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.

Since all of Kokoschka’z artistic training occurred at a crafts school, he did not learn painting; he taught himself to paint after leaving the school, producing his first canvases in 1909. Unlike the German Expressionists, who sought inspiration in primitive art, Kokoschka was inspired by the agitated colorism of Austrian Baroque and by the more macabre eccentricities of his countryman Anton Romako (1832-1889). The production of his shocking play, Morder Hoffnung der Frauen (Murder, Hope of Women) caused a sensation at Vienna’s Kunstschau in 1909; it was a declaration of Kokoschka’s radical artistic intentions.

At that time, the young artist came to be attention of the architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933), who introduced him to the writer and cultural critic Karl Braus (1874-1936), another radical seeking to cut through the elegant façade of Viennese aestheticism. Some of Kokoschka’s most important early paintings were portraits of these men and other members of Vienna’s avant-garde community. Kokoschka’s aim was to reveal the psychic truths underlying the face of his model, thereby revealing his own soul as well; he sought to shock intentionally.

In 1910, he went to Berlin, where he worked for Herwarth Walden’s Sturm magazine. His affiliation with the Expressionist journal brought him wider fame and a show at Paul Cassirer’s influential Berlin gallery. By 1913, a monograph appeared about the artist, and he became a well-known figure both in Germany and Austria. He had returned to Vienna in 1911, where he worked as an assistant at the School of Arts and Crafts. His passionate relationship, from 1912 to 1914, with Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma Mahler, was immortalized in his most famous work, The Tempest (now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York); the work is considered by many as the last great Romantic portrait.

In January 1915, Kokoschka volunteered for military service. He was severely wounded eight months later and was eventually sent to Dresden to recover. He remained in Dresden after his discharge, striving to heal his shattered psyche.

His style changed to one of broader color patches, often applied with the palette knife. In 1919, he was appointed to the academy in Dresden, but only remained until 1924, when he began years of constant travel throughout Europe, Africa, and the New East. Until 1933, he listed his residence as Paris. In that year, he returned to Vienna, but after the arrival of Hitler, moved to Prague. In 1937, 417 of his works were removed from German museums. In 1938, Kokoschka fled to England, where he had several exhibitions. In 1940, his works appeared at Otto Kallir’s Galerie St. Etienne in New York; he became immensely popular in England and the United States. In 1947, he became a British citizen. After teaching for one year at the Minneapolis School of Art in 1952, Kokoschka settled in Villeneuve on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. From 1953 to 1963, he held summer-long courses at his “School of Seeing” in Salzburg. He lived to be 94, the last of the great figures of Expressionism.

*Peasant Girl c.1921-2*	*Portrait of Mrs. Swoboda no. 1 1920*	*Portrait of Mrs. Swoboda no. 2*	*Three Mountains c.1913*

Kubin’s career was marked by morbid fantasies and personal anxieties which he tried to express in his nearly surrealistic graphic style. Born into an aristocratic family, Kubin manifested from the state a totally undisciplined nature. He refused to go to school, although he had been admitted to one of Salzburg’s best gymnasiums. In 1890, he was expelled for failure to attend. He enrolled briefly at the State Crafts School in Salzburg in 1891 and 1892. from 1892 to 1896, he was a photographer’s apprentice in Klagenfurt, but never completed the training. In 1896, he tried to kill himself on the grave of his mother.

About that time, he chose to follow an artistic career. He went to Munich in 1898, where he first attended the private art school of Ludwig Schmidt-Reutte (1863-1901) and then the academy. In 1904, he married a young widow, Hedwig Grundler, who offered him some measure of emotional stability. He had his first exhibit at Bruno Cassirer’s gallery in Berlin in 1902, and, in 1904, he participated in the first Phalanx exhibition in Munich.

His intense interest in philosophy and literature had a marked effect on his art; indeed, his best-known works are the illustrations for many of his favorite novels and set of poetry. He also began to write: his fantasy-novel, Die andere Seite (The Other Side), published in 1908, is a semi-autobiographical account of his idiosyncratic artistic nature with visionary literary allusions. Demonic and macabre imagery determined his graphic style as well, with incongruous psychological juxtapositions of elements that own as much to Edgar Allen Poe as to the German artist Max Klinger.

In 1905, Kubin traveled to Paris and Italy and then in 1906, took up permanent residence at a castle in Zwichledt am Inn. He remained there until his death, with frequent trips to Germany. In 1909, he joined the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen (NKVM) (The New Artists’ Association), which brought him into contact with Franz Marc and Paul Klee. He became close friends with Klee; indeed, Klee’s style of the period owes much to Kubin’s weird images. In 1912, he participated in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition and his work appeared in the Blaue Reiter Almanach. He also began a lively and rather unlikely correspondence with the rational and quiet Lyonel Feininger, demonstrating that Kubin was more thoughtful about his art and less uncontrolled than he is often portrayed in literature.

In 1913, he took part in the Herbstsalon at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin. Ill health prevented him from serving in World War I. A nervous breakdown in 1916, precipitated by the news of Franz Marc’s death, lead him to seek relief through Buddhist meditation and lifestyle-a development that did little to affect his artistic themes or style. In 1921, he had his first retrospective exhibition at Goltz Gallery in Munich. During the 1920s, he again began to write; this was also the period of his most prolific productions as an illustrator. In 1927, he exhibited his graphic work at the Graphische Sammlung (Graphic Collection) of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and, in 1932, through his acquaintance with Klee and Feininger, he exhibited at the Bauhaus In Dessau. Labeled as “degenerate” in 1937 by the Nazis, Kubin retreated to Zwickledt. The Albertina in Vienna gave him a retrospective in 1947. He willed his estate to the Austrian nation, which has preserved it as a Kubin memorial.

*Corpse washed to shore 1919*	*The Fugitive 1912*

Macke’s joyous and richly colorful paintings has made him one of the most popular German artists of the Expressionist period. His enthusiastic and confident personality had a great impact on his contemporaries, and he was involved in nearly every major artistic event in Germany at the beginning of the century.

Born the son of an unsuccessful engineer who was himself a frustrated artist, Mache grew up to be a headstrong man determined to avoid his father’s unhappy fate. When Macke was a baby, his family moved to Cologne, where he started school in 1893. There he met Hans Thuar when they were both seven. The two remained lifelong fiends and Macke was instrumental in Thuar’s decision to become a painter.

In 1900, when Macke was 13, the family moved to Bonn, where the boy, an indifferent student, attended gymnasium. In 1903, he met Elisabeth Gerhardt, the daughter of a well-to-do industrialist. She became his lifelong companion and confidant; they married in 1909 and had two children.

In 1904, against his father’s wishes, Macke left school to attend the academy in Dusseldorf. He found the instruction there to be disappointing, but remained, at least nominally, until 1906. as with so many other German students, Macke’s first artistic passion was the Swiss “intellectual” painter Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901). In 1905, he made his first trip to Italy, accompanied by Elisabeth’s brother Walter Gerhardt. In the same year, he made the acquaintance of the writers Wilhelm Schmidtbonn (1876-1962) and Herbert Eulenberg (1876-1949); through them, he became involved in activities of the Dusseldorf Theater, employed as a stage and costume designer.

With Schmidtbonn and Eulenber, Macke traveled in the summer of 1906 to Belgium and Holland, and eventually to London where he was fascinated by the antiquities in the British Museum. Upon his return to Dusseldorf, he left the academy with great relief.

