Anna & Arne Wolf
1998 Distinguished Book Artists

Tireless innovators, exemplary teachers, enthusiastic supporters of other artists, Anna and Arne Wolf have been mainstays of the Bay Area book and letter arts communities for 35 years.
The Center presents a retrospective of their recent bookworks.

Arne Wolf studied applied graphics and lettering at the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in Munich. It was there that he and Anna met. They emigrated to New York, where he worked as a designer, and later on as a professor in Atlanta, Berkeley and Toronto. In 1972 they returned to Berkeley, Arne becoming a professor in the art department at California State University at Hayward, a position from which he retired in 1993. His woodcuts and his books are in major collections in the U.S. and abroad. Over the past ten years Arne has produced seven books, the text of which are mostly drawn from sacred sources.

“The definition of the so-called artist’s book is of absolutely no importance to me,” declares Arne Wolf. “What does interest me as an artist, and is one reason I have adopted the book form, is the use of sequence. I find the book form fascinating in that it can represent an unfolding mystery, or a visual journey. What you have seen, you don’t see anymore; what you will see is yet concealed.”

Anna Wolf studied pottery and sculpture at the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in Munich. She has always felt a deep affinity for Asian art forms, and began practicing origami as a child.

“In a way,” she says, “it’s almost easier to absorb the essence of a culture from a distance – you can see things clearly in their pure for, uncomplicated.”

She practiced craft-weaving, then paper marbling- at a high level before discovering book making as a means of expression. In fact, she rejects the distinction between applied and fine arts as artificial.

“In Germany,” she says “there is a word basteln, which means making things, and this is what everything was for us prewar. We made things. It wasn’t called art, it was what you did.”

Anna’s work is remarkable for its searching quality, its relentless ambition to transcend the material plane. She is best known for her imaginative variations, seemingly endless, on ancient bookforms, but equally impressive is her exploration of the abstract letterform. Her current enthusiasm is what she calls “spirit papers,” the intricately folded tissue offerings found in temples in China and Japan.

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