The Catalog

The catalog consists of biographical entries about the individual artists, followed by texts on the artworks in the collection by these artists. The individual entries include information about the present appearance of the artwork. if a work is signed, the signature is indicated by the designation "lr" (lower right), "ll" (lower left), or "lm" (lower middle; "ur" (upper right), "ul" (upper left), or "um" (upper middle). If a signature appears in any other location, that location is spelled out. "Signed in stone" or "monogram in stone" means that the artist included his signature within the print itself. No reference to a signature means that the work is unsigned. Provenance of a work is included if it is known; in most cases, this information consists only of the work's location at the time it was purchased by Pohl. If the specific work appeared in an exhibition, this information is included under the heading of "Exhib."

All translations from German are the author's unless otherwise noted; one can assume that most references to letters, and most citations, were originally in German. Certain terms which cannot be easily translated-for example, gymnasium for German secondary school-have been retained in German and have not been italicized. The terms for the two Expressionist groups, Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter, also have been retained. Names of all schools, however, have been translated, e.g., Arts and Crafts School for Kinstgwerbeschule, Technical College for Technische Hochschule.

The items included in the bibliographies of the biographical entries are highly selective, especially for those artists who have been the focus of much scholarly attention. For the most part, titles included are those consulted in the completion of this catalog. Some attempt has been made to provide more extensive citations for the lesser-known artists, about whom it is difficult to find information. Although most texts are in German, texts in English, even when they are not as comprehensive as other sources, also are emphasized. The citations included under "lit" in the entries on individual works refer to texts which discuss the specific work in the collection, or to other works by the artist that are similar stylistically. Some entries under "Lit" indicate a reproduction only.

Born the eighth child of 12 into a Jewish miller’s family, Jakub Adler was educated at religious schools in Lodz and Warsaw. In 1906, he was apprenticed to an engraver, an occupation he pursued until 1912. At the time, Adler moved to Germany and lived with a parried sister in Barmen (now Wuppertal). There he began drawing classes at the School of Applied Arts; his teacher was Gustave Wiethuechter (1873-1946), whom Adler later praised as one of his most important inspirations.

During the war, as a Polish subject, he was officially conscripted into the Russian army, but was transferred almost immediately to the Germans, while nominally a prisoner, he worked on the land and continued with his artistic studies. In 1918, he had his first contact with the group of artists known as Das junge Rheinland (Young Rhineland) in Düsseldorf. He then returned to Warsaw, where he organized Jung Jiddisch (Young Yiddish), a group of the most avant-garde Jewish artists in Poland. He had his first successful exhibitions there and in Lodz.

In 1920, he moved back to Germany, where, after extensive contact with the Socialist atmosphere surrounding the Berlin periodical Die Aktion, he settled finally in Düsseldorf and worked closely with the group of young artists around Johanna Ey’s gallery. At the time, he became good friends with Cologne artists Otto Dix and Franz Seiwert.

In 1921, he visited Paris for the first time. The success of his Polish exhibition brought him recognition in Germany, and , in 1925, he was commissioned to paint a fresco in the Düsseldorf planetarium, a work later destroyed by the Nazis.

Adler then entered the happiest and most creative period of his life. In 1928, he received the Gold Medal of the City of Düsseldorf for his painting Katzen (Cats) (Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne). From 1929 to 1931, he lived on Mallorca and traveled throughout Spain. He returned to Düsseldorf in 1931 to teach at the Academy, where he worked closely with Paul Klee. In 1933, he was invited by the College of Art Association in New York to participate as a member of the German selection at an international exhibition. The Nazi takeover that year, however, forced Adler to leave Germany completely; he first fled to Paris. Because he was still a Polish citizen, Adler’s works in Germany were retrieved by the Polish government, which then mounted a large retrospective exhibition of his works in Warsaw in 1935.

From 1935 to 1937, Adler wandered through Italy, the Balkans, and Russia, and eventually returned to Paris. There he worked in the British artist S. W. Hayter’s “Atelier 17,” the studio through which every Surrealist eventually passed. Adler finally fled to Cagnes-sur-Mer in Southern France. There he probably met Picasso; in any case, the Spanish artist exerted an enormous influence on Adler’s late style. (When a critic once noted that Adler artistically stood between Klee and Picasso, Adler commented that it was a very good place to stand.) His works became more abstract, although, like Picasso, he never entirely rejected objective art.

When war was declared in France, Adler enlisted with the Polish Volunteer Army, the members of which managed to escape to Britain in June 1940. Adler was sent to Scotland with the Polish artillery, but was released on medical grounds in January 1941.

In 1943, he moved to London, where he held several exhibitions. After the war, Adler’s works appeared in galleries in London, Brussels, Paris, and finally in 1949, at the Jewish Museum in New York City. He died of a heart attack in the midst of one of his most productive periods. A large memorial exhibition was held in London by the British Arts Council in 1951.

Although known primarily as a Cubist sculptor, Archipenko was also a painter and printmaker. As a teacher and writer, he also devoted much of his life to the promulgation of his ideas about the creative process. His father was a mechanical engineer and professor at Kiev University and his grandfather was an icon painter. A leg injury confined him to bed when he was 13 and 14 years old, during which time he studied and copied art from books given to him by his grandfather.

In 1902, he chose art as a career over mathematics, taking classes at Kiev’s art school from 1902 to 1905. He was expelled after openly criticizing his teachers’ academic methods. In 1906, he moved to Moscow, where he participated in many exhibitions.

At the age of 20, in 1908, he went to Paris. He enrolled briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts, but was soon bored with his academic direction; he studied independently, finding inspiration in the ancient sculpture at the Louvre. He established a studio where, according to Archipenko, Modigliani and others learned sculptural methods.

For Archipenko, 1912 was an important year. He opened his own art school and became a founding member of the artists’ group Section d’Or (The Golden Section); other members included Picasso, Braque, Delaunay, Léger, and Duchamp. In the same year, he had his first one-man exhibition in Germany at the Folkwang Museum Hagen. He was then constructing sculptures that he called “Sculpto-Peintures,” composed of various painted materials; his work was already abstract and geometric with emphasis on volume and the space surrounding the forms.

In 1913, he made his first lithographs. In that year, his works appeared at the famous Armory Show in New York, and he had a one-man show at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin. In 1914, he exhibited five sculptures in Prague along with the works of the Cubist painters.

While his work was ridiculed by most critics, the avant-garde writer and critic Guillaume Apollinaire became his staunch defender. Archipenko was able to escape military duty during World War I, spending 1914 to 1918 making sculpture in a villa near Nice that was loaned to him by a wealthy friend. From 1919 to 1921, he traveled extensively, exhibiting his works throughout Europe.

In 1921, he was in Berlin, where he received his first commission to produce a print portfolio for the Wasmuth publishing house. He also married the German sculptor Angelica Bruno-Schmitz and opened an art school. At the same time, he received recognition from New York’s Société Anonyme and exhibited there; a monograph by Ivan Goll appeared in connection with this exhibition. He decided to emigrate to the United States in 1923 and settle in New York City. He again began to teach, opening a summer school in Woodstock, New York–one of the first artists to work in this future artists’ colony.

He produced at the time kinetic sculpture, some of the first created. In 1928, he became a United States citizen. Aside from his continued work in sculpture and printmaking, Archipenko also experimented with ceramics, establishing a laboratory school in the medium in New York City. In the 1930s, he lectured throughout the country on his theories of “creativeness.” After teaching at Mills College in California, he settled in Los Angeles for several years. In 1937, he moved to Chicago, where he became an instructor at the New Bauhaus of Industrial Arts. Having been declared a “degenerate” artist by the Nazis, all of his works in German museums were confiscated; as one of the few Cubist sculptors, his pieces received particularly vehement attention in Nazi publications. He spent most of the 1940s in New York, working on large sculptural commissions and continuing to produce prints.

In 1952, he began experimenting with serigraphy and mixed-media prints. He traveled to Germany in 1955 and 1956 to accompany his one-man show to six cities. At the same time, he began work on a book, Archipenko: Fifty Creative Years, which included a manifesto summarizing his ideas about creativity. The book was finally published in 1960 and was dedicated to his wife, who died in 1957. He married Francis Gray in 1960 in Paris; the event marked Archipenko’s first return to France since 1921.

