In children’s book, created using just two shapes and the three primary colors, Roth demonstrated his interest both in the accumulation of forms and in compositional symmetry. The shapes multiply page by page until reaching a crescendo at the midpoint, after which their number recedes. Through a complex interplay of transparency and opacity, compositions are built in accumulated layers of colored plastic. About a similar work, made at the same time, the artist joked that children seeing the book would be “fantastically bored.”

Watch Dieter Roth and Dr. Ira G. Wool discuss children’s book (kinderbuch).