In the following spring, he visited a sister in Kandern, on the Swiss border; on a trip to Basel, he saw photos of the paintings by French Impressionists and purchased Meier-Graefe’s book, Manet und sein Kreis (Manet and His Circle). Both experiences were for him decisive. His style became more impresionoistic, and he realized that the true source for his art must be nature. In June 1907, through the financial support of Elisabeth’s uncle, the industrialist and art collector Bernhard Koehler, Macke made his first trip to Paris. He stayed for four weeks, making sketches of Manet’s Olympia and viewing work by Dega, Monet and Pissarro. Koehler continued to be an essential patron for Macke.

In October 1907, he began six months of study in Berlin with Lovis Corinth. Despite is dissatisfaction with Corinth’s methods, Macke discovered in Berlin the works of van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin. In 1908, he made a second trip to Paris, accompanied by Elisabeth and Bernhard Koehler; there they enthusiastically studied the work of Seurat and Cézanne. Upon returning to Bonn, Macke began a six-month stint of military duty. In October of 1909, he and Elisabeth married; they traveled to Switzerland, where they met the painter Louis Moillet. They continued to Paris, where hey also met Karl Hofer. On the suggestion of Schmidtbonn, the couple returned via Tegernsee in Upper Bavaria; Macke’s cousin Helmuth convinced them to stay in the resort town, where they remained until November 1910.

Macke made frequent visits to nearby Munich, where, in January 1910, he met Franz Marc; they became friends immediately, enthusiastically sharing ideas about a new German art. With Marc, Macke attended the Matisse exhibition in Munich; he also joined the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen (NKVM)(The New Artists’ Association), and met Kandinsky and Jawlensky. Despite his close attachment to Marc and his involvement with the events and activities associated with the Blaue Reiter, Macke was always skeptical of mystical intentions and did not share in the group’s ideological commitments.

After returning with his family to Bonn in 1911, Macke established contact with museum people and dealers throughout the Rhineland; he met, for example, Wilhelm and Emmy Worringer, important figures in Bonn’s artistic life. Macke gained access to the Gereonsclub, an important forum for newer artistic ideas. Because of his association with Munich artists, he had a significant influence in the city. Emmy Worringer was also the manager of the restaurant in the Zoological Gardens; through her, Macke gained access to the gardens, which offered him his most important pictorial themes. In the fall of 1911, Macke traveled first to Kandern, where he met Paul Klee though his old friend Moilliet. He then went on to visit Marc in Sindelsdorf and Kandinsky and Gabrielle Munter in Murnau. He worked with them on the production of Blaue Reiter Almanach, in which he included an essay.

Three Macke paintings appeared in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition at the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich in December 1911; upon seeing the exhibition for the first time in Cologne in January of 1912, Macke was critical of its contents. In letters to Marc, he gave the opinion that Kandinsky and he spent too much time philosophizing and not enough time producing good art. Despite these criticisms, Macke continued to work with the artists of the Blaue Reiter, arranging for their inclusion in the Sonderbung exhibition with which he was greatly involved; this landmark exhibit took place in Cologne from May to September 1912. Macke was especially moved by the works of Edvard Munch exhibited there, as well as those of the French artists Robert Delaunay. In September, he and Marc visited Delaunay in Paris.

Along with evidence of Delaunay’s influence, Macke began to experiment in his own work with Cubist and Futurist techniques. In January 1913, Delaunay and Apollinaire visited Macke in Cologne. Macke became the leader of a group of artists who congregated around the Villa Agnita in a suburb of Bonn. He was involved in preparations for an exhibition of Rhineland artists that took place at the Galerie Cohen in Bonn in July and August. Largely because of the show’s impact, Macke and many other artists were incited to exhibit at the Herbstsalon at Walden’s Strum Gallery in Berlin.

Macke’s productivity in 1913 was particularly high and included some of his most important paintings. He turned increasingly to Delaunay’s coloristic ideas and moved further from Kandinsky’s abstract directions, finding the Russian philosophical writings to be unconvincing. In January 1914, Klee visited him in Bonn, where they planned a trip to Tunis with Louis Moilliet; they traveled in April. The intense desert sun and consequent coloristic effects had an immense impact on all the artists; Macke, along with the others, made several watercolors and hundreds of drawings while there. When war was declared in August, Macke immediately joined; both he and his wife had premonitions that he would not return. He fell in battle, only 27 years old, on the front in France.

*Elisabeth reading with a bowl of fruit c.1908*	*Girl in sunny garden with dog 1911*	*Lovers in a garden 1912*	*Shop Window 1914*

Marc’s art most clearly represents the religious, mystical aspirations associated with the artists of the Blaue Reiter. Along with Kandinsky, Marc became the spiritual force behind the group’s joint efforts. From an artistic family, Marc first studied philosophy and theology before deciding to become a painter in 1900. from the beginning, his aim was to create a new religious art. He attended the Munich Academy in 1903, where he studied with Wilhelm von Diez (1839-1907). In that same year, he made his first journey to Paris, where he was deeply moved by the Impressionists’ works.

Upon returning to Munich, he quit academic studies and moved into his own studio, where he began to develop a distinct style, emphasizing the beauty of animals. At that time, he began to paint outdoors in small Upper Bavarian villages. In 1905, he met the Swiss painter Jean Bloé Niestlé (1884-1942), who remained a lifelong friend and participant in the activities of the Blaue Reiter. In that year, he married the painter Marie Schnue, the marriage apparently ended in divorce in 1908. Marc had already met Maria Franck, another art student, who became his lifelong companion. In 1907, Marc made his second trip to Pairs, where he discovered the paintings of van Gogh. The Dutch artist’s work had an enduring impact on Marc’s own painting; he gained the confidence to experiment with the use of arbitrary color and began to formulate more specifically his goal of expressing “the inner truth of things.”

For Marc, animals became the subject and from through which he could express the mystery and spirituality of nature. In 1910, he held an exhibition at Brakls Moderner Kinsthandlung, a gallery in Munich, where he met the publisher Reinhard Piper, who invented him to contribute to the publication, Das Tier in der unst (the Animal in Art).August Macke, having seen Marc’s exhibition, sought out the young artist in Munich. They became fast friends and artistic comrades; their enthusiastic discussions and exchanges led Marc to a greater exploration of the power of expressive color. Marc visited the exhibition of the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen (NKVM) (The New Artists’ Association), at the end of 1910, and wrote an enthusiastic critique of the new art presented there. In 1911, he became a member of the organization, as well as Kandinsky’s close associate. They began to plan for a publication of their aesthetic ideas. As the NKVM became less tolerant of the artists’ avant-garde creations, Marc and Kandinsky left the group at the end of 1911. On December 10 of that year, they held the first exhibition of the Blaue Reiter at the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich.

The Marcs then moved to the small village of Sinfelsdorf in Upper Bavaria, not far from Kandinsky’s home in Murnau. Their home became a center of artistic activity, as the Marcs invited like-minded artists to visit and work. Here the Blaue Reiter Almanach came into being; it was published in May 1912. Marc moved ever more deeply into the depiction of animals as expressions of organic and cosmic force. In the fall of 1912, he went with Macke to Paris, where they visited Robert Delaunay, Apollinaire, and the dealer Kahnweiler. Marc’s discovery of Delaunay’s Orphism, along with his knowledge of Cubist and Futurist breakthroughs, contributed to the development of his own spectral fragmentation of forms.

