Gnter Grass

Before G�nter Grass achieved worldwide fame as a novelist, the future author of The Tin Drum studied sculpture at the art academies of D�sseldorf and Berlin. Over the past 60 years of artistic life, he has created not only novels, poems, stories and plays, but an extensive body of artworks in a diverse array of media. His writings are inconceivable without their visual counterpart for reasons both private and public. As a matter of method, during the slow, intimate process of painting, drawing and modeling, Grass develops the ideas for new novels. After he has finished a book, he moves back to his studio and his drawing table. As a matter of aesthetics, he created the dust jacket illustrations for each of his first editions, which has lent his literary works a distinctive unified style. These first installments of a five-volume Catalogue Raisonn� encompass Grass's most graphic and best-known work--fish, cockerels, rats, portraits and self-portraits, Oscar and the tin-drum player. The complete five-volume Catalogue Raisonn� will include his complete etchings, lithographs, watercolors, drawings and sculptures. Readers of Grass's novels will discover a new dimension of his world, which, he once wrote, is "of the same ink" as his writing; others will simply discover an accomplished, unexpected artist.