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.

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

Although Grosz was a member of the November-gruppe for a short time, the majority of his searing commentaries on Weimar society and its rampant corruption were created outside the group framework.
Like Dix, Grosz had enlisted for military service despite his marked antiwar sentiments.
His experiences soon reconfirmed his horror of combat, and following an honorable discharge in 1915 he began chronicling his abhorrence of Berlin society.
His vocabulary of chaotic scenes of crime and passion, of obscene officers, injured soldiers, and leering prostitutes in dark streets was increased and sharpened by his observations during the war and afterwards.
He created a veritable cascade of paintings, prints, portfolios, illustrated books, and illustrations for radical periodicals, such as Die Aktion.
A painting like Selfbstmord ( Suicide ) probably reflects the artist state of mind following his release from the army.

MMaxi

The Expressionism movement in Germany embraces stylistic phenomena as disparate as the first abstract watercolors painted by Wassily Kandinsky around 1910 and the almost realist social driticism of the art of the Weimar period.
One has only to think of Conrad Felixmuller.
This in itself shows that Expressionism was not just a national stylistic phenomenon.
It was in fact a higly complex movement of cultural protest, wich sought to overturn the prevailing aestethic and social values on a universal scale.
It's purely stylistic charecteristics - however strong its predilection for sharp angles, distortions of form, or strong contrasts of color - remained secondary.
The common features that can be identified within its enormous formal diversity are more a matter of content: specifically they spring from its critique of contemporary civilization.
it was precisely when Expressionism began to use stereotyped formulas that its impulse began to wane, like that of a solidifying stream of Lava.

MMaxi

Der Schaubunder, 1921

 (Der tod des Dicthters Walter Rheiner)
 (Death of the Poet Walter Rheiner), 1925

Bildnis; Otto Ritsdil, 1920

Original name: Bildnis Elfriede Hausmann, 1920

Portrait of Felix Steimer

Conrad Felixmuller

Felixmuller left Dresden after joining the Communist party in 1919. In 1920 rather than use his recently won Saxon State Prize for it's intended purpose, travel to Rome, he visited the Ruhr District and studied the life of the coal miners. Shocked by the high unenployment he saw there, and feeling that he would contribute something worthwhile by making the miners' plight known, Felixmuller executed several powerful paintings, drawings, and woodcuts in the early 1920's. " To do this," he writes, " To show the toiling proletarian, I was reduced to the simpliest forms, to reproducing simple, organic things that could be comprehended in their natural, their
human and their social context... The violence of the situation permitted the forceful character of the woodcut."
This images were hailed as among the best work of the period.
In one of the earliest monographic articles on Felixmuller the playwright Carl Sternheim wrote in Der Cicerone: " This Muller... peeled the mask from the faces of his contemporaries... and in his paintings there appeared for the first time the proletariat, hitherto passed over in silence." Felixmuller continued to draw on his Ruhr experiences for his illustrations for Die Aktion. But by the mid-twenties, he had turned his back on expressionism, and until his death in 1977 he created sweet, intimate portraits and landscapes.

MMaxi