On a day like today, in 1919, the Bauhaus.

This year, the centenary of the Bauhaus is celebrated. The Staatliches Bauhaus (The State’s house for the construction) was a center for new ideas and consequently attracted progressive architects and artists. The Bauhaus School has become a symbol of modern architecture worldwide, because of its educational theory and buildings, and it is inseparable from the name of the architect Walter Gropius.

"Architects, sculptors, painters, we must return to manual work! There is no essential difference between artist and craftsman. The artist is but an inspired craftsman. "

In his 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto, Gropius sums up his school's thinking : breaking the line between applied and fine arts. He opened the Bauhaus School in Weimar, that small town in central Germany, the same one that gave its name to the German Republic of 1919-1933. After the First World War, Gropius dreamed of a more egalitarian world, where dwellings, clothes, everyday objects would also be aesthetic objects, accessible to all.

This year of 2019, at the Berlinische Galerie, an anniversary exhibition will be held, called Original Bauhaus. The curator Nina Wiedermeyer explains: "The social component is part of the Bauhaus utopia. The people behind Bauhaus wanted to improve the world. "

Walter Gropius brought to Weimar artists of all disciplines, with different methods and characters. Among the best known, Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky, both responsible for the basic theoretical training of students. Also, Henry van de Velde, Hannes Meyer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In an exercise that has since become famous, Kandinsky asks his students to pair one of the primary colors (red, blue, yellow) with one of the three basic forms (triangle, circle, rectangle).

What is called "design" today was then only in its infancy. Students are encouraged to experiment with new shapes, new materials, new colors. Within the school, they painted on glass, theater, typography, weaving with cellophane, carpentry ... Among the most famous objects produced in the Bauhaus, there were the Wassily chair, by Marcel Breuer and the teapot of Marianne Brandt.

"There is no Bauhaus style," says Nina Wiedermeyer. "Gropius himself insisted on it. It was a multicultural school where students had very different styles. "

An avant-garde philosophy that displeased the National Socialist Party, which came to power at the local level already in the 1920s. The school was forced to move to Dessau in 1924, then to Berlin in 1932. For Goebbels, the Bauhaus belongs to the "degenerate art" and is a symbol of "cultural Bolshevism". The school was dissolved in 1933, a few months after Hitler's conquest of the power.

Many Bauhaus alumni would teach in the United States. Walter Gropius himself headed the design school of Harvard University from 1937. Others settled down in Tel Aviv and built more than 4,000 buildings, most of them classified as World Heritage by Unesco. The dissolution of the school, far from killing the movement, contributed to its internationalization and its perpetuation.

Exhibitions :

In Berlin: original bauhaus, 6.9.2019 - 27.1.2020, Berlinische Galerie.

In Weimar: "The Bauhaus comes from Weimar », from April 6th.

In Dessau, Bauhaus Experimental Site, The Collection, Fall 2019.

Paul Klee's poster for the 1923 exhibition

    

Max Radler

Max Radler (1904-1971) is a name you won’t find in every Dictionary of Artists. Still, he was one most respectable representative of the New Objectivity. He was best known for his work as a caricaturist. His drawings are contemporary documents, and still provide accurate information about the social and political atmosphere that prevailed in the immediate postwar period and the beginning of the economic miracle years.
To become an artist meant a difficult journey for Max Radler. Existential concerns accompanied him almost the whole life. In the fifties, he had to work occasionally as a bricklayer or house painter.
The images of Max Radler, in which great enthusiasm for technology often finds its expression, tend to "magical realism", another name for New Objectiviy. Steam locomotives, excavators, stations, rails and bridges, are a common motif. He paints industrial landscapes with blast furnaces as well as shabby urban artisan districts. His figures are expressive, such as the "radiolistener" from 1930 or the many portraits of women, for which his wife usually served as a model.

1930 

1931 

Anti Nazi caricature, 1945

"Denazification machine", 1946

    

Kurt Günther

Born 1893, Kurt Günther attended the same art school in Dresden as, among others, Otto Dix. In 1917 he was treated for tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where he met Ludwig Kirchner. In 1928 he had an exhibition in the prestigious Berlin gallery Nierendorf. During the Nazi period, he was forbidden to expose. He survived the war and died in 1955 in East Germany. 

About the picture above, see this posting:  Radio painters

Portrait of Ernst Jünger

    

Weimar Berlin in 2019 London

An event this week at London's Southbank Centre :

The Weimar Republic (1919-33), which emerged from the chaos of Imperial Germany’s defeat in the First World War, may have opened the door to the rise of Nazism. But it also provoked an astonishing explosion of invention and innovation from the outstanding creative talents of the time.

Centred on Berlin, previously the capital of the Kaisers, a generation of composers, writers, dramatists, poets, painters and film-makers emerged whose often collective efforts would influence the whole course of Western culture in the 20th century.