Prints occupied an increasing amount of his production; these late works appeared in print anthologies and many other publications. Retrospective exhibitions occurred throughout the world. He died shortly after casting his last sculpture, King Solomon.

Max Beckmann, one of the most internationally known figures associated with Expressionism, is also one of the most enigmatic. The son of a prosperous grain dealer, he moved from Leipzig to his parents’ native city of Braunschweig at the age of ten. He exhibted early artistic talent, and avidly studied the collection of Rembrandts in the Braunschweig museum; the Dutch master remained one of his most important inspirations.

From 1900 to 1903, he attended the Weimar Academy, where he came to the attention of the great art critic Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935). Meier-Graefe raised money to send Beckmann to Paris, but the young artist left the French capital after a few weeks. He was, however, impressed by Manet, van Gogh, and Cézanne. In 1904, he moved to Berlin, where he painted in a style influenced by the Berlin Impressionists Liebermann, Corinth, and Slevogt. He acquired the most influential dealer in the Berlin art world, Paul Cassirer.

In 1906, he married Minna Tube, a fellow art student; they then traveled to Italy. The death of his mother that year caused deep sorrow, which he expressed in more contemplative paintings. In 1907, an exhibition of Delacroix in Berlin caused another stylistic transformation; Beckmann began to paint monumental paintings of mythological scenes and cataclysmic events, such as his Sinking of the Titanic of 1912. In 1913, the 29-year-old artist had a one-man show at Paul Cassirer’s gallery. In 1914, he participated in the famous Werkbund exhibition in Cologne.

When war was declared, Beckmann volunteered as a medic and was sent to the Russian front. By the summer of 1915, the horror he confronted daily caused him to have a nervous breakdown, and he was discharged. His war experiences had a tremendous impact on his style, which became consciously grotesque and claustrophobic, depicting through allegorical and religious themes images of violence, brutality, and the irrational mystery of human motivations. Stylistically, Beckmann turned to the old German and Flemish masters for inspiration.

In 1924, a major monograph about his work was published in Munich, and he acquired the patronage of the most important collectors and museums. Beckmann moved to Frankfurt, where he received an appointment to the School of the Städesches Art Institute in 1925, a post he held until the Nazis came to power in 1933. In the same year, he divorced his wife Minna and married Mathilde “Quappi” von Kaulbach, daughter of the Munich painter Friedrich August von Kaulbach (1850-1920). This new relationship ushered in a period of self-confidence and happiness, which was reflected in his many self-portraits. In 1931, eight of Beckmann’s works appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the same year, the National Gallery in Berlin placed its collection of his paintings in a special room–an unprecedented honor for a living artist. From 1929 until 1933, he spent the winters in Paris. When the Nazis dismissed him from his post in 1933, he moved to Berlin, where he stayed until 1937. His work became increasingly cryptic; his use of literary-mythological symbols had many possible interpretations. He was declared a “degenerate” artist in 1937, and 509 of his works were removed from German museums. The day after the opening of the famous “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich, Beckmann and his wife took the train for Amsterdam; Beckmann never returned to Germany.

Despite hardships and deprivation in Holland where Beckmann was forced to endure Nazi occupation during the war years, the period was very productive artistically. In the summer of 1947, Beckmann received an offer from Washington University in St. Louis. In 1948, he had his first American retrospective at the City Art Museum in St. Louis; he also acquired an important patron in St. Louis businessman Morton D. May. This retrospective exhibition traveled to Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, and Minneapolis, introducing the artist to American audiences.

In 1949, he taught summer school at the University of Colorado and received first prize at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. He accepted a tenured position at the Brooklyn Museum Art School that year. He learned to love the “extravaganza” of New York. He taught summer school in 1950 at Mils College in Oakland, California, and then returned to New York, where he died.

As his best American friend, Perry Rathborne wrote, “his life was governed by the compulsion to work and the desire to dream.”

Berke was one of the few German artists active after World War II who was successful both as an abstract and as a representational artist. He spend seven years after gradation from gymnasium at a Capuchin cloister, studying to prepare himself to be a missionary to China. He spent intensive hours studying the cloister’s art collection; he then decided to become an artist. He studied at the academies in Königsberg and Düsseldorf, where he was a student of Paul Klee.

In 1934, he moved to Cologne and had his first one-man show at the Wallfraf-Richartz museum in 1936. With Fernand Moeller as his dealer, he gained recognition in the same year in Berlin. Primarily a draughtsman working in crayon and charcoal, Berke received the Cornelius Prize in 1948.

In the 1930s, he began to work as a book illustrator, and occupation well-suited to his style which has been labeled “painted graphics.” After the war, he became a member of the group Zen 49. He settled in Alfter, a village near Bonn, where he worked in both abstract and representational styles and in a variety of media.

Blumengeist 1943A 1943	Fall Landscape (Herbstlandschaft) 1932

Described by a contemporary as “a spacial idealist,” Bieling incorporated Cubist form into a woodcut technique. Bieling’s first studies took place at the academy in his native Rotterdam. Dissatisfied, he went to Paris, where he became a member in 1913 of the Cercle internationale des beaux-arts.

One of the most renowned artists in Austria, Boeckl has received little public attention internationally. Boeckl had already decided to be an artist at 15, but his parents persuaded him to study architecture instead. He entered the Technical College in Vienna in 1912 and stayed until 1914, when he was drafted into the army. On the front near Italy, Boeckl came into contact with the art historian Bruno Grimschitz; they remained lifelong friends, and Grimschitz supported Boeckl’s artistic ambitions.

After the war, he returned to Vienna, with no intention of continuing his architectural studies. Through his friendship with Grimschitz, he met the leading figures in Vienna’s post-war cultural life. A self-taught painter, Boeckl demonstrated in his early work the compositional influences of the Viennese Secession artists then in vogue. The works of Schiele and Kokoschka remained enduring inspirations to him.

In 1919, he married Maria Planha. He also joined a group of young artists known as Noetscher School, whose members included Anton Kolig (1886-1950). Under the influence of this group, Boeckl placed greater importance on color, subduing his nervous line; he also mastered the gouache technique.

In 1920, he signed an exclusive contract with the dealer Gustav Nebehay. The contract assured Boeckl of a monthly income and allowed him the freedom to travel. He spent several months in Berlin, where the revolutionary atmosphere and exciting artistic climate were, for Boeckl, invigorating. He met some of the Brücke artists at that time, a fact that is evident in his new conception of color an form. During a trip to Paris in 1923 he confronted the work of the “classic” masters of modern art. He then painted a series of landscapes that indicated his debt to Cezanne and Matisse.

By the late 1920s, Boeckl had gained public recognition: A retrospective of his work appeared at the Vienna Secession at the end of 1927, and he had other exhibitions throughout Austria. He began at this time to paint a series of anatomical studies. He also became interested in religious themes, and painted several church frescoes. In 1934, he received Austria’s State Prize and, in 1935, he was named Professor at Vienna Academy.

With the Nazi takeover in 1939, he resigned his official position and began teaching the academy’s evening life-drawing class; he continued in this capacity until 1965. After the war, he was named rector of the academy, a position he gave up in 1946; he was again rector from 1962 to 1965. A major retrospective of his work opened at the academy in 1946. Boeckl explored the possibilities of abstraction in the early 1950s, but he soon returned to a representational style.

In 1958, he received the Guggenheim International Award, one of the only instances of his international recognition. He also participated in the Venice Biennale in 1964. He suffered a stroke in October of that year and increasingly withdrew from public life. In later years, he concentrated on religious art, creating important wall-paintings for newly-renovated churches throughout Austria.

Although he is not well known in America today, Campendonk was an active member of the Blaue Reiter group from its inception and was one of the first of these artists to exhibit internationally.

As a child, Campendonk received little encouragement for his artistic talents from his family. When his father realized that Heinrich might find employment as a designer in the lucrative silk industry, he relented and allowed him to attend the School of Arts and Crafts in Krefeld. Campendonk attended the school from 1904 to 1909, where he remained a favorite pupil of the Duch artist Jan Thron-Prikker (1868-1932); the two artists became lifelong friends.

