Skeleton
1985 · Graphite and black and colored Conté crayons, with touches of colored wax crayons, smudging, and erasing, on pieced salmon laid paper, prepared with a white ground
68.2 × 89.7 cm (26 7/8 × 35 3/8 in.)
Art Institute of Chicago
WATTS INDEXThe canonical database of visual culture
Horst Janssen
German, 1929
Hamburg, Germany
PrintmakingRealism
Representation
None documented
2
Institutional Exhibitions
51
Works in Collection
68
Assets Indexed
4
Authority-backed Facts
0
Publications Referenced
90%
Profile Completeness
Cultural Positioning
Movements
- • Realism
Related Artists
No edges recorded
Influence Graph
No influence edges encoded yet.
Selected Institutional Exhibitions
View all exhibitions →No image
The Artist as His Subject
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1967
No image
The Artist as His Subject
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1967
About
Why this artist matters now
Horst Janssen was a German printmaker and draughtsman whose obsessively detailed pen and ink works mapped the interior life of the postwar psyche through distorted self-portraiture and narrative sequences. Working across etching, lithography, and drawing from the 1950s onward, he developed a visual language of psychological intensity that rejected both abstraction and socialist realism. His prints and drawings, characterized by intricate hatching, fragmentary bodies, and hallucinatory spaces, established him as a central figure in Northern European printmaking of the postwar period.
Source: Moma Bulk 2026 05 04 · Trust score: 92% · Updated 25d ago
Graph relationships
Taste overlap and adjacency
Movement
Realism
Medium
Printmaking
Related Artists
12 in graph
Institutional
Museum Collections
Canonical record
Artworks (51)
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Record
Images
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Adjacent in the graph
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Milton Glaser
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Alfred Rudolph
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Record
Movements and affiliations
Institutional
Representation & Collections
In collection
Museum of Modern Art
New York, US
In collection
Art Institute of Chicago
Market
Auction sale history
Houses that have sold works by this artist at auction
Market
Auction History
| Work | Auction House | Date | Estimate | Hammer Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Artsy | Feb 2026 | $500 – $600 | Unsold |
Record