Bruno Krauskopf, painter and illustrator

Bruno Krauskopf (1892-1960) was a German artist. In 1912 he had his first exhibition in Berlin’s Casper Gallerie. In 1916 he became a member of the Berliner Free Secession and in 1918 of the Novembergruppe. In the beginning of the 1920s he goes from Expressionism to Impressionism. In addition to his pictures Krauskopf illustrated books, designed film decorations for the UFA film company and costume and stage designs for film and theater.
He fled Germany where he had been declared a "degenerate artist", and spent the rest of his life in Norway and in the U.S.

    

Weimar expo at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Francfort

Paul Grundwalt - Varieté

A great exhibition was staged in Francfort 2017-2018. "Splendor And Misery In the Weimar Republic from Otto Dix to Jeanne Mammen"

Albert Birkle - Kurfurstendamm - 1924

"Social tensions, political struggles, social upheavals, as well as artistic revolutions and innovations characterize the Weimar Republic. In a major thematic exhibition the SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE is presenting German art from 1918 to 1933. Direct, ironic, angry, accusatory, and often even prophetic works demonstrate the struggle for democracy and paint a picture of a society in the midst of crisis and transition. Many artists were moved by the problems of the age to mirror reality and everyday life in their search for a new realism or “naturalism.” They captured the stories of their contemporaries with an individual signature: the processing of World War I with depictions of maimed soldiers and “war profiteers,” public figures, the big city with its entertainment industry and increasing prostitution, political unrest and economic chasms, as well as the role model of the New Woman, the debates about paragraphs 175 and 218 (regarding punishability of homosexuality and abortion), the social changes resulting from industrialization, and the growing enthusiasm for sports."

"The exhibition assembles 200 paintings by famous artists and others who have been largely neglected to date, including Max Beckmann, Kate Diehn-Bitt, Otto Dix, Dodo, Conrad Felixmüller, George Grosz, Carl Grossberg, Hans and Lea Grundig, Karl Hubbuch, Lotte Laserstein, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Jeanne Mammen, Oskar Nerlinger, Franz Radziwill, Christian Schad, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Scholz, and Richard Ziegler. Together with historical films, magazines, posters, and photographs the exhibition provides an impressive panorama of a period that even today, 100 years after its advent, has lost nothing of its relevance and potential for discussion."
(from the catalogue of the exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle, Francfort, 2017-2018) 

Karl Hofer - Tiller Girls

Horst Naumann - Weimar carnival

 
The SCHIRN KUNST­HALLE FRANK­FURT is one of Europe’s most important exhibition venues, opened in 1986. It focuses on art-histor­ical and historico-cultural themes, discourses, and trends from a contem­po­rary perspec­tive.

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Ernst Fritsch

Jeunesse dorée, 1926

Ernst Fritsch (1892-1965), was a German painter, born in Berlin-Charlottenburg. His style, originally cubist, became later closer to the New Objectivity, while some of his works may seem influenced by Expressionism. None of those tendencies pleased the Nazis, who in 1939, like the harsh art critics they were, proceeded to burn a great deal of Fritsch’s works. 

Self-portrait 1927

    

Conrad Felixmüller

 

 

Conrad Felixmüller (1897-1977) was born in Dresden, where he also studied. In 1916 he and Lyonel Feininger exhibited in Herwarth Walden’s famous gallery Der Sturm.

Born as Conrad Felix Müller, he chose Felixmüller as his nom d'artiste. 

He served as a medical orderly in the First World War. He and his wife lived in Dresden until 1931 when they moved to Berlin. During the Dresden period, Felixmüller was a member and founder of several groups which reflect and represent his artistic and political affiliation towards the end and after the First World War. For example, in 1917 he founded the “Expressionist Working Community” with Felix Stiemer and Walter Rheiner; he was a member of the “propaganda committee of the Socialist Group of Intellectual workers” in 1918 and the German Communist Party (KPD). Moreover, Felixmüller became president of the “Dresden New Secession Group” in 1919 which included members such as Otto Dix and Gela Forster, and he was member of the 1919 “Novembergruppe” founded by Max Pechstein and Cesar Klein. His membership of some of those groups later made him a target for the National Socialists.

In 1933 and 1937 some of Felixmüller’s artworks were part of “Degenerate Art” exhibitions in Dresden and Munich. Many of his works are lost today due to the confiscation of his artworks from public collections by the Nazis. An air raid destroyed his Berlin studio in 1944.

Felixmüller gained international ríecognition as an artist at exhibitions in Bologna and Rome in 1971, and the first prize at the IV International Graphics Biennale in Florence in 1974.