Thorn-Prikker was responsible for Campendonk’s early exposure to van Gogh and Cézanne, the two artists who had the greatest impact on the young man’s conception of color. Campendonk became close friends with two other students: Walter Giske, with whom he spent the summer of 1908 painting in the country; and Helmuth Macke, cousin of August Macke and a significant figure for Campendonk’s future career.

Determined to succeed as an artist, Campendonk broke entirely with his family in 1909 and tried to become self-sufficient. Despite financial difficulties, he continued to study color theory and painting independently, finding in fellow artist Heinrich Nauen an important confidant. In 1910, Campendonk attended, along with Nauen, Helmuth Macke, and other young artists, the exhibition “Neukunst” (New Art) at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf where he discovered Matisse and Signac, whose arbitrary use of color was for him a decisive revelation. Through his friendship with Helmuth Macke, Campendonk’s works came to the attention of August Macke, then living in Tegernsee in Bavaria; Franz Marc and Kandinsky also saw his paintings at Macke’s house. They were impressed enough to intercede on Campendonk’s behalf with Krefeld dealers and museum directors.

Kandinsky also arranged a meeting for the young artist with Alfred Flechtheim, the influential Düsseldorf collector and dealer. Flechtheim immediately purchased Campendonk’s work and promised further support. While the artist was encouraged by this success, his financial situation remained dire. Finally, in October of 1911, Marc and Kandinsky invited him to join them in the Upper Bavarian countryside. Campendonk moved immediately, living near Marc in the village of Sindelsdorf. There he shared a farmhouse with his old friend Helmuth Macke and immediately entered into the stimulating atmosphere generated by Marc and Kandinsky.

Exposure to the latest developments in nearby Munich and to the most advanced ideas propounded by these artists and the others associated with the Blaue Reiter group greatly influenced the style of his work. Campendonk remained in Bavaria until he was called into the military in 1915. He considered this Bavarian period as his happiest and most productive.

Stimulated by Marc’s mysticism, Campendonk developed a colorful style with emphasis on dreamlike landscapes and poetic themes. He particiapted in all of the 1911-12 exhibitions of the Blaue Reiter, and in 1913, he exhibited at Herwarth Walden’s Sturm Gallery in Berlin.

After being discharged from the army in 1916, and greatly affected by the deaths of Macke and Marc and the disappearance of the exciting artistic life that surrounded them, Campendonk and his family settled in Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberk with one of the only surviving members of the Sindelsdorf community, the Swiss artist Jean Bloé Niestlé (1884-1942). He remained there until 1922, painting in a quieter style with broader color surfaces and emphasis given to the portrayal of luminous tonal fields amid darkened, mysterious backgrounds.

By that time acknowledged as one of the leading artists associated with the Blaue Reiter, Campendonk had several one-man shows; the first monograph about him appeared in 1920. Coming to the attention of Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier, founders in the United States of the Société Anonyme, Campendonk’s works first appeared in New York in 1921. In 1925, he was one of the very first German artists to have a one-man show in the U.S. He even became a member of the Société board in 1923. He remained a lifelong friend of Mrs. Dreier, who stayed with the artist and his family when she visited Germany.

In 1923, he received a teaching position at the School of Arts and Crafts in Essen and, in 1926, became Thorn Prikker’s successor at the academy in Düsseldorf. At that time he completed commissions for stained-glass windows and church frescoes and continued to paint and make wood-cuts in his richly imagistic style. This comfortable period ended in 1933, when he, along with Paul Klee and many others, fell victim to the Nazis’ “cleansing” of the Düsseldorf Academy.

He emigrated first to Belgium and finally settled in Amsterdam, where he was appointed to Rijksakademie in 1935. During the war years, lack of materials compelled him to concentrate most frequently on graphic art. After the war, his interest in glass painting and stained glass continued, and he received several commissions for church windows during the post-war rebuilding of Germany and Holland. His attempts to return to Germany after the war were unsuccessful, and he remained until his death in Amsterdam.

The Fisherman (Der Fischer) 1917	*Girl with Frogs (Madchen mit Froschen) 1916*	Study of Eve c.1925

Of the generation preceding the first Expressionists, Corinth created an artistic style that bridged the gap between the subdued German brand of Impressionism and a moderate form of Expressionism. Born to a prosperous Prussian farm family, Corinth attended gymnasium in nearby Königsberg. By 1876, he was attending the painting academy there; he moved to Munich in 1880, and continued his artistic studies at the academy.

Intent on broadening his aesthetic education, Corinth decided to go to Paris in 1884, where he worked at the Académie Julian with the well-known painter William Bouguereau (1825-1905). His greatest revelations in Paris were the Flemish master Rubens and, among the more modern French painters, Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884), whose conservative style of pleinairism introduced Corinth to the Barbizon painters. Both of these artists helped Corinth to loosen his palette and his brush, and to rid his style of any dry academicism.

The artist returned to Königsberg in1887, where he began to paint portraits, a genre in which he would excel throughout his life. Corinth’s penchant for the monumental, and his adherence to the traditional academic attitudes about what constituted “true” art, compelled him to attempt a series of works based on Biblical and mythological themes. While interesting in their concentration on the voluptuous colors of flesh, these compositions are too self-aware and contrived to be fully successful.

In the 1890s, he began to experiment in graphic techniques and continued to do so throughout his life, although these works would always be secondary to his exploration in color. Corinth moved to Berlin in 1900, where he became, along with Max Liebermann and Max Slevogt, one of the triumvirate of painters of the artistic movement known as the Berlin Secession. Their efforts were the first attempts to free Berlin art of its traditionally academic direction.

In 1904–when he was nearly 50–he married the writer and painter Charlotte Berend (1880-1977), with whom he had two children. The paintings of this period reflect his new-found domesticity.

In 1911, he suffered a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his right hand. Through immense effort, Corinth overcame this handicap and resumed painting; this difficult experience in fact, led to a break with his past aesthetic concerns. A new, more personally intense style revealed the artist’s need to conquer self-doubt and depression through an examination of his own psyche. The works of this period represent Corinth’s “Expressionist” phase, with greater emphasis on introspective self-portraits and on a more turbulent use of spontaneous brush-stroke and vivid color.

At the time, Corinth also began to concentrate more specifically on graphic art, perhaps because the smaller scale was less strenuous for him physically. Corinth continued to work until his death, producing some of his most powerfully expressive landscapes and portraits in his last years. He died f a heart attack while on holiday in Holland.

Alice Berend 1924	Woman Writing by the Window (Frau am Fenster) 1908	*Salomé 1916*	*Swimming Pool (Badeanstalt) 1920*

Although born in America of German parents and often classed as an American artist, Feininger spent his most productive years in Germany and was closely involved with the major events in German artistic life in the 20^th century.

From a musical family, Feininger went to Hamburg in 1887 to study music but decided to become a painter instead. His first studies took place at the School of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg and at the Academy in Berlin.

In 1901, he married the pianist Clara Fuerst; they had two children. This marriage ended in divorce after he met Julia Berg, née Lilienfeld, in 1905; Julia became his most ardent supporter and lifelong companion. They married in 1908 and had three sons, all of whom became artists in their own right.

From 1893 to 1906, he worked in Berlin as an illustrator for the humor magazines Ulk and Lustige Blätter; in 1906 and 1907, he was in Paris. There he worked as a correspondent for the Chicago Sunday Tribune creating some of the newspaper’s earliest comic-strip characters. In 1907, he decided to give up illustrating and devote himself entirely to painting: “From a well-known illustrator he turned himself into an unknown painter.”

He moved to Berlin at the end of 1908, where he came to the attention of the young artists who were known as Expressionists; he became especially close to Karl Schmitdt-Rottluff and Erick Heckel. Inspired by his discovery of Cubism, Feininger’s definitive style began to crystallize in 1912; increasingly, he moved away from the depiction of figures to concentrate solely on the interplay of light on fragmented structural forms and seascapes. Upon the suggestion of another new friend, the Austrian artist Alfred Kubin, Feininger was invited in 1913 to exhibit at the famous Herbstsalon organized by the Sturm Gallery in Berlin.