Marc was responsible for the hanging of the Futurist show in Cologne, organized by Jerwarth Walden in October 1913; he also participated in the famous Berlin Herbstsalon of that same year. He began correspondence with Paul Klee, in which the two revealed their shared concern for the expression of the spirituality and mystery of nature. At the beginning of 1914, the Marcs moved from Sindelsdorf to Ried in Upper Austra. Marc’s work, no doubt initiated by the intensity of his philosophical endeavors, became ever more abstract; shortly before his death, he created non-objective paintings. He admitted to Klee, however, that he was uneasy with Kandinsky’s theories about abstraction. One cannot say with any certainty that Marc would have continued in an abstract direction if he had survived the war.

Despite the fact that he was a contemporary of most of the first generation of Expressionists, Mayrshofer’s style is more closely aligned to Jugendstil and the modified brand of Impressionism that appeared in Munich at the turn of the century. He began studies at Munich’s School of Arts and Crafts in 1890, where he was a student of Otto Seitz, Karl von Marr, and Azbé. From 1907, he became a regular contributor to the art journals Jugend, Simplicisimus, and Hyperion. There he demonstrated his mastery of a graphic style that favored as a theme the nude figure. After 1919, Mayrshofer became director of the life-drawing classes at Munich Academy. In 1920, he published a series of 20 lithographs with the Bruckmann publishing house, but there is little evidence that he exhibited while he was alive. A retrospective exhibition occurred in 1952 at the Stadtische Galerie in Munich.

Meidner’s wildly distorted landscapes and undulating street scenes epitomize for many the angst-ridden vision of the Expressionists. Meidner was the son of a Jewish factory owner who had settled in a small town amid the bleak mining landscape of Middle Silesia. Although Meidner declared his artistic ambitions as a young man, his parents insisted that he become a bricklayer’s apprentice, in the hopes that he would decide to study architecture. He prevailed, and studied art in Breslau from 1903 to 1905. He found work then as a fashion illustrator in Berlin. In 1906 and 1907, he was in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian. He became acquainted there with the quintessential bohemian artist, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). The traumas of life as a foreigner in France caused him to return to Berlin, exhausted and depressed.

His existence in Berlin was extremely tenuous. In 1912, he founded, with fellow artists Richard Janthur and Jakob Steinhardt, the artists’ club Die Pathetiker (The Exalted Ones); the group meant to oppose the prettified Impressionism then in fashion in Berlin, preferring instead the raw expressive power of the Old German Masters. In the same year, Meidner met Kirchner, Heckel, and others through the exhibitions that took place at Herwarth Walkden’s Strum Gallery. In 1913, he frequented the Café Josti, where he met Robert Delaunay and Apollinaire. In his writings of the time, Meidner alluded to the hallucinatory power of alcohol, a fact which may explain some of his terrifying apocalyptic imagery.

Contemporaries recounted that he painted as if in a state of emotional crisis. He developed in these years the chaotic, emotionally ecstatic style for which he became best known. Some of his greatest achievements came as a painter of penetrating psychological portraits. In 1914, he moved briefly to Dresden, but soon returned to Berlin, where he established a studio. From 1916 to 1918, he served in the army; during that time, he also wrote the prose-poems Im Nacken das Sternemmer (At my Back, A Sea of Stars) and Septemberschrei (The Scream of September), based on his intensely traumatic experiences of war. In 1919, he returned briefly to his mother’s home in Bernstadt before settling in Berlin again, where he remained until 1935.

In 1922, Meidner began to reevaluate his consciously agitated style. Tired of Expressionist excesses, which he labeled as “indecent,” he began to produce near-impressionistic images. This transformation was viewed by many of his friends as a betrayal of their common aesthetic goals. In 1924 and 1925, he held a teaching post in Charlottenburg; here he met Else Meyer, whom he married in 1927. Their only son, David, was born in 1929. In 1935, after being branded as “degenerate” by the Nazis, Meidner moved to Cologne, where he taught drawing at the Jewish school Jawneh. There he completed two cycles of images based on Biblical tales and Jewish history entitled Allegorien (1935) and Visionen (1938).

After the terrors of Kristallnacht, when Nazi persecution of Jews was made glaringly evident, Meidner realized he had to flee Germany; in August 1939, he arrived with his family in England. He spent 1940 and 1941 interned on the Isle of Wight; he then lived in London. The most enduing experience of his years in England was his discovery of the prints of Hogarth and William Blake.

He returned to Germany, a guest of the federal government, in 1953, when he was already 69 years old. He spent 1953 to 1955 in the Jewish Home in Frankfurt. From 1953 to 1963, he had a studio in Marxheim in the Taunus district; there he painted many self-portraits. In 1963, he moved to Darmstadt. In 1964, he received the Service Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany. His later years saw numerous awards and exhibitions, as he was recognized by a new generation of artists as a significant participant in German culture between the wars.

Growing up in Cologne, Mense was closely associated with the Rhenish Expressionists. Born into a well-to-do family, Mense was able to study and practice without financial hardship. Although Mense was trained to take over the family business, his mother supported his desire to become an artist. He studied at the Dusseldorf Academy from 1906 to 1908, where he met August Macke. In 1908, he made his first trip to the Swiss town of Ascona, a favored spot for many artists; until World War I, he returned there frequently. In 1909, Mense went to Berlin to study with Lovis Corinth; in 1911 he continued his studies in Weimar. During this period, his style vacillated greatly, demonstrating a variety of influences. His works of 1910-1912 indicate the coloristic concerns of the Fauves and Neoimpressionists, no doubt inspired by the works he saw at the Sonderbund show and by his association with Macke. A great revelation for him was the Futurist exhibition at Otto Feldman’s Cologne gallery in 1912. He began to incorporate Futurist-style fragmentation and concepts of dynamism into his own works. He also learned of Robert Delaunay, whose composition solutions affected Mense’s works after 1913.

After his participation in the Sonderbond show in 1913, Mense traveled to London and the Isle of Wight. There he met Boba Knopp, daughter of a St. Petersburg banker; this friendship let to his lifelong interest in Russia. Again in Ascona, he made a series of etchings of views of the big city which he published under the pseudonym Otto Marto. In the fall of 1913, he participated in the exhibition of Rhenish Expressionists in Bonn and in the Herbastsalon in Berlin. Mense’s work of 1914 emphasized graphic art: he completed etchings for the title-pages of the Expressionist journals, Die Aktion and Die Sturm. He also organized an exhibition of Rhenish Expressionists for the Galerie Flechtheim in Dusseldorf.

He was again in Ascona when war was declared. He spent most of the war as a soldier in Belgium and briefly in Warsaw. After the war, his style again changed; he was linked to the stylistic tendency labeled “magical realism,” although he considered himself unaffiliated with any group. In 1920 and 1921, he traveled often to Positano, Italy. In 1923, he became a member of the New Secession in Munich. In 1925, he participated in the exhibition “Neue Sachlichkeit” (The New Objectivity) in Mannheim. From 1925 to 1932, Mense was professor of painting at the Academy in Breslau. In 1933, he received the Rome Prize, which allowed him to spend time in Italy, Greece, England, France, and Russia. Although his works were labeled “degenerate” by the Nazis and were removed from museums, Mense served as an officer during World War II. After the war, he settled in Bad Honnef, where his parents had previously lived.

