ANTON PRINNER (1902-1983) - LE TAPIS VERT STUDIO, VALLAURIS Women with raised arms Wall plaque. Proof in white earthenware with green patina. Signed PRINNER lower left, marked TAPIS VERT Vallauris on the back. 13.5x9.5cm A French artist of Hungarian origin, Anton Prinner trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Budapest, before moving to Paris in the late 1920s, where he frequented the artistic milieu of Montparnasse and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. His early works are in a constructivist vein, but already seem to be nourished by a highly personal semiotics. A philosopher and mystic, Prinner was interested in esotericism, occult doctrines and symbols, particularly Egyptian ones, as well as the myth of the androgynous - to which he dedicated his work La femme tondue, published in 1945. Like the Surrealists, he worked on ancient texts and illustrated them with his engravings - for example, Le Livre des morts des anciens Égyptiens (1948) and La Bible ésotérique et poétique (1949). Prinner tirelessly explored the link between the visible and the invisible through a protean body of work: in etching, but also in painting and sculpture, through his work in wood, plaster and ceramics. His encounter with Picasso (1881-1973) was to play a decisive role in his career; Prinner joined him in Vallauris in 1951. He moved to the Tapis Vert studio, not far from the Spanish master, where he confronted the material and experimented with new directions. The result was a body of work rooted in [cosmic symbolism], part of his quest for formal perfection. In the same studio, he also created large wooden sculptures of rare monumentality, before returning to Paris after 1965. Throughout his career, Prinner pursued a quest for supreme harmony. This aspiration is expressed in the regularity of forms, symmetry and simplification of features, leading to an "androgynization" of the figure, around which his entire life and work are structured.