As an American citizen, Feininger did not fight in World War I, consequently continuing his artistic progress without shattering interruption. In 1919, he became a member of the Novembergruppe, an idealistic organization of progressive young artists intent on regenerating German art. Out of his affiliation came one of the most significant developments for his artistic career: his appointment in 1919 to Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus in Weimar. There he taught painting and graphics and was director of the printing press until 1924; he then moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau, where he stayed until the school’s closing by the Nazis in 1933.

From 1924, he was a member of the group known as Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). Primarily formed as an exhibiting organization, Die Blaue Vier consisted of Kandinsky, Klee, Jalensky, and Feininger. In 1936, completely shaken by the Nazis’ declaration of his art as “degenerate,” Feininger determined to return to the United States. In the summer of 1936, he was invited to teach at Mills College in California. After returning for a short visit to Europe, he and his family left for the United States for good in June 1937. He then became a leading figure in the country’s emerging modernist movement, eventually settling in New York and Connecticut. He painted a fresco for the 1939 New York World’s Fair and became closely associated with Alfred Barr, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art. He had major exhibitions both in the United States and abroad throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

Street in Treptow on the Rega 1932	Eutin I 1925	Hansa Fleet (Hansa-Flotte)

Felixmueller ranks as one of the most important artists of the so-called “second generation” of Expressionist artists who emerged after World War I. He was born Conrad Felix Mueller, the son of a factory worker. He was already taking drawing classes at the Dresden School of the Arts and Crafts when he was 14 years old. Several early teachers recognized his talent and arranged for him to transfer to Dresden’s academy where he began in the advanced painting class.

Aside from this formal training, Felixmueller taught himself every graphic technique; the woodcut became his special love, and his most important works were carried out in this medium. In works before 1914–most specifically, woodcuts to Schönberg’s Lieder des Pierrot Lunaire and Elsa Lasker-Schüler’s Hebräische Balladen–the young artist demonstrated his knowledge of the most advanced artistic developments.

Encouraged by his 1914 exhibition at the renowned Berlin gallery of J.B. Neumann, Felixmueller left the academy in1915 to become a full-time artist. He studied independently the graphic art of Edvard Munch, the achievements of the Brücke artists, and the breakthroughs of Cubism. In the same year, Herwalden named him the youngest contributor to his magazine Der Sturm, the leading Expressionist journal.

In Berlin, he became acquainted with Ludwig Meidner, Raoul Hausmann, and other Dada artists he was also a close friend of the poet Waler Rheiner (1895-1925). One of his most famous woodcut series illustrated Rheiner’s gripping poem-essay, Kokain; when Rheiner died of a cocaine overdose, Felixmueler painted a moving eulogy to his young friend.

From 1917, Felixmeuller was closely involved with Franz Pfemfert’s leftist political journal Die Aktion. Felixmueller’s distinctive graphic style determined the look of the journal for many years. He also founded the literary and art-journal Menschen and was a founding member of the Expressionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dresden, a union of politically-minded artists.

During the war, he made every effort to avoid service and eventually worked as an orderly in an insane asylum for 30 days. In 1918, he married Londa Freiin von Berg, and after a stay in Wiesbaden, he settled outside Dresden. The November revolutions of that year brought his enthusiastic support, and he produced a series of lithographs in honor of the fallen works and a memorial woodcut for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebkneckt. He joined the Communist Party and founded in 1919 the Dresden Secession Group; he left the group when it became apparent that the members considered it more an exhibition organization than a political forum.

Upon winning the Rome Prize of the State of Saxony in 1920, Felixmueller chose to visit the workers’ regions of the Ruhr rather than travel to Italy. This trip inspired some of his most powerful images on the plight of the workers. In the early 1920s, Felixmueller befriended the then unknown Otto Dix (1891-1969), helping him financially and introducing him to graphic art.

In the mid-1920s, Felixmueller;s style changed drastically, moving away from Expressionism toward what he called “more reality”; he found inspiration in 19^th-century German Realist styles. With the rise of the Nazi regime, Felixmueller’s public life ended. Forty of his works appeared in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich in 1937, and all of his works were removed from public collections. The artist moved to Berlin, where he lived out the war in isolation.

In 1949, he was appointed professor of painting and drawing at Martin Luther University in Halle (East Germany). In the 1960s, a wave of exhibitions of his early Expressionist works began, despite Felixmueller’s efforts to distance himself from this period. In 1965, the Galerie Nierendorf in West Berlin brought Felixmueller to the attention of a West German audience. In 1967, Felixmueller moved to Berlin-Zehlendorf; in the same year, the Graphik-Salon Gerhart Söhn in Düsseldorf published a volume of writings by and about Felixmueller in honor of his seventieth birthday. In 1973, the National-galerie Berlin held the first retrospective of his works.

Although born in Russia, Genin spent much of his artistic life in Germany. Completely unruly as a child–he burned down his family’s home and farm when he was seven–his only positive experience in school came from the drawing teacher. His first artistic training came in Wilna and Odessa, where, beginning at age 12, he studied independently with local artists.

He came to Munich in 1902, where he enrolled at the famous Azbé school, a favorite school for Russian emigrés. His disruptive behavior and refusal to abide by any academic procedures caused his dismissal, after which he traveled to Paris; there he was most influenced by the 19^th-century fresco painter Puvis de Chavannes.

He spent several years as a vagabond, living briefly in Cairo and walking across North Africa. He returned to Munich before World War I, and was associated with the New Secession from its beginnings, on November 27, 1913, until 1929. He exhibited at the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich, where he came to the attention of organizers of the Sonderbund show in Cologne in 1912. Six of his works appeared in that exhibition. Through his active participation in the New Secession, Genin gained commissions for graphic works in many of the portfolio series produced in the 1920s.

In 1916, he wrote and illustrated a pessimistic autobiographical essay, Sizzen und Erinnerugen, which was published by Fritz Gurlitt. He associated most frequently with artists around the Galerie Thannhauser, especially Karl Hofer and Max Mayshofer.

After 1910, Genin moved increasingly away from landscape toward figure-painting. Eventually, he gave up color altogether, concentrating on sketch-like graphic compositions that captured a momentary impression. The mood of these works was usually bleak. His own writings indicated he had little use for art critics, and felt that art was, like religion, private and metaphysical. He returned to Paris in 1930, but he felt increasinly drawn to Russia. When he returned to his homeland in 1937, he was disillusioned by the realities of life there.

Reports to friends in Germany indicate that he shot himself in his studio in Mascow, either in 1941 or 1943.

*Lovers 1922*	*Courting 1922*

The son of a professor, Goesch attended school in Berlin. As did so many other young men of his generation, Goesch became an ardent disciple of the aesthetic poet Stefan George (1968-1933). He spent three years in Munich studying architecture, although the academic life did not interest him. He decided to become a painter, practicing first as a watercolorist. He spent six months in San Remo, Italy, learning how to paint. He then traveled through Italy, France, and Germany, preferring everywhere the company of artists.

Feeling the need for a secure profession, he trained in 1911 to be a governmental architect, an occupation he practiced until 1917. In the meantime, he became involved with theosophical circles and continued to paint. In 1917, he decided to devote himself entirely to art, working especially in the creation of utopian architectural designs. Fascinated with folk art, he generated a sense of naiveté and allusion to magical states in his own works.

The art critic Wilhelm Hausenstein summarized Grossmann’s enigmatic position in the artistic life of Weimar Germany when he wrote about him: “How is it then? Is he sophisticated? Is he naive? And are these the right questions or not?”

Grossmann was born into an artistic family; his father was a doctor, but his mother was a well-known portrait painter and the daughter of the Hofmaler of Baden, Wilhelm, Dürr (1815-1890). Grossmann attended the gymnasium in Reiburg, and, from 1902 to 1904, completed a few semesters in the schools of medicine and philosophy at the University of Munich; but he had already decided that he wanted to be an artist.

After unsuccessful attempts to pass the entrance exams at the academies in Düsseldorf and Karlsruhe, he went to Paris in 1905. There he became part of a group of artists, most of them German, who met at the Café du Dôme; also associated with this group were Hans Purrmann (1880-1966) and Jules Pascin (1885-1930), both of whom became Grossmann’s close friends. The influence of Pascin’s delicate graphic style and muted use of color is evident in Grossmann’s own work. The three artists made trips together in Belgium and Holland and led a thoroughly bohemian life in the brothels and cafés of Paris.