*Good Friday 1919*	*Votive 1919*

While differing from the other members of Die Brucke in his delicate use of color, Mueller shared the group’s desire to search for a simple lifestyle in harmony with nature. Mueller was born in the Riesengebirge, the mountain region of Silesia. The common belief that his mother was gypsy adopted by a family related to the great German writer Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) was a story Mueller himself nurtured. He began his artistic career as a lithographer apprentice in Gorlitz. By 1894, he was at the Academy in Dresden; there he associated with a group of radical writers around Carl and Gerhart Hauptmann.

Dissatisfied with academic teachings, Mueller left the academy in 1898 and lived for ten years in relative seclusion in the Riesengebirge. He may have studied briefly in Munich during that period, as his works then demonstrate some knowledge of the artist Franz von Stuck (1863-1928). In 1899, he met Maschka Meyerhofer, who became his mistress and model; they married in 1905 and continued to live until 1908 in small Silesian villages.

In 1908, they moved to Berlin; by this time, Mueller had already formulated most aspects of his characteristic style. His rediscovery of the old method of distemper technique, which allowed the application of thin layers of paint over large surfaces, had an immense impact on the young artists who formed the group Die Brucke.

Mueller met Kirchner in 1910; their common enthusiasm for German Renaissance painting let to Mueller’s membership in Die Brucke. Both artists also became founding members of the New Secession in Berlin. With Kirchner, Mueller traveled in 1910 to Bohemia, where they met avant-garde artists in Prague; an exhibition of Brucke works in the Bohemian capital resulted. Mueller shared especially the Brucke’s interest in painting nudes in nature, and he painted several such scenes before World War I. While he never adopted the brilliant colors of Kirchner or Heckel, Meuller’s style became more angular under the influence of his new friends.

From 1916 to 1918, he served in the army, where he contracted pneumonia. Upon his release, he returned to Berlin and exhibited at Pail Cassirer’s important gallery. In 1919, he was appointed professor at the Breslau Academy. His separation from Maschka in 1921 was a shattering event from which he never recovered. The next year he married a former student Elsbeth Luebke, with whom he had a son; they were divorced in 1927, after which he lived with Elfriede Timm. He traveled often throughout the 1920s, continuing to paint in the style he had mastered before the war. In the summers, he spent weeks on the seacoast; in 1923, he spent the summer with Heckel in Flensburg. The publication of his portfolio of gypsy paintings in 1927 indicates his continuing affection for this theme and other views of “outsiders.” By 1929, his earlier lung ailments reappeared and finally caused his death at the age of 55.

While an important contributor to the modern artistic directins in the Rhineland, Nauen as a loner consciously avoided any affiliation with artistic groups. (He often stated, “I am no Blue Rider.”) In 1898, he briefly attended the academy in Dusseldorf, by 1899, he was in Munich, studying privately with Heinrich Knirr (1862-1944). At that time, he met Paul Klee and learned of Matisse, van Gogh, Cézanne and other advanced modernists. From 1899 to 1902, he was a member of Kakreuth’s master class at the academy in Stuttgart. He spent the years from 1906 to 1911 in Berlin, where he was influenced by Slevogt and Corinth, and by the French Impressionists newly installed in the National Gallery under controversial direction of Hans Tschudi. In Berlin, Nauen overcame the last vestiges of academic style. Unhappy with city life, he fled to Dilborn, a small town near Brueggen in Lower Rhineland. In 1911, he visited Paris, where one of his pictures was on exhibition; the work earned him an admiring letter from Matisse. Through his association with the art historian Edwin Redslob, Nauen met the industrialist and collector Edwin Suermondt, who immediately commissioned him to complete six frescoes for a room in his residence at Burg Drove, near Duren. This work, which took two years to complete, is often considered one of the greatest monuments in 20^th-century German art.

In 1913 and 1914, he exhibited with the Rhenish Expressionists Macke, Campendonk, Max Ernst, Mense, and Thuar. He was especially close to his fellow Krefeld native Campendonk and tried to persuade him to avoid the “southern air” of Munich. After a 1913 trip to Italy and France, Nauen destroyed three months’ worth of canvases as “painted under false light.” Increasingly, he attempted to combine modern color with traditional forms. During World War I, he served as a soldier in France. His home in Dilborn became an active center for visiting artists, including the Mackes, Thorn-Prikker, and Erich Heckel, who visited after attending the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914. In 1921, he was appointed professor at the academy in Dusseldorf, where he taught many members of the group Young Rhineland and the Rheinische Sezession. Nauen’s work was becoming increasingly monumental, with a decided tendency toward the decorative. At the same time, he became a master of incisive graphic portraiture. In 1925-1926, Nauen completed enormous mosaics for the Gesolei Exhibition Hall in Dusseldorf; he also exhibited in Berlin. Again restless and dissatisfied with the city, Nauen moved to Neuss in 1931 and spent his summer months in Hegau and on the Bodensee. In 1937, he was ousted from his position at the academy, and, in 1938, he moved to the tiny village of Kalkar. His last works indicate his concern with religious imagery, an enduring interest that linked him to the German Gothic art he always loved.

While only a few years younger than the first generation of Expressionists, Nesch was a student of Kirchner. His experimental work in printmaking, moreover, links him to the generation that followed the initial Expressionists breakthroughs; his art is the logical extension of their earlier experimental vision. Nesch began his artistic career as an apprentice to a decorative painter in Heidenheim. From 1909 to 1912, he attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Stuttgart. He then worked as a painter-journeyman in Dresden. There he also took classes and learned of the efforts of the artists of Die Brucke; he also discovered the works of van Gough, Cézanne, and Picasso. He was a soldier during World War I, ending up in an English prison camp. After his release in 1919, he again settled in Dresden, where he had a master’s studio at the academy. He met Kokoschka, who was teaching in Dresden at the time. He made frequent visits to his native Swabia and, from 1922 on, yearly journeys to friends in Hamburg. Aside from paintings and drawings, Nesch began in the 1920s to produce innumerable etchings, including the series Die Schwabischen Heiligen Drei Konige (The Swabian Three Kings), and Gilgamesh. In 1924, he stayed with Kirchner in his Swiss mountain home in Fruenkirch. There he learned Kirchner’s art of printing. Between 1924 and 1928, he traveled constantly between Berlin, Dresden, Friedrichshafen, and Hamburg.

In 1925, he discovered, as the result of an accident to one of his etchings, a new graphic method, which he labeled the “metal print”; this textured technique became Nesch’s true métier. In 1929, he moved to Hamburg . he became a member of the Hamburg Sezession, and joined a circle of artist friends who included Karl Kluth (1898-1980) and Karl Ballmer (b. 1891). He continued to perfect his metal print technique. In 1933, he exhibited at the Galerie Ferdinand Moeller in Berlin and at the Hamburg Artists’ Association.

While exhibiting in Hamburg, he received a telephone call informing him that his works had been removed from the exhibition by the Nazis. A few days later, with a letter of introduction from the dealer Gustav Schiefler to Edvard Munch, Nesch left with his wife for Norway. Despite hardships in exile, he continued to work, now almost exclusively on metal prints. In 1935, he created the first relief prints, which included actual pieces of metal imbedded into the surface; these he labeled “Materialbilder,” or material pictures. In 1938, he had a one-man show in Basel, but hardships continued to plague him; his wife returned to Germany and divorced him. When the German troops entered Norway in 1940, Nesch evaded capture for several years. His work during this time took a decidedly religious turn, culminating in his three-panel color metal print St. Sebastian in 1941.

