Dieter Roth started where many designers start: an apprenticeship in commercial graphics, a grid, a limited palette and a printing press. He then spent four decades taking those tools apart. His early books have no words, no pictures and no binding, only cut holes and coloured sheets. His later prints pile screenprint on offset on found postcards. His food works include sausages stuffed with shredded books and suitcases of cheese left to rot. For designers of pages, packaging or editions, his work is a long experiment in what a format can hold.
His works date from the 1950s to 1998 and are not flagged public domain or CC0 by the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Museum of Art, so this guide describes them in text only. They remain protected and are not free to use. For historic images cleared for reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Dieter Roth?
The Met’s collection records give his life as Hanover, 1930, to Basel, 1998, and the Art Institute of Chicago describes him as Swiss, born in Germany. According to Schaulager in Basel, his parents sent him to Switzerland in 1943, during the Second World War. Between 1947 and 1951 he served an apprenticeship as a graphic designer in Bern.
He also published as Dieter Rot and Diter Rot, so some catalogues and titles use those spellings.
A dated career outline
- 1953, spirale. With the poet Eugen Gomringer and the painter Marcel Wyss he founded spirale, a magazine for concrete art and poetry that ran to nine issues between 1953 and 1964.
- 1955–57, Copenhagen. Schaulager and Art UK place him in Copenhagen in the mid-1950s, where he worked as a textile designer.
- 1957, Reykjavik. He moved to Iceland, where he published his own books. His square, spiral-bound Children’s Book (Kinderbuch) dates from that year.
- 1958–65, the cut books. A run of books made from cut and coloured sheets, among them Bok 2b and Book 4A (both 1961) and Book AA (1964) at the Met, and Diter Rot Book FC 1958–65 at the Art Institute.
- 1961, Literaturwurst. He began his literature sausages. The Museum of Modern Art says he made about fifty between 1961 and 1970.
- 1968–72, screenprints. 246 Little Clouds (1968, a book), the Piccadilly Triptych (1968–70) and Six Piccadillies (1969/70) at the Art Institute, and Heidelberg (1970), Düsseldorf (1971) and By the Blue Sea (1972) at the Met.
- 1970, Staple Cheese (A Race). His US gallery debut, at the Eugenia Butler Gallery in Los Angeles, where 37 suitcases filled with cheese were left to decay through the summer.
- 1982 and 1999, Venice. He represented Switzerland at the 1982 Venice Biennale. His video installation Solo Scenes was shown at the 1999 Biennale, after his death.
- 2003–04, Roth Time. A retrospective organised by Schaulager with the Museum of Modern Art and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. It opened Schaulager in 2003 and ran at MoMA QNS and P.S.1 in New York from 12 March to 7 June 2004.
What to look at in a Dieter Roth book
The page as an object, not a carrier. MoMA describes his books of 1958–64 as having no text, no images and no binding, and no fixed orientation or order. The Met’s Book AA is a portfolio of eighteen black-and-white sheets with hand-cut rectangular slots of different sizes. Lay one sheet over another and the slots frame the sheet below, so every reordering makes a new composition. The reader becomes the layout designer.
Concrete-art discipline. These books come out of the concrete art of the 1950s, the same circle as spirale. MoMA’s 2013 presentation describes his work of that decade as rigorous design exercises in colour, shape, form and typography. Look for flat colour, hard edges, repeated units and optical effects that make a simple grid vibrate.
Mechanical binding. Book 4A and Bok 2b are both catalogued by the Met with spiral binding, and Book 4A with letterpress printed from rubber blocks. Spiral binding lets a page lie flat or fold right back, which suits a book meant to be handled and recombined rather than read front to back.