After five years in Paris, Grossmann began to travel, visiting Nice and Cannes, Vienna, Budapest, and Stockholm. About 1910, he arrived in Berlin, where he quickly came under the wing of the important art dealers Paul Cassirer and Alfred Flechtheim. Through their substantial contacts, Grossmann received numerous commissions for illustrations and drawings, and produced some of his own successful works, including the graphic portfolio Boxers and Menschen. Grossmann also became a much sought-after portrait illustrator. In 1915, he went to Engadin, Switzerland, for several months, then moved to Bavaria, where he worked with Olaf Gulbransson and Th. Th. Heine, the famous illustrators of Simplecissimus. In 1919, he married Maria Becker. In 1922 and 1923, he traveled to Italy, accompanied at times by his old friend Hans Purrmann; during this period, he also tried his hand at writing, and completed among other things, an autobiography, Mange des Lebens (The Horsemanship of Life). In 1924, he was in Berlin again, where he received a teaching appointment to the State Art School in 1928. Political pressure from the Nazis led to his resignation in 1934 and his return to his native city of Freiburg. He died there, not yet 60 years old, after a long and debilitating illness.

Very little information exists about this artist; in the first edition of Vollmer’s Kunstler-Lexikon, in fact, he is confused with his father Eugen, who was also an artist. Between 1922 and 1927, Hasenfratz studied with Richard Seewald at the Kolner Werkschulen, one of the most influential and successful art schools in Germany. From 1928 to 1930, in Paris, where he completed illustrations for Le Monde.

In 1932, he returned to Cologne before emigrating to Switzerland- in 1944. He traveled before World War II to Ibiza and Greece, where he completed several landscape paintings, again in apparent emulation of Seewald’s Mediterranean studies.

After 1938, he settled, along with many German artists declared “degenerate” by the Nazis, in Ascona in the Tessin region of Switzerland. He traveled extensively throughout Southern Europe, developing a distinctly Mediterranean style that was particularly effective in watercolors. In his last decade, Hasenfratz discovered London, where he made several studies of street life and urban activity. He moved increasingly toward abstraction, although he always returned to the object.

Heckel was one of the original memebers of Die Brucke. He was born the son of an engineer and attended school in Freiburg (Saxony) and Chemnitz. In Chemnitz, he met fellow students Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Franz Bleyl, with whom Heckel shared an enthusiansm for art and philosophy. Encouraged by Heckel’s reports of Kirchner’s artistic ideas, Schmidt-Rottluff joined Heckel and the others in Dresden, where, in 1905, they gave up academic studies and founded the artists’ group Die Brucke (The Bridge).

Always a good organizer, Heckel was responsible for the group’s business matters; he was the one who found the old butcher’s shop that became their studio and living quarters. With Kirchner, Heckel spent the summers from 1909 to 1911 on the Moritzburg Lakes outside Dresden, where they painted nudes in nature. Heckel’s work, less concerned with an explicit display of sexuality than Kirchner’s, emphasized the prismatic interplay between water and sky. In Moritzburg, he also developed his characteristic graphic style, in which certain jagged forms take on near-hieroglyphic significance.

In 1910, Heckel met Milda Frieda Georgi, who as a dancer went by the name Sidi Riha, or later, Siddi; they were married in 1915. Following Kirchner’s lead, Heckel left Dresden for Berlin in 1911. There he met Franz Marc and August Macke, who encouraged him to participate in the second exhibition of the Blaue Reiter and to contribute work for the group’s famous Almanach. He also became a good friend of Lyobel Feininger and his wife, a friendship that continued even after World War II.

By 1913, Heckel had his first one-man show at Fritz Gutlitt’s gallery in Berlin. In 1915, he volunteered as an army medic and was sent with several other artists to an infirmary on the Flemish coast. There he was safe from any direct combat and was able to continue producing art. By 1918, he was again in Berlin and was a founding member of the Arbeiterrat Fur Kunst (The Worker’s Council for Art). He was also briefly a member of the idealistic artist’s organization, the Novembergruppe.

From 1913 to 1944, except for the three years of military service, he spent summers in Osterholz, near Worpswede, where he painted outdoors. In 1920, he met Paul Klee and remained in contact with him until Klee’s death. He was one of the first to be listed as a “degenerate” artist by the Nazis in 1937; 729 of Heckel’s works were removed from public collections, and he was forbidden to exhibit. He went into international exile in his studio in Berlin. The studio itself and many of his paintings were destroyed by bombs in 1944. Heckel then settled in Hemmenhofen on Lake Constance.

In 1949, he was appointed to the academy in Karlsruhe, where he taught until 1955. Heckel was involved, along with Schmidt-Rottluff, in the founding of Die Brucke Museum in Berlin-Dahlem, where many of his best works are on permanent display.

*Bathing Soldiers 1916*	*Woman 1913*	*Handstand (Acrobat) 1916*

In a 1926 catalog, Hoerle was described rather melodramatically as a “fanatic of Constructive Destruction – absolute relativity in painting – result = Totalism.” This description links him correctly to the stylistic direction of the 1920s known as Die Deue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity). Hoerle’s father was a teacher who, like so many other members of the Hoerle family, died of tuberculosis while Heinrich was still a boy. An undisciplined child, he left school at a young age to wander though Holland and Belgium. In 1911, he joined a Belgian circus for one year.

Returning to Cologne in 1912, Hoerle studied sporadically at the School of Arts and Crafts. The next year, he set up a studio in his family’s apartment, where he often worked with is friend Max Ernst. He and Ernst and several other young artists often visited Gereonsclub, a Cologne center for artistic exchange, and frequented the bohemian artists’ group, the “Lunists.”

In 1914, he met the Italian painter Pietro Malmesi; the two shared a studio. Hoerle’s first stylized figural studies appeared in that year. In 1916, Hoerle met Angelika Fick; a short while later, he volunteered for military duty, becoming a telephone operater in the artillery. At the end of the war, he returned to Cologne, where he met Franz Wilhelm Seiwert (1894-1933); the two became close friends and artistic associates. In 1919, he married Fick.

Because of his friendship with Ernst, Hoerle participated in several of the Dadaists’ exhibitions and publications; Hoerle’s other friends Seiwert and Otto Freundlich, has already rejected this movement as too apolitical. By 1920, Hoerle too has moved away from Dada, although Hoerle’s own publishing house, Schloemilch-Verlag, published Ernst’s portfolio Fiat modes and the Dada journal Die Schammade.

Through Seiwert and others, Hoerle has close contact by 1921 with the group Linksradikale Jugend Aachens (Left-Radical Youth of Aachen); with this group, he participated in exhibitions and demonstrations. In 1922, Hoerle met the photographer August Sander (1876-1964), who made several photos of Hoerle and his paintings.

In 1922, Angelika contracted tuberculosis. In his dread of the disease, Hoerle abandoned her and returned to his family home, only to have his sister Maria die of the same disease that year.

By 1923, Hoerle was producing his most politically motivated prints and portfolios. His paintings were concerned with depictions of the grim realities of life in post-war Germany. With the decline in social-revolutionary concerns, Hoerle stopped producing prints and concentrated on oil-painting. In the same year, he married Marta Kleinertz, with whom he has a daughter.

He then became associated with a group of young artists centered at the Café Monopol; these artists later became Die Gruppe progressiver Kunstler (The Group of Progressive Artists). By 1925, perhaps through continued contact with his friend Ernst in Paris, Hoerle began a “surrealistic” phase. The first signs of his own tuberculosis also appeared at that time.

By 1926 and 1927, he began to exhibit throughout the Rhineland, as well as in Russia. He appeared in an exhibition at the Koelnischer Kinstverein in 1928; some of his best and most famous paintings, in his characteristically hard-edged style, were completed at that time.

By 1930, Hoerle, as part of the Gruppe progressiver Kunstler, had exhibits throughout Germany and the rest of Europe; his paintings even appeared in Chicago. By that time, Hoerle also began painting portraits of his contemporaries and friends, the works for which he is best known today. In 1932, he and Seiwert has a falling-out; Seiwerts death of tuberculosis in that year prevented any reconciliation. Hoerle’s work now consisted largely of drawings and pictures in wax.