Finally discovered and ordered into the German army, Nesch threw himself in from of a streetcar and was hospitalized for months. The incident left him partially crippled. In 1944, he began to work again, now on smaller prints. In 1946, he became a Norwegian citizen and held exhibitions throughout Scandinavia. He married the Norwegian actress Ragnhild Hald in 1950. He bought a farm in 1951, in Aal, in the mountains outside Oslo. There he retreated from city life and urban disturbance. Travel to New York brought him recognition in the United States and exhibitions at several museums, including the large retrospective at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In 1958, when he was awarded the Lichtwark Prize by the city of Hamburg, he returned to Germany for the first time in 25 years. He received numerous honors and awards from his native country, but remained in Norway until the end if his life.

St. Olav 1954	Three musicians 1951-52	Lapplanders 1952	Faol 1954

One of the best known of all German painters of the 20^th century, Emil Nolde’s relationship to Expressionism is particularly problematic. Born Emil Hansen, the son of a farmer, Nolde worked as an apprentice woodcarver in a furniture factory in Flensburg from 1884 to 1888. He then moved to Karlsruhe, where he worked as a furniture carver and also attended the School of Arts and Crafts. In 1892, he was appointed as a teacher of industrial and ornamental design at the industrial museum in St. Gallen, Switzerland. There he discovered the works of Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901), whose brooding attempts to express the soul in nature attracted the young artist. In 1898, Nolde went to Munich, where he tried to enroll at he academy; when he was rejected, he attended a private painting school. The next year, he joined the artists’ colony at Dachau, painting landscapes outdoors. After nine months there, he went to Paris, and studied at the Académie Julian. He immersed himself in the style of the Impressionists. In 1900, he returned home, traveling frequently to Berlin and Copenhagen; he became a member of Berlin Sezession in 1901. In the same year, he married Ada Vilstrup. In 1902, he changed his name to that of his birthplace. From 1903 until 1917, he settled in Guderup on Alsen Island, near the Danish border. He began to develop a personal style based on direct emotional expression through color; his landscapes and floral pieces of that time have been described as examples of “ecstatic impressionism.”

Such works brought him to the attention of the Brucke artists, who asked him to join the group in 1906. He participated in their exhibition until the summer of 1907, when he resigned from the group. Always a loner and older than the other artists, Nolde felt uncomfortable with their communal working arrangements and their blunt style of criticism. During his time with Die Brucke, however, he taught the others his etching technique, and they in turn introduced him to the woodcut. Despite any personal conflicts, Nolde remained supportive of the group’s artistic aims.

In 1909, after an illness, Nolde felt compelled to paint religious images; the results were some of the boldest and most moving as all German paintings. His pictorial interpretations became increasingly mystical, with color as the major expressive force. He sought to reach some vision of primitive, “pure” religiosity. He resigned from the Berlin Sezession in 1910, in solidarity with the Brucke artists whom the Sezession had rejected. The increasingly violent reactions to his work and his won antagonistic attitude to the artistic establishment led to his withdrawl from virtually all exhibitions. He did, however, send paintings for the second exhibition of the Blaue Reiter in 1912 and was also represented in the Cologne Sonderbung show that year. His works were also reproduced in the Blaue Reiter Almanach.

In 1913, his desire to gain greater understanding of primitive art let Nolde to join a German expedition to the South Seas. He returned with the outbreak of the war in 1914. He settled again in Alsen. Nolde’s stance against the art world became increasingly belligerent. His fervent belief in a Germanic art revival was coupled with an emotions and naïve support of theories of racial superiority. Such beliefs led him to attack the supposed Jewish basis of artistic life in Germany. In 1920, he became a charter member of the Nazi party, a fact that did not prevent him from being labeled as a “Degenerate” artist when Hitler came to power. More than 1,000 of his works were removed form museums in 1937, and he was forbidden to paint or exhibit. From 1926, until his death, he lived as a virtual recluse in Seebull in Schleswig-Holstein. When he died, his home became the center for Die Stiftung Ada und Emil Nolde (The Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation).

Of the artists associated with Die Brücke, Pechstein was the only one who actually came out of the working class. His roots contributed to his decisive, pugnacious character; he was a man and artist of action rather than contemplation, a trait that ultimately led to frictions with other artists of this group.

Born the son of a textile worker in Saxony, Pechstein left school at 15 and became an apprentice to a local painter. He completed his apprenticeship in 1900 and set out for Dresden. There he worked as a floral and decorative painter, but he also took classes at the School of Arts and Crafts. In 1902, he was accepted at the academy; he dutifully participated in the academic curriculum until 1906, supporting himself through a variety of commercial art jobs. The diversity of his tasks helped him to attain a facility in painting that was later the envy of his colleagues. During this period, Pechstein discovered several artists who inspired him, among them the old German master Lukas Cranach and, most significantly, van Gogh, whose work he saw at Dresden’s Galerie Arnold in 1905, Pechstein was at this time more interested in expressing himself through color.

In the spring of 1906, he met Erich Heckel, who introduced him to Kirchner and Schmidt-Ruttluff; he soon joined the others as a member of Die Brücke. Committed to the idea of portraying the nude in nature, he went with Kirchner, Heckel, and two models in the summer of 1907 to the Moritzburg Lakes outside Dresden. In 1907-1908, Pechstein made his first trip to Italy, where he was fascinated by the “primitive” painters of the Early Renaissance. On his return trip, he also visited Paris, where he studied the tribal art in the Trocaderao Museum and met, among others, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen (1877-1968), whom he invited to join Die Brücke. When he returned to Dresden in 1908, he decided to move to Berlin–the first of the Brücke artists to take this important step.

To escape the pressures of city life, Pechstein spent the summers, beginning in 1909, on the Baltic seacoast in Nidden; his discovery of this forgotten landscape ultimately inspired the other Brücke artists as well. He made scores of dry-ink studies along the beach, completed with quick brushstrokes and a sense of compositional stylization. In Berlin he exhibited in 1909 at the Berlin Secession, but was rejected by this group the following year. In protest, Pechstein and several other progressive painters founded the New Secession, which became the voice of new artistic directions. The third show of the New Secession in 1911 included works by the Munich artists of the Blaue Reiter; Pechstein, then, was aware of their work by this date.

In 1911, Pechstein married, and with his wife visited Italy again. By the time of his return, Kirchner, Heckel, and Schmidt-Ruttluff were all in Berlin. Pechstein and Kirchner now founded the Institut Moderner Unterricht in Malerei (The Institute of Modern Instruction in Painting), which optimistically announced courses in all artistic fields. The venture, however, was not a success and the dropped the idea in the summer of 1912.

By this time, the artists of Die Brücke were beginning to receive critical attention. Pechstein’s work, which was more easily accessible to the art viewer than was the work of the others, received the highest praise; he was considered by the press the leader of the group. Although still intent on only exhibiting jointly, the Brücke members began to show signs of discontent. Pechstein exhibited at the second Blaue Reiter show in 1912, and was represented in the Munich group’s Almanach.

