Fritz Eichenberg - orig. wood/linocut on paper - Three Kings - pencil signed

• original wood/lino on sheet - 1983 - Three Kings - signed in pencil - very good condition.

Fritz Eichenberg (October 24, 1901 – November 30, 1990) was a German-American illustrator and art educator who worked primarily with wood engravings. His best-known works dealt with religion, social justice, and nonviolence.
Eichenberg was born into a Jewish family in Cologne, where the devastation of World War I shaped his anti-war sentiment. He worked as a printer's apprentice and studied at the Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in Cologne and the Graphic Academy in Leipzig, where he studied under Hugo Steiner-Prag.[1] In 1923 he moved to Berlin to begin his career as an artist, creating illustrations for books and newspapers. In his newspaper and magazine work, Eichenberg was politically outspoken and sometimes wrote and illustrated his own reporting.
In 1933, the rise of Adolf Hitler convinced Eichenberg, a public critic of the Nazis, to emigrate to the United States with his wife and children, where he settled in New York City for most of the rest of his life. He taught art at the New School for Social Research and the Pratt Institute, was part of the WPA's Federal Arts Project, and was a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists. Eichenberg also served as head of the art department at the University of Rhode Island and set up the printmaking studios there.
In his prolific career as a book illustrator, Eichenberg worked with many forms of literature, but specialized in materials with elements of extreme spiritual and emotional conflict, fantasy, or social satire, illustrating authors such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Poe, Swift, and Grimmelshausen. He also wrote and illustrated folklore and children's stories.
Eichenberg grew up in a non-religious family and was drawn to Taoism as a child. After the unexpected death of his wife in 1937, he briefly turned to the practice of Zen Buddhist meditation, then joined the Religious Society of Friends in 1940. Although he remained a Quaker until his death, Eichenberg was also involved in Catholic charitable work through his friendship with Dorothy Day – whom he met at a Quaker conference on religion and publishing in 1949[2] – and frequently contributed illustrations to Day's newspaper, The Catholic Worker.
Eichenberg was a long-time contributor to The Nation, whose illustrations appeared in that magazine at various times between 1930 and 1980.
In 1947 he was elected as an extraordinary member of the National Academy of Design and in 1949 he was made a full academician.
Eichenberg was a former director of the Graphic Arts Center in Brooklyn and a member of the faculty of the Pratt Institute and later former head of the art department at the University of Rhode Island.
He died on November 30, 1990 at the age of 89 at his home in Peace Dale, Rhode Island, from complications of Parkinson's disease.