Having divorced his second wife, Hoerle married Trude Alex in 1933; by that time, his own tuberculosis was becoming more apparent. His work contained more religious motifs, still-lifes and landscapes – an apparently conscious rejection of his previous concentration on figural works. He died of tuberculosis three years to the day after the death of his friend Seiwert.

Hofer’s works often reveal “the great pessimism” which permeated so much of the work of the New Objectivity painters of the 1920s. In his later years, he became the vehement champion of representational art against the forces of abstraction.

Orphaned at an early age, he was first reared by two great-aunts. At 10, he went to an orphanage. He had already shown great artistic talent. At 14, he was completely on his own, apprenticed to a bookdealer. He met E. R. Weiss (1875-1942) at that time, and with him began his first artistic studies under Hans Thoma at the Karlsruhe Academy; Weiss remained a close friend throughout his life, even when their artistic directions diverged significantly.

With Weiss, he made his first trip to Paris in 1899, where he met important dealers and critics and studied the works of Gauguin and Cézanne. He returned to Paris the next year for a longer stay, and at that time met the influential art historian and critic Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935).

In 1902, he studied briefly in Stuttgart, but felt the academic training there was as useless as it had been in Karlsruhe. He considered himself self-taught and self-educated. At that time, he made the acquaintance, though his father’s side of the family, with the renowned Swiss industrialist and art patron Hans Reinhardt, who remained for Hofer an important contact throughout his life and eased his financial difficulties.

In 1903, he married the singer Mathilde Scheinberger in Vienna and moved to Rome, where he worked from 1903 to 1908, often as a decorative painter. In 1906, he had his first one-man exhibition in Weimar, sponsored by the art patron Harry Graf Kessler. In 1908, he met the unknown Paul Klee through Reinhardt.

From 1908 to 1913, he and his wife lived in Paris. Again with the aid of the Reinhardt family, Hofer made two trips to India, in 1909 and 1911- trips that were important to him personally but had little effect on his artistic style. Upon his return to Paris, further familiarity with the most modern directions in art led to more vehement rejection of the ideas of abstraction. Hofer considered Kandinsky, for example, a promulgator of “dead principles” of “avant-garde mistakes.”

During World War I, Hofer was a civilian prisoner in France; eventually he was allowed to travel to Switzerland. He retuned to Berlin in 1919, where he had an exhibition at Paul Cassier’s gallery. In 1927-1928, he was the German representative on the jury of the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh. After that time, except for occasional trips throughout Europe, Hofer spent his entire life in Berlin.

During the 1920s, his realistic, sometimes shocking style, in which he exposed the grim side of life and manifested a bleak conception of human interaction, connected him to the works of other German artists of Die Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity). A professor at Berlin Academy from 1920 to 1933, he was the first academic to be ousted from his post by the Nazis.

Despite the prohibition of sales of his artworks, he continued to sell very well on the art black market before the war. Through his acquaintance with the Reinhardt family, Hofer was able to have a major exhibition at the Art Museum in Witerthur in 1939. His studio and 150 paintings were destroyed in the bombings of Berlin in 1943.

Janthur’s name invariably appears in connection with Ludwig Meidner, Jakob Steinhardt, and their group Die Pathetiker (The Exalted Ones), although he continued as an artists long after his association with them. Janthur first studied at the Academy in Breslau. By 1908, he was in Berlin; from 1911 on, he exhibited with the Berlin Secession. His first works exhibited there revealed a modified Neo-impressionist technique, which gained him recognition with the Secession artists.

After a trip to Greece in 1911, Janthur became dissatisfied with the slick aestheticism of the Secession style; under the influence of the Brucke artists whom he met in Berlin, he began to develop an Expressionist technique.

At that time he joined with Meidner and Steinhardt to express their common aesthetic goals and rejection of the impressionism then so fashionable in Berlin. He joined the New Secession and, after the war, participated in the Novembergruppe. He was a particularly gifted graphic artist and established himself as an illustrator of poetry and modern classics.

Throughout the 1920s, Janthur completed print portfolios for the leading Berlin art publishers, J. B. Neumann and Fritz Gurlitt. In his later years, he turned increasingly to the decorative arts, designing batik textiles and book endpapers.

Jawlensky was involved with the work and philosophers of the Blaue Reiter group from its beginnings. He grew up in White Russia in a military family and came with his mother in 1874 to Moscow. There he studied at the cadet school from 1877 to 1882, and then entered the Alexander Military School. Having completed his military training, he was sent to St. Petersburg in 1889, where he was allowed to study painting at the academy while performing his duties as an officer.

In 1980, he became a student of the well-known Russian Realist Ilya Repin (1844-1930). In 1891, he met the painter Marianne von Werefkin (1870-1938), who would become his mistress and artistic soulmate; it was Werefkin who guided Jawlensky’s artistic decisions for the next 20 years.

In 1896, both Jawlensky and Werefkin moved to Munich, where they entered the Azbé School, the art school so favored by Slavic immigrants to the city. There they met fellow Russian Wassily Kandinsky and began a friendship that would be the most significant for the rest of Jawlensky’s career. Although returning several times to Russia, Jawlensky became involved with the avant-garde art scene in the Bavarian capital. Through his close relationship with the Russian dancer Sacharoff, he participated actively in the cultivated Russian émigré circles of the city.

Jawlensky traveled to Paris in 1905. There he met Matisse, who remained his most significant inspiration for the next few years. He and Werefkin joined Kandinsky and Gabrielle Munter in Murnau in1908, where they began to work toward common aesthetic goals in their painting.

In 1909, he became one of the founding memebers of the Neue Kunstlervereiningung Munchen (NKVM) (The New Artist’s Association of Munich), which became the first vehicle to support their new artistic ideas. At the same time, he became involved with the anthroposophic teachings of Rudolf Steiner; Steiner’s ideas continued to fuel Jawlensky’s metaphysical leanings.

He met Franz Marc in 1910 and made a lengthy visit to Marc’s home in Sindelsdorf in 1912. In the same year, Jawlensky left the NKVM as a protest against their increasingly conservative artistic stance. At that time he also met Paul Klee, another significant source of artistic inspiration for him. During that period, he concentrated on the depiction of highly stylized “mystical” heads, in which he attempted to capture the spiritual essence of human form.

In 1914, he made his last rip to Russia; with the outbreak of World War I, he fled to St. Prex on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. In 1917, he was in Zurich and, in 1918, he finally settled in Ascona, along with many other German artists. He had met Emmy “Galka” Scheyer in 1915; she became for Jawlensky an important patron and supporter. After his break with Marianne von Werefkin, he moved in 1921 to Wiesbaden and married Helene Nesnakomoff, another Russian émigré who had been his model for years and with whom he had a son in 1902.

Through the help of Emmy Scheyer, he established contact with the Bauhaus, although he never taught there. Scheyer also helped to found in 1924 Die Blaue Vier (the Blue Four), an exhibiting group composed of Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee, and Feininger.

In 1933, he joined the ranks of the artists labeled by the Nazis as “degenerate”. Plagued in his last years by debilitating arthritis, he was unable to work, a fate that was agonizing for him. Despite his close association with Kandinsky, Jawlensky was rarely abstract, focusing instead on brilliantly and highly stylized images of faces in which pure color and bold black lines took priority. His artistic aims, however, were similar to Kandinsky’s, in that both sought to express abstract spiritual states.

Kandinsky stands as one of the most important artists and aesthetic philosophers of the early 20^th century. Born of a well-to-do Moscow family, he moved to Odessa when a small child. After the separation of his parents, he was raised there by an aunt. His first love was music: he began playing the piano and viola in 1876, and constantly attended concerts during his yearly visits to his father in Moscow. Music served as a vital inspiration throughout his life and the basis for his ideas of abstraction.

In 1866, he began studies in law and economics at Moscow University, and, in 1892, he married his cousin Anja Chimiakin. Although, appointed to the chair at the University of Dorpat, Kandinsky decided in 1896 to reject his bourgeois life; he left his wife, moved to Munich, and devoted himself entirely to the study of painting.

