Artist: Peter August Böckstiegel 1889-1951

Auszug der Junglinge in den Krieg, Studie ( Departure of the Youngsters for War, Study ), 1914

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Artist: Peter August Böckstiegel 1889-1951

Die Mutter ( The Mother ) c. 1915 

Peter August Böckstiegel

Born is Westphalia in 1889, Böckstiegel moved to Dresden in 1913 to pursue his studies at the academy.

Back from the war in 1919 he became a founding member of the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919.

His work shows him to have been a painter whose temperament kept him close to Nature Basing his work on the central experience of his encounter with Van Gogh, he used a heavy impasto and sweeping brush strokes to evoke the lush landscape and the looming figures of the people of Westphalia.

Whatever he touched - painting - printmaking or terra-cotta sculpture - bears witness to the elemental vitality of his creative impulses.

In his woodcuts he deployed a simple, powerful line.

Böckstiegel divided his working time between Westphalia and Dresden.

He remained close to the agricultural landscape all is life, and he was not enough of a townsman to succumb, during the one year he spent as a member of the Secession, to the intellectual communism of his brother-in-law 

Felixmuller and his painter friends.

Even so in 1921 he designed a poster for IAH ( Internationale Arbeiterhilfe , International Workers' Aid ), a body promoting solidarity with the cause of labour.

Only one work from 1919, done after Böckstiegel joined the Secession, is still known to us: a figure group titled Singende Kinder am Meer ( Children Singing   by the Sea), largely executed in the Secession style, with a background dominated by the moon and stars.

A second painting, Offenbarung ( Revelation), is known only by its tittle.

Also lost are woodcuts with the highly characteristic period tittles do Die Wanderer des Lebens ( The Wanderers of Life), and Klage deer Frauen ( The Women's Lament), his major graphic statements belong to the ensuing Years.

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Random words and phrases
Days go by MMaxi10


Spring is here and the birds are starting to celebrate nature
Time for me to get my camera and start taking snaps of the city as it changes from gray into a bright green
Weekend Rest
Cook maybe some carne de vinho e alhos
Bake a cake as well it can't be that difficult
Do some blogging less face more me
It's back to the study of German Expressionism 1915 - 1925 The Second Generation
I'm not a fast reader after 4 years I managed to read 48 pages 75 more
to go MMaxi10

october 23rd 2006 

Started with the Introduction

I started on

http://www.blogg.org/blog-43176-date-2006-10-23-billet-otto_dix_-461862.html

Otto dix "Selbstbildnis als Soldat"                             Check link Above

October 29 2006

I started on

Prewar, Wartime, and Postwar

Conrad felixmuller, bildinis Raoul Hausmann ( portrait of raoul hausmann )

http://www.blogg.org/blog-43176-date-2006-10-29-billet-conrad_felixmuller__bildinis_raoul_hausmann___portrait_of_raoul_hausmann__-465760.html

Expressionism in Berlin from 1912 to the early 1920s                                    Check link above

And 14 pages later 18 avril 2009  Max Hermann Max Pechstein, Selfbildnis mit Tod 1920-21

http://www.blogg.org/blog-43176-date-2009-04-18-billet-max_pechtsein_self_portrait_with_death-1012614.html

                                                                                                         Check link above

Hermann Max Pechstein, Selfbildnis mit Tod 1920-21

German Expressionism 1915-1925

The second generation.

Hermann Max Pechstein began his artistic career as an apprentice to a decorative painter from Zwickau. In 1903, he enrolled in the Dresden Academy. In 1906, he graduated with top honors and a scholarship to study in Italy. On his return, he visited Paris where he befriended Kees Van Dongen. In 1906, he joined Die Brucke. In 1910, he moved permanently to Berlin where he was elected President of the Neue Secession. He exhibited at the Berlin Secession in 1912 and was therefore expelled from Die Brucke having violated their policy of only exhibiting together. In 1914, he traveled to the Palau Islands in the South Seas. While attempting to return to Germany, he was interred in Japan, the United States and Holland. Upon his return, he was drafted into military service and sent to the Somme front but was released in early 1917 after suffering a nervous collapse.

Pechstein produced 850 prints composed of 390 lithographs, 290 woodcuts and 170 etchings. In the early years, Pechstein only printed in very small editions. His often irregular rolling technique resulted in printing differences. He liked to experiment with colored papers and different inks. A print from several blocks (one for each color) was too laborious for his impatient nature so he applied the different colors to the same block.

Etchings represent the smallest number of prints in his entire oeuvre. He especially liked to combine drypoint and aquatint techniques. As an exceptional draughtsman, he liked the immediacy of lithography.

Leda, 1919

Otto Dix

In his foreword to the 1919 exhibition catalogue devoted to the group's prints Grohmann introduced Dix this way " Otto Dix appeared at Easter with brutal force, and all sorts of expectations were aroused. At the moment he is laughing heartily at himself, at art, and at us.
Let us leave him to it; something will surely occur to him."

