Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945) was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war. Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities.

After her return Kollwitz continued to exhibit her work, but was impressed by the work of younger compatriots--the Expressionists and Bauhaus--and resolved to simplify her means of expression. Subsequent works such as Runover, 1910, and Self-Portrait, 1912, show this new direction. She also continued to work on sculpture.

Kollwitz lost her youngest son Peter on the battlefield in World War I in October of 1914, prompting a prolonged depression. By the end of the year she had made drawings for a monument to Peter and his fallen comrades; she destroyed the monument in 1919, and began again in 1925. The memorial, entitled The Grieving Parents, was finally completed and placed in the Belgian cemetery of Roggevelde in 1932. Later, when Peter's grave was moved to the nearby Vladslo, the statues were also moved.

In 1917, on her fiftieth birthday, the galleries of Paul Cassirer provided a retrospective exhibition of one hundred and fifty drawings by Kollwitz.

Kollwitz was a committed socialist and pacifist, who was eventually attracted to communism; her political and social sympathies found expression in the "memorial sheet for Karl Liebknecht", and in her involvement with the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, a part of the Social Democratic Party government in the first few weeks after the war. As the war wound down and a nationalistic appeal was made for old men and children to join the fighting, Kollwitz implored in a published statement:

"There has been enough of dying! Let not another man fall!"

Anonymous

Max Pechstein

Max Hermann Pechstein (December 31, 1881 - June 29, 1955), was a German expressionist painter and printmaker, born in Zwickau.

Early contact with the art of Vincent Van Gogh stimulated his development toward expressionism. After studying art in Dresden, Pechstein met Erich Heckel and joined the art group Die Brücke in 1906. He was the only member to have formal art training. Later in Berlin, he helped to found the Neue Sezession and gained recognition for his decorative and colorful paintings that were lent from the ideas of Van Gogh, Matisse, and the Fauves. His paintings eventually became more primitive, incorporating thick black lines and angular figures.

Beginning in 1933, Pechstein was attacked by the Nazis because of his art. 326 of his paintings were removed from German museums. 16 of his works were displayed in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937. During this time, Pechstein went into seclusion in rural Pomerania.

He was a prolific printmaker, producing 421 lithographs, 315 woodcuts and linocuts, and 165 intaglio prints, mostly etchings.

Pechstein was a professor at the Berlin Academy for ten years before his dismissal by the Nazis in 1933. He was reinstated in 1945, and subsequently won numerous titles and awards for his work.

Spanish title: Aquellos polbos

See the result: From such dust dirt must come. For shame, to treat her in such fashion!
She who has waited on everyone for a trifle, she who was so industrious, so useful;
she was an honorable woman.

Spanish title: Pobrecitas!

They will have to repair what has long been going from bad to worse, to fix what has been forced apart.

The painter Max Oppenheimer, three-quarter Length, 1910 by Egon Schiele

Max Oppenheimer, a native of Vienna, began to study art at the Academy at the age of fifteen, continuing from 1903 at the Prague Art Academy. In 1906 Max Oppenheimer joined the Prague group 'OSMA' (the Eight), one of the first associations of Czech avant-garde artists. At the time Oppenheimer's style revealed a growing interest in Impressionist painting, especially that of Max Liebermann. In 1908 Max Oppenheimer moved back to Vienna, joining the circle of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. His encounter with Kokoschka's painting exerted a formative influence on Oppenheimer, especially in the field of the psychological portrait. After participating in several group shows, Oppenheimer had his first one-man show at the Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1911. That same year Oppenheimer began to work on the journal 'Die Aktion', founded by Franz Pfemfert in Berlin. In 1915 Oppenheimer moved to Switzerland, where he would remain, with interruptions, until 1924. His style of painting subsequently incorporated Cubist elements that would become characteristic of his work. Introduced to Dada in 1916, Oppenheimer participated in the first Dada exhibition in Zurich that year. Oppenheimer embarked on his celebrated orchestra scenes, which were shown in 1924 at a large-scale group exhibition mounted by the Vienna Haagebund. Oppenheimer went to Berlin again in 1926 but by 1931 the political situation in Germany was so fraught [sic!] that he decided to return to Vienna. A year later his work was confiscated during the widespread wave of persecution of Jews and SA defamation of their work that followed the Reichstag fire. In 1932 Oppenheimer participated a last time in a group show at the Vienna Künstlerhaus before fleeing to Switzerland in 1938. In 1939 Oppenheimer emigrated to the US, where his work revealed a reversion to earlier ideas. Shortly before his death in his New York apartment on 19 May 1954, Max Oppenheimer was experimenting with American Abstract Expressionism.

Egon Schiele

Girl with sun glasses ( Gertrude Schiele ), 1910 Albertina, Vienna

Isolated patches of relatively unmodulated color, on the sunglasses and belt, are played against more expressively nuance flesh tones.
The balancing of these two different approaches, like the balancing of painted and unpainted areas, is a legacy of Schiele's Jugendstil background.

" The Music "

Gustave Klimt 1862-1918

Posters:

Max Pechstein ( Don't Strangle Our New Born Freedom), 1919
Rudi Feld ( The Danger of Bolshevism), ca.1919


The Between War Years

As the 1st World War drew to it's bitter end, hunger and despair were rife throughout Germany. Military defeat and economic collapse were making
themselves felt.
Deserting soldiers roamed the streets and added to the chaos. The country was ripe for change.
On November 9, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to Holland, and a few days later
announced his abdication.
The stage was set for a revolution that would replace the old regime with a system in which the leaders were responsible to parliament.
A coalition government of the moderate Social Democratic party and the more radical independent Social Democrats was set up.
Elections were called for january 1919. In the intervening period many artist's become Politically active, some for the first time, trying to stimulate action, strengthen opinions, or alter the social conscience.
Posters were the visual weapons in the struggle of the working class against the rich.
In marked contrast to the censorship that had been so strictly enforced during the Kaiser's reign, German cities now become a riot of colors and slogans as strident messages covered every available wall space.

MMaxi

Check Vincent Van Gogh's thème, Arles Bedroom, 1888 blogg posting on the 04/07/2006

A version of Van Gogh's painting was owened by Schiele's patron Carl Reininghaus and
Exhibited at the 1909 "kunstschau"

MMaxi