In 1897, he attended the Azbé School, where he met Alexander Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. He continued his studies at the Munich Academy under Franz von Stuck (1863-1928). In 1901, he was founding member of the artist’s organization Phalanx, for which he designed the first poster. Phalanx was responsible, among other things, for bringing Monet’s art to Munich for the first time in 1903.

At that time, Kandinsky was concerned with the ideas of Jugendstil ornamentation then so popular in Germany. He also incorporated elements of Russian fold art, in aesthetic direction that remained an important spiritual source for the artist.

In 1902, Kandinsky helped found a new art school connected to Phalanx; there he met Gabriele Munter (1877-1962), who was one of his students. In 1904, the Phalanx group disbanded. Kandinsky, along with his new mistress Munter, traveled throughout Europe, eventually reaching Tunis and then Russia. In 1904, he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, and, in 1905, at the Salon de Indépendants.

With Munter he lived in Paris in 1906 and 1907, returning to Munich in 1908. in 1909, they purchased a country house in Murnau, in Upper Bavaria, which became over the next years the meeting place fore several like-minded artists wishing to escape the city and to work in nature. Kandinsky collaborated at the time with several composers and playwrights, producing his own plays, among them Der gelbe Klang and a version of Daphnis und Chloe. In 1909, he was cofounder of the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen (NKVM) (The New Artist’s Association) and became its first president; the task of the organization was to bring the most avant-garde artistic ideas to Munich. The group had its first exhibitions at the Galerie Thannhauser, which became the important center for young artists. There Kandinsky met August Macke and other artists who would later participate in the activities of the Blaue Reiter.

By 1910, Kandinsky’s art had moved increasingly away from its early decorativeness and toward an abstraction based upon his ideas of the metaphysical significance of pure forms and colors. By 1910, he was creating paintings in which the object has disappeared entirely in favor of emotionally expressive forms and symbolic color.

In December of 1910, Kandinsky exhibited 52 works at the Salon Isdebski in Odessa and at an exhibition in Moscow, establishing contact with the Russian avant-garde art world. In June 1911, he began intensive work with Franz Marc on the publication of an almanac, in which the artists’ aesthetic ideas and inspirations would be presented; this undertaking led to the famous Blaue Reiter Almanach, from which the group around Kandinsky and Marc obtained the name with which their art would later be associated. This publication also led to Kandinsky’s first meeting with Paul Klee.

As Kandinsky moved increasingly away from objective art, the membership of NKVM was less supportive of his ideas; in December 1911, Kandinsky, Munter and Marc resigned from the organization. In that same month, the Blaue Reiter group had its first exhibition at Galerie Thannhauser.

In 1912, Kandinsky published with Piper-Verlag, his Uber das Feistige in der Kinst (On the Spiritual in Art), a presentation of his metaphysical ruminations on the nature of art and artistic expression; the book became one of the most significant treatises on the concept of non-objective art. In the same year, the Blaue Reiter group held exhibitions in Cologne and Berlin, and Kandinsky had his first one-man show.

In 1913, Kandinsky gained his first recognition in the United States through his representation at the famed Armory Show. The declaration of war in August of 1914 compelled Kandinsky, a Russian citizen, to flee Germany. He first went with Munter to Switzerland. After several months there, Kandinsky returned to Moscow alone. There he became involved in the revolutionary artistic climate that prevailed after the 1917 overthrow of the Czar. In the same year, to Munter’s great sorrow, Kandinsky married a Russian aristocrat, Nina Andreevskaja.

As a member of the Commission on Public Education, Kandinsky taught at the new Institute for Visual Arts in Moscow and was even made Director of Public Museums. In the latter capacity, he funded more than 30 provincial museums and organized museum education programs. In 1920, he was instructor for art theory at the University of Moscow.

After Lenin’s revision of artistic policy in 1921, Kandinsky returned to Germany, where he was appointed by Walter Gropius to the Bauhaus in Weimar. He remained a teacher at the school until its closing by the Nazis in 1933. During that time, he formulated his aesthetic principles in clear didactic form, publishing many of them in 1926 in his famous book From Point to Line to Plane. His style became less spontaneous and more geometric.

In 1924, he joined Feininger, Klee, and Jawlensky in the group Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). In 1928, he and his wife became German citizens. He also participated in several collaborative efforts involving music and the theater, producing at Dessau Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. With the rise of the Nazi regime, Kandinsky moved to Paris, where he became a French citizen in 1939.

*Two Riders in Front of Red 1911*	*Untitled 1924*

Kaus is a true Berlin artist, relatively unknown outside Germany, but as consistent in his aesthetic world-view and as original in his creations as ther other artists associated with Expressionism. Since Kaus’ father was a painter, the young Kaus received support for his decision to be an artist. He studied painting at the School of Arts and Crafts in Berlin and began his career as a decorative painter.

As his insightful reminiscences in the Brucke-Archiv publication attest, he spend World War I in a Red Cross medical unit; his section chief was Erich Heckel (see Heckel entry). This experience was important for the development of his art; through Heckel, Kaus first began to learn the art of printing, a medium he would continue to practice throughout his life.

After the war, he completed his first works as an independent painter. By 1919, he had gained the patronage of an important Berlin gallery owner Ferdinand Moeller; eventually he would also exhibit at the galleries of Paul Cassirer and Karl Nierendorf.

Through Hackel and Moeller, he met other Expressionist artists, most notably Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Otto Mueller. In 1923, he married Gertrud Kant. From 1921 to 1930, he traveled extensively through Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and France. In 1926, he was appointed instructor for life and animal drawing at the Master’s School for Crafts in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

In 1927, he received the Albrecht Durer Prize, and in 1928, the Guenther Wagner Prize. In 1935, he became instructor for figure painting at the Sate Schools for Free and Applied Art in Berlin. Along with his many artist friends, Kaus’ works were removed from museums and galleries in 1937.

His political convictions compelled him to resign his teaching post in 1938. he remained in Berlin during the war, even after a bomb destroyed his studio and some 250 paintings; a second bomb on the last day of the war caused the loss of his remaining paintings and nearly all of his graphic work.

After the death of his first wife in 1943, Kaus married Brigitte Kamm; they were divorced in 1948. As soon as peace was declared, Kaus was named Professor at the College of Fine Arts in Berlin, where he led the department for Freie Kunst (Free Art) from 1949 to 1959. he married Sigrid Reinke in 1953. In 1959, he worked at the German Academy in Rome, and, in 1963, he was awarded the Berlin Art Prize.

He retired in 1968, but continued to participate in the activities of Die Brucke Museum in Berlin-Dahlem.

While associated personally with Heckel and other Expressionist artists, Kerschbaumer was more concerned with naturalistic form than most of this group. Born into a family from South Tirol, Kerschbaumer decided to be an artist at an early age; his father, however, concerned about his future, insisted that he first pass the examination for drawing teacher.

His first artistic studies took place in Munich from 1901 to 1908, where he worked with, among others, Max Mayrshofer. In 1908, he moved to Berlin, which then became his permanent residence. There he worked six months with Lovis Corinth, discovering and ultimately rejecting Impressionist directions.

From 1910 to 1914, he concentrated on an independent study of color theory, with an intensive examination of the works of Hans von Marées and Paul Cézanne. At that time he studied works by Munch, van Gogh, and Matisse, although he consciously rejected any association with French art and never embraced the conceptual idea behind Impressionism.

During the war, he was part of Erich Heckel’s medical unit in Flanders, where the artists shared technical expertise; Heckel taught him lithography, and cultivated his tempera technique. In 1919, he returned to Berlin and concentrated on oil painting. From 1920 to 1926, he spent his summers in Bavaria, at Chiemsee and Ammersee, painting his strongly architectonic views of the landscape.

In 1927 and 1928, he lived on Lake Garda in Italy and in 1929, he finally traveled to Paris and Normandy. He was a guest at the German Academy in Rome in 1930, where he met Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. By that time, he was already ill, and he died the next year at only 46.

Kirchner’s works most clearly epitomize the dynamically gestural art considered “Expressionist.” He is probably the most famous member of Die Brucke.