By 1913, personal differences brought an open rift: Kirchner’s publication of the Chronik der Brücke, in which he gave a very personal interpretation of the group’s history, was the final catalyst to the group’s collapse (see Kirchner). Pechstein then made his third trip to Italy, this time, no doubt, inspired by his experiences on the Baltic coast, staying in small villages and coastal towns. His first son, Frank, was also born in 1913.

Intent on experiencing primitive life firsthand, Pechstein finally traveled (with his wife and 40 turns of belongings) to the Soup Pacific in 1914, settling in the German island colony of Palau. There he made sketches and kept a diary, until declaration of war and the Japanese occupation of the island compelled him and his wife to flee. After a harrowing journey, Pechstein finally reached Germany in 1915, where he served in the army until 1917. Back in Berlin, he began to complete paintings and prints based on his memories and interpretations of Palau life. Perhaps because of his experiences in the Pacific and during the war, his work became less explosive, more controlled.

During the 1920s, he taught at the Prussian Academy of Art, continuing to spend summers on the Baltic coast. His first marriage ended and in 1923, he married again; his son Max was born in 1926. Despite his vehement protestations, Pechstein was ousted from the academy by the Nazis in 1933 and was forbidden to exhibit or to paint. In 1944-1945, while serving in Pomerania, he was briefly a Russian prisoner of war. His Berlin apartment, with many of his works, was destroyed in the same year. In 1945, he returned to Berlin and taught at the College for Visual Arts.

*Woman with large hat 1910*	*"H M Pechstein Holzschnitte 1919" portfolio*	*Nudes in the dunes, one carrying water pails 1912*

Reichel’s work identifies him clearly as an acolyte of Paul Klee; indeed, he was probably the only artist to attempt to emulate so directly the Swiss artist’s very personal style. Reichel grew up in Munich, where he attended Hans Hoffman’s private school. In 1918, he met the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), whose dreamlike reveries remained a source of inspiration for him. The next year was most decisive, as he met Paul Klee; through him he also met in 1924, Kandinsky, whose ideas on abstraction influenced him greatly. By 1928, he was in Paris, where he felt most at home. He became a well-known figure among the Parisian literati, despite his reticent personality. In 1952, he received the Prix Jongkind, and the next year he had a major retrospective at the Bucher Gallery in Paris. He had his first German exhibition in Kaiserslautern in 1955 and a large show at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in 1960.

Although Rohlfs was a full generation older than the Expressionists, he enthusiastically embraced the ideas of new art espoused by these young artists and became a leading, if less aggressive, vice in German art. Rohlfs was born the son of a farmer in Holstein in the northern German border. In 1864, a fall from a tree caused leg injuries that required two years of convalescence in bed. Rohlfs’ doctor, who was the son-in-law of the Poet Theodor Storm (1817-1888), introduced the young man to painting. In 1866, he attended school in Bad Segeberg, where he demonstrated his artistic talent. With a letter of recommendation from Torm, Rohlfs visited the Berlin academic painter Ludwig Pietsch in 1869; Pietsch recommended him to the conservative academy in Weimar, where Rohlfs began studies in October 1870. The next year, the problems with his right leg worsened; it was amputated in 1873. In 1874, he continued his classes in Weimar, working also in Dresden. He had his first exhibition at the Weimar Art School in 1877, when already 28 years old. At that time, he still painted in the acceptable academic style of the period, but with the lessons of his teachers. In 1884, he declared himself an independent artist and established his own studio.

By the 1890s, his work began to display knowledge of a looser Impressionist technique, perhaps precipitated by the exhibition of Monet and other French art and his subsequent assimilation of Impressionist ideas was for Rohlfs, a liberation, allowing him for the first time to express his artistic talents freely. In 1895, he went to Berlin for a year; upon returning to Weimar, he studied with great intensity the French painters who exhibited there. Through Henry van de Veld (1863-1957), director at the Weimar Art School, Rohlfs came into contact in 1900 with the famed collector Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874-1921), then making preparations for the founding of Germany’s first museum devoted to modern art, the Folkwang Museum in Hagen. In 1901, Rohlfs moved to Hagen at Osthaus’ invitation; it was Rohlfs’ first real contact with the most contemporary art trends. The experience led to continuous transformations of his style. By 1902, he was painting in a modified version of Seurat’s Neoimpressionism, and, by 1903, his work demonstrated the influence of Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh. He also painted his first watercolor in 1903. He spent part of 1904 in Weimar again, where he met Munch. At the same time, he came into conflict with the headstrong Osthaus and decided to distance himself from the Hagen museum.

In December of that year, he made his first trip to Soest, a small town near Hagen, which would provide his greatest artistic motifs for the next few years. He spent the summer of 1905 in Soest, where he was sometimes joined by Emil Nolde. The first exhibition of Die Brücke at the Folkwagen Museum occurred in 1907 and introduced Rohlfs to Nolde’s compatriots. The experience led to his first woodcuts in 1908. In the same year, he made his first trip to Munich although he had no knowledge then of Kandinsky or Marc. In 1912, at Osthaus’ death and with the move of the Folkwang Museum to Essen, Rohlfs returned to the museum.

Nearly 70, Rohlfs experienced a surge of youthful energy (he married for the first time in 1919) and became one of the leading members of the German avant-garde movement. The traumas of World War I caused the only pause in his creative powers. During the 1920s , he discovered Ascona in Switzerland; from 1929 until his declaration as a “degenerate” artist in 1937, he spent summers in Ascona and winters in Hagen. He continued to paint with astonishing vigor until his death at the age of 89.

*View of Upper Weimar 1899*	*Forest path 1898*	*The Boat c.1907*	*Mother and child 1933*	*Heartfelt Thanks and Greetings 1933*

Egon Schiele represents the logical progression of Viennese aestheticism, moving from sensuous elegance of Gustave Klimt to a graphic and highly expressive depiction of eroticism. Schiele came from a middle-class family in a small town near Vienna; he attended the monastery school of Klosterneuberg, and at an early age displayed great artistic talent. At 16, he entered the academy in Vienna, where he immediately gained a reputation as a gifted yet headstrong pupil. By 1907, he had established his own studio and began developing his own style.

At that time, he met Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), who greatly affected his colorfully decorative tendencies. Klimt invited Schiele to exhibit at the 1909 Kunstschau in Vienna, where Kokoschka’s works drew controversial criticism. There Schiele came to the attention of the influential critic Arthur Roessler, who became the artist’s closest friend and patron.

At the end of 1909, Schiele and other like-minded artists founded the Neukunstgruppe (The New Artists’ Group), in reaction both to the academy and to the now-entrenched Secession. His style was moving further from the superficially elegant line of Klimt’s work towards an anxiety-ridden exploration of self. Central to these studies was a portrayal of obsessional autoeroticism. His figures became increasingly angular and gnarled with conscious emphasis on the genitals. Such emphasis eventually brought conflict with the authorities. In 1912, while staying in a small country town, his drawings were labeled as pornographic and he was imprisoned for 24 days. The trauma of imprisonment became the source for some of his most probing and claustrophobic works. Despite his continued attachment to decorative form, his work became increasingly emotive of psychic doubt and anguish.

By the end of 1912, he was gaining some recognition; he joined with the SEMA group in Munich, whose members included Klee and Kubin, and he participated in several exhibitions. The next year, he became a contributor to the Berlin Expressionist political journal, Die Aktion. Through his works published there, Schiele came to the attention of German artists and patrons; an entire issue of the journal Sturm was devoted to him in 1916.