In this series, the Philharmonia and Esa-Pekka Salonen – who has long been fascinated by the garish and exuberantly original artistic volcano that erupted during the Republic – bring to life the world-famous and familiar, and the strange and peculiar, and trace the connections that link many of these artists so closely and personally to one another.

Link here

Kurt Weinhold, another neo-objectivist from the Weimar era

Kurt Weinhold, 1930

Born in Berlin in 1896, Kurt Weinhold didn’t attend any art school. His own father – a painter – who was his art teacher. In 1922 he moved to Calw (in Baden-Würtemberg) with his wife. Calw was also the home town of two other painters: Rudolf Schlichter and Richard Ziegler (he was born in Pforzheim, near Calw).

Close related to Otto Dix, George Grosz and Rudolf Schlichter, he belonged to the New Objectivity movement and exposed throughout Germany with them. The Nazis classed him as a "degenerate artist" without, however, forbidding him to paint.

During that terrible period, in order to feed his family, he did a variety of portraits, mostly of fellow Calw citizens.

Kurt Weinhold died in 1965 in Calw, his adopted home town.

Mann mit Radio, 1929

About the picture above, see here: Radio painters

1929

"The materialist" 1931

1931

1929

1928

The town of Calw

    

The radio in Weimar art

Mann mit Radio, Kurt Weinhold, 1929

The birth of German broadcasting dates from October 29, 1923 in Berlin, when Radio-Stunde-AG started sending from the "Vox-Haus" on Potsdamer Strasse. Contemporary artists' view of the revolutionary new medium was mixed, spanning from interest to scepticism.

The Berlin born artist Kurt Weinhold painted a naked middle aged man immersed in his listening of a wireless receiver. Why naked? Maybe because he is supposed to represent, not a worker, not a bourgeois, but just Man. The subtitle of the picture is after all Homo Sapiens.

A somewaht satirical representation of modern man, whose wisdom stems, not from reading books or attending lectures, nor for that matter from scientific or philosophical speculation, but from absorbing contents conveyed to him by a technical, cold medium : a weird looking bakelite device all with antenna and valves. A lonely man, naked in front of the machine, relied to the machine. As lonely are the other four persons (always men, no women) in this posting’s pictures. Lonely and isolated from the outside world by their earphones.

Kurt Günther, "Der Radionist", 1927 - Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg

The misanthropic looking radio speaker in the above picture – by Kurt Günther –  is said to represent the intellectual limitations of the petty bourgeoisie, insensible to the outside world. Its alternative title is indeed "Petty bourgeois on the radio".  However, it is in reality the portrait of a wheelchair bound paraplegic man who lived in a room on the lower floor of Kurt Günther's house. 

 If Kurt Günther had painted it today, the guy would be probably sitting in the subway or at the dinner table with his wife, listening to his smartphone.  

However, looking closely at the picture, we see that the man holds an opera libretto in his right hand, it is "Die Zauberflöte" (The Magic Flute), by Mozart. The blank expression of his eyes is maybe the result of a concentrated listening. The guy may not be insensible to the outer world, just an opera aficionado.
 
The subject of broadcasting was widespread in the painting of the New Objectivity. See for instance Max Radler ("Radio Listener", 1930), Kurt Weinhold ("Man with Radio", Homo sapiens, 1929) or Wilhelm Heise ("Verblühender Frühling", Withering spring, 1928).

"As radio emerged as a new medium and transformed communication and popular culture, critics raised questions about the impact it would have on people’s lives. In a 1924 article for the Frankfurter Zeitung, editor and critic Siegfried Kracauer wrote: “The radio, too, disperses our beings even before they have caught a spark. Since many feel they have to broadcast, we are in a constant state of receiving, always heavy with London, the Eiffel Tower, and Berlin. Who could resist the courting of those delicate headphones? They shine in the salons, they mechanically wind around heads – and instead of cultivating an informed conversation, which will surely be boring, we turn into playing fields of world noise which, regardless of its own potential objective dullness, doesn’t even allow the humble right to personal boredom.” [Siegfried Kracauer, Works, Volume 5.2, p. 162. Original text: Frankfurter Zeitung, November 16, 1924.] "

The text above is from the site GHDI http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/index.cfm

Max Radler, Radio listener, 1930

Radiohörer (Radio listener) is a painting by Max Radler, an artist from Munich, whose themes were often industrial landscapes, motorways, train stations. Here he chooses yet a modern subject : the radio. His main person, a worker, listens attentively to this new medium which allows him to transcend the narrow limits of his daily life and reach the whole world.A positive view of radio listening, as opposed to Radler's and Günther's pictures.

Wilhelm Heise, Verblühender Frühling, 1928

How interpret Heise's painting? Technical paraphernalia, and behind, a number of pot plants, "whithering", says the pictures title. The only human figure here is not listening to radio, instead is he repairing, or building one. Is he wondering whether technique is a good thing or if he should rather take care of the plants? Enigma. 