Felixmüller’s work includes paintings, graphic work and a few wood sculptures created around 1923. His early work is influenced by the Expressionist style but he created his last Expressionist painting, “the Death of the Poet Walter Rheiner”, in 1925. From then onwards, his subject matter, style and tone become increasingly realistic, and include working class depictions and private scenes.

Leicester's German Expressionism Collection

Portrait of Mo von Haugk, 1932

         

    

Gunnar Lundh, Swedish photographer in Berlin

Gunnar Herbert Lundh (1898-1960) was a Swedish photographer. He bequeathed about 300.000 well classified photographs to Nordiska Museet in Stockholm.

In that collection, there is a number of pictures from the beginning of 1933, bearing in mind that on January 30th, Hitler was appointed Chancellor by president Hindenburg, a fact that marks the end of the Weimar era. As a matter of fact, the Nazi dictature wasn’t established until some weeks later. In one of the pictures, we see the window of a bookshop, full of nazi publications.Taken the same day Hitler took power? Or some days before?

More photographs by Gunnar Lundh, here.

    

Art of the Weimar Republic: a current exhibition in New York

A painting by George Grosz, "Eclipse of the Sun", illustrates an exhibition at New York’s Neue Galerie about art in the Weimar Republic. Many of the works are drawn from the collections of the Neue Galerie, and together they demonstrate the artistic output that coincided with a moment of extreme political unrest in Germany.

In Eclipse of the Sun, Grosz vividly captures the rampant political and social corruption that characterized Germany in the mid-1920s. Set against the backdrop of a city in flames, the central figure depicted is Paul von Hindenburg, the nearly-eighty-year-old president of Germany at the time this was painted, and easily recognizable for his walrus moustache. He proudly wears his military uniform, bedecked with medals and with a laurel leaf crown perched atop his bald head. Hindenburg’s portly physique is in sharp contrast to the group of slim and headless financiers in formal attire who join him around the table. 

They bask in the glow of a darkened sun illuminated with a dollar sign—an acknowledgment of America’s investment in Germany post-World War I. A corpulent “man of industry,” wearing a top hat and toting weapons and a miniature train under his arm, whispers discreetly in Hindenburg’s ear. But Hindenburg has focused his attention elsewhere—toward a spot just beyond the bloodied sword and funerary cross resting directly in front of him on the table. Rather bizarrely, a donkey wearing blinders decorated with the German eagle is balanced on a board tethered to a skeleton.

The other participant in this motley group is a more somberly dressed but also headless man whose foot rests precariously on the prison bars below. Eclipse of the Sun was one of Grosz’s “favorite pictures” and it offers a microcosm of the Weimar Republic, alluding to the competing interests that struggled to control the fledgling democracy.

The exhibition will end on September 02, 2019.

https://www.neuegalerie.org/eclipse-sun-art-weimar-republic

George Grosz, 1919

Rudolf Schlichter, 1923

Otto Dix, 1929

Otto Dix, 1920

    

Leo von König, painter

Portrait of Käthe Kollwitz

Leo Freiherr von König (1871-1944) was a German painter of the Berlin Secession .
Tthe son of a Prussian general, he belonged to the Berlin Secession, as did other artists asMax Liebermann , Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt.  He was close to Impressionism, having studied in Paris and Berlin. His works include portraits of Gerhart Hauptmann , Ernst Barlach , Emil Nolde , Käthe Kollwitz and Eugen d 'Albert .
The arrival of the Nazis to power did not put an end to his career, even if Hitler himself disliked him. 

Emil Nolde

Actor Alexander Moissi

Gerhart Hauptmann

Self-portrait

    

Emil van Hauth

Portrait of Grit Hegesa, 1925

Emil van Hauth was born 1899 in the Rhineland, as Gustaf Emil Hoffmann. He studied art in Munich and was drafted for WWI. Around 1925 he moved to Berlin, where he married the dancer Grit Hegesa.
He was a part of the artistic and intellectual milieu of Weimar Berlin, where he often met other today legendary names of that era, like Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, George Grosz, Philipp Harth, Ernesto de Fiori and the actor Gustaf Gründgens. Among his colleagues and friends were also Karl Hofer, Emil Nolde, Leo von König. He began painting in a style between cubism and expressionism, and was later influenced by an artist from an earlier period : Paul Cézanne.
He was the last president of the Berliner Secession, dissolved by the Nazis in 1933. After that, he had to retire from his active artistic life for many years.
He died in 1974.

Van Hauth (right) with his wife Grit Hegesa, in the Berliner Secession ball of 1925