The Invertible Cube - signed, colored & handmade by Paul Schatz
*1898 / †1979 - Anthroposoph, Artist & Mathematician
(authenticity confirmed by Paul Schatz Foundation)
Paul Schatz was born in Constance on Lake Constance on December 22nd, 1898. His early life was shaped by his comfortable, middle-class background - his father was a town councillor and owner of a small engineering works. The technological achievements of the new century, in particular those of aviation, were welcomed and encouraged everywhere with tremendous enthusiasm. In 1916, the second year of World War I, the gifted student was awarded the Count Zeppelin Prize, a scholarship granted for coming first in mathematics and the sciences. At age seventeen, he was sent to the Western front as a radio operator. After the war, he began to study mathematics and mechanical engineering at the Munich College of Technology. Shortly before he was to take his diploma, he changed over to astronomy instead. Disenchanted by the abstract approach to the sciences prevalent at that time, he discontinued his studies in 1922 and began training as an artist at the Warmbrunn School of Wood-Carving in the Riesengebirge.
Between 1924 and 1927, he worked as a sculptor and had his own studio on Lake Constance. At the same time, he also began to intensively study Anthroposophy, which increasingly led him to search for the origins of his own art work in an attemption«... to find a way of thinking the clarity of which does not freeze art to death, and to become a truly creative artist out of a clearly perceived reason and not one shrouded in darkness and beyond human control».
As a result of this discussion, he published his book «A Quest of Art Based on the Strength of Perception» (Konstanz, 1927).
In 1927, he and his wife, Emmy Schatz-Witt, moved to Dornach (Switzerland), where the artist, inventor, and technician lived and worked until his death on March 7th, 1979.
Paul Schatz saw his developing of novel technical designs in the sense of the Greek word "techne" as a simultaneous practising of art. His great ideal was to seek and realize a new technology suitable for man and in harmony with nature.
