Reverse as Obverse. An Unknown Pencil Sketch by Schulz

The experts and admirers of Schulz’s plastic art have long known about his design of a bookplate of Ella and Jakub Schulz, the children of Izydor, Schulz’s elder brother, made probably in 1930. A sheet of paper with a pencil sketch was glued to carton most likely by Schulz himself and then framed. In such a form, hiding the reverse, it was preserved for several decades. In 2015 it became an object of auction. During examination, the sheet was separated from its original background and it turned out that on the reverse there are some unknown sketches by Schulz. One of them is a portrait of the writer’s mother, the other shows a homage of an elderly man to a young woman. Many known drawings by the writer have been made on sheets where both the reverse and the obverse have been used, which implies that, first, all the undersides of Schulz’s works must be carefully examined since they may hide his works that are still unknown, and second, that Schulz’s pencil sketches must be treated as material wholes. Fragments of his works cannot be reproduced separately from their visual milieu. It is also undesirable to frame and publish his drawings in isolation, according to conventional genre categories, such as “portrait,” “self-portrait” or “nude.” Their publication should make a documentary foundation which will allow us to reveal the principles of a mysterious coexistence of disparate motifs, optical perspectives, and emotional tonalities