In 1915, Schiele married Emmy Harms, and his life seemed to be settling down. Immediately after his marriage, he was drafted into the Austrian army, but managed to spend most of his service in Vienna. By the end of the war, he was reaching the apex of his career; the Vienna Secession mounted a large retrospective of his work. His painting of the time were marked by a dynamic sense of color and a confidence of line that led to his strongest creations.

When Klimt died in February 1918, Schiele drew him on his death bed. In October of that year, his wife, seven months pregnant, died of the Spanish flu; three days later, Schiele, only 28, was also dead.

The son of a village parson, Schinnerer lost his father early in life. He spent his school years in Erlangen, where he was most interested in chemistry and science. Art became a passion while he was a teenager. He went to Munich, where he took private drawing lessons. He enrolled in the university but spent most of his time in the museums, copying and drawing. In 1899, Schinnerer followed his drawing teacher Ludwig Schmidt-Reutte (1863-1909), to the academy in Karlsruhe. There he worked most enthusiastically in etching. In 1908 and 1909, he studied with the Realist Wilhelm Trübner (1851-1917). In the following year, he received a prize that allowed him to study in Florence for one year. Schinnerer was a co-founder of the New Secession in Munich.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluf was one of the original members of Die Brücke and one whose style remained the most expressively consistent. He was born Karl Schmidt, the son of a miller in Rottluff, a village on the outskirts of Chemnitz (now Karl-Marx-Stadt). He attended gymnasium in Chemnitz, where, in 1901, he met Erich Heckel; the two remained lifelong friends and artistic comrades. While Chemnitz contained little of artistic merit, Schmidt-Rottluff began painting while still a student and was always proud the he was self-taught. In 1905, he enrolled as an architecture student at the Technical University in Dresden. It was at that time that he added the name of his home-town to his family name.

In June of 1905, Schmidt-Rottluff joined his old friend Erich Heckel, along with Kirchner and Fritz Bleyl, to form the artists’ group, Die Brücke. They gave up architectural studies to concentrate on painting and the development of their enthusiastic ideas about a new German art. The group rented a workshop in the working-class district of Dresden and began painting with furious abandon, while living a communal life.

While Schmidt-Rottluff’s work was as brilliantly colorful and powerfully gestural as the others, he was by nature reserved and shy. He distanced himself from the wild extravagance that marked Kirchner’s passionate personality. He did not, for example, participate in Kirchner’s and Heckel’s trips to paint nudes in nature on the Moritzburg Lakes, preferring instead to concentrate on pure landscape.

After seeing Emil Nolde’s work at Dresden’s Galerie Arnold in February 1906, Schmidt-Rottluff visited the older artist on the island of Alsen and persuaded him to join Die Brücke. From 1907 to 1912, he spent the summer months in Dangast near Oldenburg; after 1910, Heckel joined him there, where they worked together in calm and peaceful surroundings. In the summer of 1911, he also journeyed to Norway. The works of the period are tonally brilliant, with a strong predilection for Fauve-like use of arbitrary color.

In the fall of 1911, he joined the other Brücke artists in Berlin. His exposure to a variety of new stimuli encouraged him to experiment with new techniques, including Cubist conceptions of form and space. These creations, however, remained experiments, as he developed his own conceptions of color and two-dimensionality. In Berlin, Schmidt-Rottluf also met the Hamburg art historian Rosa Schapire, who became his most focal supporter and a close friend. Still a member of Die Brücke, Schmidt-Rottluff exhibited with them and encouraged the admission to the group of Otto Meuller. In 1912, he exhibited at the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, where his works demonstrated influence of Cubism.

In the summer of 1913, fellow Brücke artist Pechstein invited Schmidt-Rottluff to spend the summer at his cottage in Nidden on the Baltic Coast; Schmidt-Rottluff was as moved by this forgotten landscape as Pechstein had been. He created some of his most memorable works there, pieces in which his style is reduced to pure color and most stylized in formal elements. Will Grohmann has referred to these works as examples of Schmidt-Rottluff’s “heraldic-symbolic” phase.

The dissolution of Die Brücke in the summer of 1913 affected him deeply, but he continued to work actively on his own. He established enduring friendships with Lyonel Feininger and his wife. He spent the summer of 1914 in Hohwacht, in Holstein on the Baltic Coast; there he painted landscapes, now integrating nudes and other figures into his compositions. The declaration of war ended this idyll; Schmidt-Rottluff was drafted in 1915 and spent the next three years on the Russian front. His work during this time consisted of a few watercolors and woodcuts. In 1918, he married Emy Frisch, herself an artist; they were together for nearly 60 years. They spent the summer of 1919 again in Hohwacht.

His style, no doubt influenced by the traumas of the war, became increasingly emotive and distorted; woodcuts, which had been a part of his oeuvre since 1910, now played a more important role in the expression of his feelings. Between 1917 and 1919, he completed a series of woodcuts on religious themes. His increased emphasis on angularity also demonstrated the general influence of Cubism and African art.

In 1920-1921, Schmidt-Rottluff traveled with his wife to Italy, where the Southern landscape was therapeutic. By the mid-1920s, his style had softened and taken on a more picturesque quality. From 1920 until 1931, Schmidt-Rottluff spent the summers in Jershöft, a Pomeranian fishing village on the Baltic Coast, where he focused on scenes of the village peasants in unity with their landscape. Watercolor became a favorite medium.

Trips to Italy, Dalmatia, and Paris contributed to a greater monumentality in his work, as he studied the masters of the Renaissance and the Baroque. Schmidt-Rottluff became a member of the Prussian Academy in 1931, only to be ousted by the Nazis in 1933. He continued until 1943 to spend the summer on the Baltic Coast now in Leba.

After his work was declared “degenerate” and he was unable to exhibit, he painted very little. When his Berlin apartment was destroyed in 1943, he moved to Rottluff. After the war, he returned to Berlin, where he was appointed in 1947 as professor at the College for the Visual Arts. He was instrumental in the establishment of Die Brücke Museum, which opened in Berlin in 1967; the bulk of his and Heckel’s paintings form the core of the museum collection.

*Portrait of a Russian war prisoner 1918*	*The Herdsman 1925*	*House in the Park c.1925*

Seewald is best known as an illustrator and teacher, although his accomplishments as a fresco-painter were also substantial. Seewald began his studies in architecture in 1909 at the Technical University in Munich; instead of completing his degree, he became a self-taught painter. In 1910, he met “Uli,” whom he married in 1911. They traveled together that year to Ascona in Italian Switzerland, a place that would figure prominently in his later life. Upon returning to Munich, he learned that some of his illustrations had been accepted by Jugend and Fliegende Blätter, the leading art and humor magazines of the day.

Seewald became a participant in the Bohemian artistic life of the city and met all of the leading figures of the avant-garde. In 1911, he participated in the Salon d’Automne in Paris. In 1912, he made his first etchings and woodcuts. At that time, he also learned of the work of Emil Nolde, an experience that caused a transformation in his conception of color. He participated in 1913 in the famous Herbstsalon at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin. Released from military service during World War I, Seewald traveled to Switzerland, where he continued to paint. Returning to Munich in 1916, he further perfected his graphic style and produced lithographic illustrations for several books.