Five paintings of 1919 serve to define Dix's Expressionist period.
Their titles Leda, schwangeres Weib ( Pregnant Women), Mondweib ( Moon Women), Auferstehung des Fleisches ( Resurrection of the Flesh), and Prometheus, a self portrait. The first four convey erotic messages of enormous vehemence with " something cosmic about them. " They were reproduced in Menschen.
Grohmann said, " the ultimate distillation of his memories, not analyses,
the delirium of life, the dancing bewitchment of color. You can turn his paintings upside down; they still work. That is how pure a representation of emotion his art is.
" Zehder takes up the description: " He swings the brush like an ax, and every stroke is a yell of color. The world to him is Chaos in the throes of giving birth."



vehemence
noun
the recruiters were talk to speak with unwavering vehemence passion, force, forcefulness, ardor, fervor, violence, urgency, strength, vigor, intensity, keenness, feeling, enthusiasm, zeal.



throes
plural noun
the throes of childbirth agony, pain, pangs, spasms, torment, suffering, torture; literary travail.
PHRASES
in the throes of we're in the throes of hurricane preparations in the middle of, in the process of, in the midst of, busy with, occupied with, taken up with/by, involved in, dealing with; struggling with, wrestling with, grappling with.



bewitch |biˈwi ch |
verb [ trans. ] (often be bewitched)
cast a spell on and gain control over (someone) by magic : his relatives were firmly convinced that he was bewitched.
• enchant and delight (someone) : they both were bewitched by the country and its culture | [as adj. ] ( bewitching) she was certainly a bewitching woman.
DERIVATIVES
bewitchingly |bəˈwɪtʃɪŋli| |biˈwɪtʃɪŋli| adverb
bewitchment noun
ORIGIN Middle English : from be- [thoroughly] + witch







MMaxi08

One of the most potent graphic cycles is the series of wood cut illustrations
by the Dresden Secession artist Constantin von Mitschke-Collande
for the Walter Georg Hartmann's allegorical book
Der Begeisterte Weg ( The Inspired Way; ) Haartmann
tells of a young soldier who experiences the beginnings of the Revolution,
the funeral of Liebknecht, and the outbreak of street violence, during which he was killed.
His spirit does not die; it wanders through revolutionary Germany, observing.
Mitschke-Collande focuses on the religious salvation promissed in hartmann's text.
He combines images from the Crucifixion and the Revelation of St. John
( for instance, the horsemen of the Apocalypse ) to intertwine Expressionists
religious imagery and a message about revolution.
The illustrations are a symbol of the political and spiritual awakening
of the second-generation Expressionists.
They reflect the crossroads that many artists felt they had reached.
Mitschke-Collande's style also reflects that eclecticism of the second generation.

MMaxi08

Constantin von Mitschke-Collande

Born 1884 Collande

Died 1956 Nuremberg

Education

Thechnische Hochschule, Munich, 1905-07
( architetural Studies )

Akademie, Dresden, 1907-10, 1912-13
Studied with Fernande Lèger and Maurice Denis, Paris

Ludwig Meidner, like most of his poet friends, loved to walk the streets of the city. He roamed the outlying suburbs of Berlin for hours on end an drew his inspiration from what he saw.
At night, back in the dark, little attic room that served as his studio, he painted houses and streets that began to dance under his brush, as if the earth beneath the city were shaking.
From dancing houses it was only a step to blazing cities.
In the summer of 1912, that hot summer following a rainy April, that had such an invigorating impact on European art in general, Meidner embarked on his apocalyptic landscapes, which he painted one after another in a sustained creative frenzy.

*check blogg posting of October 29 2006
for a 1916 self-portrait etching by Ludwig Meidner

MMaxi

Neues Land ( New Land ) 1920 Johannes Molzahn

Expressionism began to show an apocalyptic or ecstatic coloration in the work of several artists after the war.
In 1919 Joahannes Molzahn published " Das Manifesto of Absoluten Expressionismus " ( The Manifesto of Absolute Expressionism ) in der Sturm, in which, with highly charged language, he proclaimed the destruction of the older and the rising of the new order in the aftermath of destruction.
Molzahn " we want to pour oil onto the fire - fan the tiny glow into flame - span the earth - make it quiver - and beat more fiercely - living and pulsating cosmos - steaming universe. "
Molzahn propounded the notion of " Abstract Expressionism, " and in his paintings and prints of 1919-20 he used a series of intersecting circular bands, reminiscent of both Robert Delaunay and the Futurists, whose work was also exhibited at the Galerie Der Sturm.

MMaxi





Johannes Molzahn (1892-1965)
Johannes Molzahn went to school in Weimar and received his technical training in Berlin and Berne. In 1908 he moved to Switzerland but returned to Germany in 1914.

In 1917, he had an exhibition at Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin. His work from the late 1910s and early 1920s can be described as Cubo-Futuristic because it combined the figurative with the abstract. Often figures are placed spatially before an environment composed of disjunctured fragments of rectangles, trapezoids and triangles. The figure struggles to maintain its distinction from the elements surrounding it. He employs a vocabulary of repetitive patterns and emphasizes geometric forms rather than emphasizing natural wood striations (in his woodcuts) which was a favored technique among the Expressionists. Molzahn's print technique more closely resembles younger artists such as Willi Baumeister and Oscar Schlemmer. This younger generation was inspired by mechanical drawings and industrial forms.

Uniformity and cohesion were emphasized as a statement of a human, universal identity. This utopian vision of universal creativity and communal harmony was exactly what the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition despised. Instead, Hitler envisioned a social order based on master and slave, subjugation and repression.

Molzahn was active in Weimar after World War I and he was asked by Walter Gropius to survey artistic activity in the region. He never joined the faculty of the Bauhaus but his work was included in their third Bauhaus Portfolio because of his association with Walden. In 1923 he became a teacher of graphics and typography at the Madgeburg School of Applied Arts and from 1928-33 he was employed at the Academy in Breslau. In 1926, his work was included in the Brooklyn Museum's International Exhibition of Modern Art organized by Katherine Dreier.

Six paintings by Molzahn were included in the 1937 exhibition of Degenerate Art after being confiscated from museums in Breslau and Essen. Portfolios of prints by Molzahn published by the Bauhaus were also included in that exhibition. The Nazis criticized the Bauhaus efforts to infiltrate "healthy German art with the germs of Jewish, Asian, and Communist principles".