Born into an artistic family, Krichner attended gymnasium in Chemnitz, where his father taught paper chemistry at the Technical and Vocational Academy. Although already convinced he wanted to be an artist, he became a student of architecture at the Technical College in Dresden in 1901. There he met another architecture student, Fritz Bleyl, with whom he shared similar ideas about the need for a new, vital art based upon a direct response to life and emotion. Both artist began to complete woodcuts together.

In 1903 and 1904, Krichner interrupted his architectural studies to study painting in Munich, where he found the flat decorativeness of Jugendstil then in style to be lifeless and uninspiring. Of greatest interest to him in Munich was the discovery of contemporary painting, especially as seen at the Phalanx exhibits organized by Kandinsky.

In 1903, he returned to Dresden, where he met another architecture student, Erich Heckel. In 1905, Krichner received his architecture diploma. In the same year, he convinced Bleyl, Heckel, and Heckel’s friend, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, to give up architecture studies altogether and to devote themselves entirely to the regeneration of German art. They founded a group that they named Die Kinstlergruppe Brucke- “the “Artists’ Group Bridge,” a term inspired by Nietzsche’s statement in Thus Spake Zarathustra, that man is a bridge and not a goal, that man is a process of becoming and transcending reality.

Kirchner was the most vocal member of the group, espousing an idea of art that embraced all of life. The group rented an old butcher’s shop, where they worked together feverishly, producing a body of graphic and painted work dependent on their excited artistic exchanges and the intensity of their thoroughly alternative lifestyles; “intuitive expressiveness” was the key to their aims. Their first public exhibition occurred in the fall of 1906.

At the same time, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein became members of the group. Until 1908, these artists worked together, developing a common approach to themes based upon modern life and their own views about a new art: views of the city, scenes of the circus and music hall, nudes in landscapes. Their work was imbued with a sense of immediacy, an arbitrary application of bold color that was not concerned with naturalistic appearances. Of particular importance to Kirchner was the discovery of “the primitive,” a concept engendered by his desire to return to a more natural state in tune with the rhythms of life.

In 1908, he and other Brucke artists began painting nudes outdoors; he visited the Baltic Island of Fehmarn in the summer of that year, where he made nude studies. During the summer months from 1909 to 1911, Krichner, along with Heckel and two young models, went to the Moritzburg Lakes outside of Dresden, where the two artists further developed their characteristic styles. Heckel concentrated on the prismatic effects of light and water, while Kirchner was more concerned with a rendering of primitive and erotic power in the interaction of nudes and natural settings.

At that time, Kirchner met Doris, or Dodo, who became his mistress and favorite model until he moved to Berlin. Dodo also provided occasional financial support for the group.

In 1910, Kirchner visited Berlin, where he became a member of the New Secession. He also met Otto Mueller, who shared the group’s interest in an art and lifestyle unrestrained by the limitations of bourgeois life. In 1911, Kirchner moved to Berlin, where he and Pechstein founded the Institut Moderner Unterricht in Malerei (The Institute of Modern Instruction in Painting), with the hope of disseminating their ideas of a new art to a broader audience. The school met with little success.

Although he continued to paint “primitive” landscapes in Fehmarn in the summers from 1912 to 1914, Kirchner’s experience of modern city life led to a new theme: that of isolated modern man, destroyed by the artificiality and evil of urban industrialization. His style became more jagged, more hectic, more claustrophobic in its composition and use of color. In Berlin, he also met Erna Schillin, who became his lifelong companion and eventually his wife.

Kirchner broke with the other artists of Die Brucke in 1913, after his publication of Chronik der Brucke, in which he claimed more credit for the group’s artistic breakthroughs than the others felt was warranted. This rupture, along with Kirchner’s attempt to create art in a state of constant psychic tension, led to a psychological crises. A brief stint as a soldier during World War I ended with his complete mental breakdown. He became a drug addict as was incapable of functioning independently. In 1918, with the aid of friends and understanding doctors, Kirchner moved to Davos, Switzerland, where he entered a sanatorium. Later he lived with Erna in a peasant house high in the mountains near Davos. He continued to paint and make woodcuts, although not with the ferocious conviction he once displayed.

In 1925-26, he made his first return visit to Germany, where he met with many of his former friends and dealers. He painted throughout the 1920s, absorbing the lessons of Picasso and Surrealism. In 1937, word of his “purge” from German museums and collections and of the Nazis’ insistence that he resign from Prussian Academy of Arts exacerbated his depression and psychic misery. Seeing no hope of recovery, he shot himself the next year, without having returned to Germany again.

Self-portrait 1907	House c.1910	Dancers 1911	Row Boats on a River 1925-27

Klee is considered one of the most delightful painters of the first half of the 20^th century. From a musical family, Klee, like Kandinsky, began to study for a career as a musician, which greatly determined the course of this life and his artistic imagery. After violin studies in Bern, Klee moved to Munich in 1898 and began to study painting under the famous academic teacher Heinrich Knirr (1862-1918). By 1900, he was studying with Franz von Stuck at the Munich Academy.

From his beginnings as a painter, Klee kept meticulous note of his creations, leaving upon his death a record of some 9,000 works. He also kept boxes of botanical specimens that served as models for his whimsical inclusion of natural elements. He spent 1901 and 1902 on travels throughout Italy. From 1902 to 1906, he was back in Berlin. He made his first trip to Paris in 1905 with his artist friend Louis Moilliet (1880-1962).

In 1906, he moved to Muncih, where he participated in exhibits of the Munich Secession. There he met the Austrian artist Alfred Kubin, who influenced his early macabre style, one that he quickly abandoned in favor of a characteristically calligraphic style and biomorphic imagery. By 1911, he had exhibits throughout Germany and Switzerland. In this same year, he met August Macke for the fist time; through Louis Moilliet he also met Kandinsky. After meeting Franz Marc at the end of 1911, Klee participated in the events leading up to the publication of the Blaue Reiter Almanach; he also contributed works for the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich in 1912.

Another trip to Paris at that time brought Klee into contact with Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), who made a great impact on his conception of light and color. In 1913, Klee translated Delaunay’s essay, “Uber Das Licht” (On Light), for Herwarth Walden’s magazine Der Sturm. Klee was also one of the participants in the renowned Herbstsalon in Berlin in 1912. In 1914, he was cofounder of Munich’s New Secession. In the summer of 1914, he traveled with August Macke and Louis Moilliet to Tunis, where all of them discovered the intensity of color and light in the north African sun. From 1916 to 1918, despite his Swiss citizenship, he served in the German army. After the war, Galerie Goltz in Munich mounted a retrospective exhibition of his work.

Klee joined the staff of Gropius’ Bauhaus in 1921, and was associated with the school until 1931, when he went to Academy in Dusseldorf. During his Bauhaus years, he published he famous Pedagogical Sketchbooks, a delightful demonstration of the clarity and simplicity of his principles for teaching design. In 1924, he had his first American exhibition, with the Société Anonyme in New York. In the same year, he joined Feininger, Kandinsky, and Jawlensky to form Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). The whimsical and magical nature of his works endeared him to the Surrealists in Paris, who included him in their exhibit at the Galerie Pierre in Paris at the end of the 1920s.

After his expulsion by the Nazis from Dusseldorf in 1933, he returned to Bern. In 1935, he suffered the first symptoms of scleroderma, a degenerative skin disease that caused his death six years later at the age of 61.

*Rising Sun 1919*	*River Landscape 1912*

As an Austrian, Kokoschka represents in his art a different approach to the emotive ideas of Expressionism. Born the son of a goldsmith impoverished by rising industrialization, Kokoschka demonstrated from an early age a fascination with psychic power and a concern for otherworldly phenomena. Because of a precocious talent recognized when he was a child, Kokoschka received a stipend to Vienna’s School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied crafts and design with the intention of becoming a teacher. The leading artists of the day, Gustav Klimt (1862-1913), took Kokoschka under his wing.

In his earliest graphic work, one sees the stamp of Klimt’s own brand of Jugendstil decorativeness. Kokoschka’s more blatant references to self-centered eroticism, however, were already apparent in such works as Die Traumenden Knaben (Dreaming Youth), a book of poems and graphic designs that he published in 1908.

Danse Macabre (Group Terror #41) 1952	Femme Nude (Fraunakt) 1921