Radio Girl. By Carel Willink, 1925

    

Trude Berliner

Regarding German cinema from the 1920s and 1930s, everyone has heard of Marlene Dietrich, of Pola Negri, of Asta Nielsen. But an actress like Trude Berliner is almost completely unknown outside of Germany. And she’s not the only one in that case : how about Elisabeth Bergner, Blandine Ebinger, Trude Hesterberg, Christa Tordy, Carola Neher, Erika Glässner ? Forgotten names. But they were great stars in their time, like Scarlett Johansson or Angelina Jolie in our days.
I find Trude Berliner one of the most beautiful of that period. Kind of "girl next door", but very charming. 

As her name indicates, she was born in the German capital in 1903. She didn’t belong then to the same generation as Pola Negri or Asta Nielsen, but she was a contemporary of "la Dietrich" or for that matter, of Leni Riefenstahl.
Her first career was in the cabaret world. Her film debut : 1925. Her most succesful period in German film was between 1928 and 1933, in which year she had to leave, as many other Jewish artists.
Trude didn’t really succeed in Hollywood. Her only somewhat important film appearance was in Casablanca, in 1942.
Trude died in 1977 in California. 

 

In Casablanca

    

Another exhibition about Expressionism

If you happen to pass by Francfort, you could take a close look to what it seems to be a great exhibition (as all which the Städel organizes): The Mysteries of Material.  It takes place just now at the Städel Museum. Here is what the museum has to say about it: 

"No material bears as close a connection to the art of German Expressionism as wood. The product of a natural growth process, wood appealed to the “Brücke” co-founders Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. In dialogue with it, they created woodcuts and sculptures of great expressive force. The exhibition retraces the interplay between these mediums in their work."

More, much more information at this site: 

Staedel Museum - Francfort

Erich Heckel, 1912

Ludwig Kirchner, 1907

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, 1911

    

Alexander Moissi, a Berliner from Itally and Albania

Alexander Moissi, a Berliner ? But he was born in Trieste, an Italian town belonging to Austria-Hungary. But his native name was Aleksandër Moisiu, an Albanian name, as his father had those origins. But his theatrical debut – because Moissi-Moissiu was an actor, a great actor at that – was not in Berlin but in Vienna and in Prague. So, why should we consider him, of all possible things, a Berliner ?

Because in 1903, at 24, he joined the Deutsches Theater in the capital of the German Reich. There, he became a protégé of the influential director Max Reinhardt. From then on, his meteoric career developed in Berlin, with occasional appearances in Russia and in the United States. 

Alexander Moissi, a name today forgotten, made women's hearts beat faster in the first decades of the twentieth century, as did Enrico Caruso and Rudolf Valentino. Moissi led the life of a pop star, a Casanova and an adventurer. In contemporary pieces by Ibsen, Wedekind and Pirandello, he played modern characters – young, strife-torn, depravity-seeking men. But he also excelled in classical plays by Shakespeare and Tolstoy. 
 

No one died on stage as often and as beautifully as Moissi. He was between 1910 and 1930 the most famous and maybe the first truly modern actor in German-speaking theatre. His biographer Rüdiger Schaper writes that Moissi "personified the moment when psychology broke into art."

Unlike most of the great German actors before him, Moissi was not a native German speaker. He was born in Albania and grew up speaking Greek and Italian. In none of his performances did he lose his Mediterranean inflection. But that did not diminish his stature; it enhanced it. 
 

Max Reinhardt "discovered" Moissi and initiated his transformation from a provincial cafe singer to an international star. Reinhardt liked Moissi’s accent. He liked the chutzpa in speaking that exotic way before a Berlin audience. Reinhardt often cast foreigners—Hungarians, Russians, Poles, even Americans—because the director sought an alternative to “high German” stage speech.

Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig were enthusiastic about Moissi, though Franz Kafka was less impressed.

Moissi was the archetypical cosmopolitan character, as was Stefan Zweig. But whereas Zweig, though speaking several languages and moving freely across Europe, was nevertheless an Austrian national, Moissi’s national identity was richer and more complex. He was born 1879 in the harbour city of Trieste, Italy’s most international, under Austrian rule at that time. His father was Albanian (then a province of the Ottoman empire), He was thus an Austrian of Italian-Albanian origin, who later became a German actor. 

In Berlin, he was a protégé of Max Reinhardt. However, Moissi did not keep up with later theatrical movements, initiated by Bertolt Brecht or by Erwin Piscator

In 1914, he acquired German citizenship to become a volunteer in World War I, and during the German Revolution of 1918–19 joined the Marxist Spartacus League.

Although a Christian, Moissi was often labeled as Jewish due to his name. He wasn’t, but he was a starch enemy of anti-semitism.The arrival of the Nazis to power put an end to his career.

He died in 1935.