Elvehjem highlights artwork of author Gunter Grass

As important as writing is to 1999 Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass, he has always needed other media to express himself.

Through April 15, the Elvehjem Museum of Art will present artworks by Grass in Mayer Gallery.

Grass, known for his disturbing and evocative novels, has created prints and sculpture throughout his career. This first U.S. tour of Günter Grass’ works on paper features drawings, watercolors, lithographs, etchings and etching plates that Grass created between 1972 and 1997. The works are drawn from two German collections: the Ludwig Forum in Aachen and the Museum Wurth in Kunzelsau.

The work includes several cycles of prints related to Grass’ books “The Tin Drum” (1959), “From the Diary of a Snail” (1972), “The Flounder” (1977), “The Rat” (1986), “The Call of the Toad” (1992) and “A Broad Field” (1995), among others.

Regarding the relationship between forms of expression in his work, Grass says that on occasion the pictorial idea would come first and that the writing process and the visual art process would fertilize one another.

Grass was born in 1927 in Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk, Poland), the setting for several novels. In the 1930s, he joined the Hitler Youth, was drafted into the army at age 16, wounded in battle in 1945 and was then imprisoned at Marienbad, Czechoslovakia.

After he was freed, Grass worked on farms, in a potash mine and as a stonemason’s apprentice. In 1948, he enrolled as a student of painting and sculpture at the Düssseldorf Academy of Art and from 1953 to 1955 studied in West Berlin at the State Academy of Fine Arts. During the 1950s he traveled in Italy, France and Spain.

His first novel, “The Tin Drum,” published in 1959, created a furor because of its depiction of the Nazis. It is the story of a child who refuses to grow to protest the cruelties of German history. He communicates only through his toy drum. Grass became the literary spokesman for the generation that grew up under the Nazis.

Grass continued this trilogy set in Danzig with a focus on war crimes and the postwar acceptability of former Nazis. He followed it with another trilogy set in Berlin. Grass became active in politics, working as a speechwriter for Social Democrat Willy Brandt. In the 1970s and 1980s, Grass took on other topics such as feminism and the art of cooking.