What to look at in the prints
By the late 1960s Roth had moved from strict geometry to dense, layered printing. The Art Institute’s Six Piccadillies are screenprints laid over colour offset lithographs, mounted on board. The offset layer reproduces a commercial postcard view of Piccadilly Circus in London; the screenprint layer then covers, recolours or interrupts it. In the Piccadilly Triptych, catalogued as 1968–70, he went further and worked over the printed sheets with wax, acrylic paint and fibre-tipped pen.
The design lesson is in the layering. A found image supplies structure and a recognisable subject; a few flat screen colours placed over it change its mood completely. The Met holds related experiments: Lion Cage (1971) combines etching with photomechanical reproductions of a drawing and a picture postcard, and Düsseldorf (1971) is a set of screenprints, a postcard, hand-painted folios and taped-together films, effectively a print and its working parts in one package.
Technique: grinding, binding and letting things change
The Literaturwurst is a book reworked as a different product. MoMA describes the process as a sausage recipe with reading matter in place of meat: a book or magazine ground up and mixed with gelatin, lard and spices, then packed into a natural casing. The Brooklyn Rail’s review of Roth Time lists a 1961 example made from Martin Walser’s novel Halbzeit, in an edition of 50. The text is still physically there, but it can no longer be read.
Food took him further into time-based work. Staple Cheese (A Race) in 1970 was planned so that the suitcases would be opened one by one through the run of the show. The Brooklyn Rail also describes Self Tower/Lion Tower, begun in 1969, as a stack of chocolate self-portrait busts and lion busts cast from his moulds. In Hamburg, during the 1990s, he set up what he called the Schimmelmuseum (Mould Museum) in an old coach house, where works in chocolate, sugar and other perishable materials were left to age.
Late in life he turned the same documentary instinct on himself. MoMA describes Solo Scenes as a grid of 128 video monitors showing continuous footage of the artist going about his days, filmed in the period shortly before he died.
Dieter Roth, editions and the artist’s book
Roth treated publishing as part of the work. His collected books were reissued as a twenty-volume Collected Works, and MoMA’s records name Edition Hansjörg Mayer as publisher for several volumes, including Snow (1963–69) in an edition of 102. MoMA’s 2013 exhibition Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth, held from 17 February to 24 June 2013, centred on Snow and covered his books and prints from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.
His books sit alongside other experiments with the form. Compare his wordless cut pages with the wordless, unreadable books of Bruno Munari, and his postcard-based prints with the work of Richard Hamilton, whose 1998 Portrait of Dieter Roth is in the Met. For historic book formats to study, see the book design theme, and for older print techniques the printmaking theme.
How designers can borrow from Dieter Roth
- Let the reader set the order. Loose sheets, die-cuts and windows can turn a brochure or zine into something people recompose.
- Use holes as frames. A cut window shows a fragment of the next page. In print, that is a die-cut; on screen, a mask or a scroll-linked reveal.
- Overprint a found base. Start from a photograph, map or stock image, then add two or three flat colours on top. The base supplies detail; the overprint supplies the identity.
- Choose binding for behaviour. Spiral, wire-o and loose portfolios each change how a publication is used. Pick the binding for how the reader should handle it, not only for cost.
- Design for change over time. Packaging that ages, editions that differ copy by copy and screens that log their own history can all borrow his acceptance of decay as part of the design.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Dieter Roth?
Dieter Roth (1930–1998) was a Swiss artist born in Hanover, Germany, who trained as a graphic designer in Bern. He is known for artist’s books, prints, multiples and works made from food, and he died in Basel.
What is Dieter Roth’s Literaturwurst?
A literature sausage: a book or magazine ground up and mixed with gelatin, lard and spices, then packed into a sausage casing. According to MoMA, he made about fifty of them between 1961 and 1970.
Is Dieter Roth’s work public domain?
No. The museums used for this guide do not flag any of his works as public domain or CC0. Treat his books, prints and objects as protected and license them for reproduction.
What can designers learn from Dieter Roth?
How to treat a book or print as a format to redesign: cut pages, loose sheets, spiral bindings, overprinted found images and materials that change over time.