By the end of the war, he was considered one of the country’s leading illustrators; he had several exhibitions, including a major retrospective of his paintings and graphic work at Munich’s Galerie Thannhauser in 1920. During the 1920s, he received commissions for several public frescoes, a fact which points to the decorative strength of his painting style; in fresco painting his major inspiration was Giotto. In Munich, he met the Italinan prince Leone Masimo, who arranged an exhibition and trip for Seewald to Italy. The discovery of the Mediterranian landscape was decisive for Seewald and he spent the next years traveling in Sicily and Corsica. The experience caused him to adopt a more classical style.

In 1924, Seewald was appointed to the Cologne Artisan Schools, known as the Köiner Werkschulen. He stayed there as professor of painting, glass-painting, graphic and book-art until 1931, when he moved to Ronco in the Tessin district of Switzerland .Throughout the 1920s, Seewald produced murals for houses and public buildings in Cologne and also completed illustrations for books and magazines. He also began to write, predominantly autobiographical sketches about his many travels.

In 1929, he converted to Catholicism, a decision that profoundly affected his activities and concerns for the rest of his life. In 1939, he became a Swiss citizen and spent the war years there. In the same year, Aldous Huxley arranged a show for him at the Stafford Gallery in London. He became a professor at the Munich Academy, a post he held from 1954 until 1958. He continued to paint frescoes and was particularly active in the creation of new church art. His last work was a Genesis Cycle for the rectory of the Herz-Jesu-Kirche in Munich; it was completed in 1976, immediately before the artist’s death at age 87.

*Deer in Woods 1917*	*Attack 1912-13*	*Dog Chasing Hare 1916*

Along with Lovis Corinth and Max Liebermann, Slovegt formed the triumvirate of German Impressionism until the appearance of Expressionism in the 1910s. As a child , Slevogt lived in Würzburg, where Tiepolo’s frescoes in the Residential Palace contributed to a style known as “Würzburg Rococo.” Art historians are quick to attribute Slevogt’s delicate and rhythmic manner to his enduring attachment to Tiepolesque expressions. Slevogt’s first artistic studies took place in Munich, where he adopted the dark tonalities of his teacher Wilhelm von Diez (1839-1907). By 1889, he was in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian. While he was not ignorant of the Impressionists’ work, he spent more time studying the Old Masters at the Louvre. His palette, however, did lighten under the impact of French art. A trip to Holland introduced him to Rembrandt, whose work remained a lifelong inspiration. His draughtsmanship now developed its characteristic nervous line. He returned to Munich in 1890, and became a member of the artists’ group, Die Freie Vereinigung, or Free Union. He produced illustrations for Jugend and other art journals that proliferated in Munich, in the 1890s. In 1901, Slevogt accepted Liebermann’s invitation to come to Berlin and join the Secession, the group of artists who were intent on bringing French pleinairism to Germany. Under the influence of Liebermann and other Secession artists, Slevogt studied the works of Degas, Manet, and Monet enthusiastically.

Landscape became an important subject for him, and in this genre he created his mot impressionistic works. At that time, he also began intensive production of graphic art; it is as an illustrator that Slevogt gained the greatest fame. His etchings and lithographs for fairy tales and popular legends were imbued with an elegant charm and fantasy that made him the most successful of all German illustrators.

*Mephisto 1927*	*Jockeys c.1920*	Twelve Drawings to the Fairy Tale "The Singing Springing Lark" 1924

As a teacher and friend of La Vera Pohl, Thuar was an important figure in the development of her understanding of German art. He was born in a small village outside of Cologne and moved to the city with his family in 1892. As children, Thuar and August Macke became best friends. At the age of 11, Thuar lost both legs in a streetcar accident and spent months in the hospital. Macke’s daily visits sustained him: “without August I would not have survived.” The trauma of this experience contributed to the long bouts of depression that Thuar suffered through his life. With Macke’s encouragement, he became interested in art. He studied painting privately from 1903 to 1907; against his parents’ wishes, he then left gymnasium to become a full-time painter. In emulation of Macke, he spent 1907 to 1910 at the Düsseldorf Academy. In 1911, Thuar completed his first important paintings after a trip to Belgium. In the same year, he participated in his first exhibit at the Cologne Secession. He also spent many hours with Macke painting from nature.

Trips in 1912 and 1913 to Brandenburg and Hamburg brought further artistic inspiration. He also participated in the famous Cologne Sonderbund show of 1912, where he was exposed to the most modern advances in French and German art. In October of 1913, he married Henriette Rasch; they had three daughters, the oldest of whom married August Macke’s son, Wolfgang.

In 1914, Thuar met Franz Marc through Macke and was very influenced by the Munic artist’s use of color and fragmented form. By that time, Cubist elements began to appear in his work. The first artistic phase ended with World War I and the deaths of Macke and Marc. The shock of these losses precipitated Thuar’s first incapacitating period of depression, which lasted until 1922. A new surge of energy at that time led to a second phase of creative activity. The paintings of this period, considered to be his most original, show strong elements of late Expressionsim, and give evidence of Thuar’s knowledge of other modern movements. After 1923, his paintings became more and more abstract. Financial problems in the 1920s compelled him to find employment as a salesman and teacher; that precarious situation caused deep depression again, and he painted only infrequently.

He experienced a final productive phase in 1938, when he journeyed to Ried in Upper Austria to see Maria Marck, Franz Marc’s widow. In the last years of his life, especially after the outbreak of World War II, Thuar painted less. Despite his association with the leading figures of Expressionism, Thuar remained a relatively unknown figure until the “rediscovery” of Rhenish Expressionism; his work was highlighted in the 1979 exhibit at the Städtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn, “Die Reinischen Expressionisten: August Macke und seine Malerfreunde,” and in a retrospective exhibition at the same museum in 1987 to commemorate Thuar’s 100^th birthday.

*Bonn Bridge and Cathedral 1921*	*Children in a Garden Pool c.1924*	*Madonna II (Henriette and Jane Thaur) 1923*

While Wirshing’s life and career were short, he left behind several notable sets of graphic works that demonstrate his devotion to the tradition of German woodcut. The son of a Nuremberg pharmacist, Wirsching studied for three years at the School of Arts and Crafts there. In 1907, he came to Munich, where he worked with Hugo von Habermann (1849-1929). In the summer of that year, he walked to Italy and Corsica; during this time he made copies in the Uffizi. He continued his travels through Spain and North Africa, living as a vagabond. Despite his thorough knowledge of Mediterranean art, Wirsching’s greatest artistic inspirations were the paintings and woodcuts of the great German masters of the Renaissance; he studied these works avidly at Munich’s City Library. When he returned to Munich at the beginning of 1913, he moved to the nearby village of Dachau, since the 1980s an important artists’ colony of the naturalist school. When war broke out, he served in the artillery, but was back in Dachau by 1916. Here he painted and also perfected his skill as a graphic artist, creating a fanciful style that translated his knowledge of the German Masters into a modern idiom. He became a leading artist of the new Dachau school, which took on a more Expressionist mode. He supported himself by making woodcut ex-libris and greeting cards for members of Munich’s artistic circles. He married in Dachau the Hungarian painter, Ankara Kowatsch. Signs of the mental instability–no doubt exacerbated by the unrecognizable presence of a brain tumor–began to appear in 1916 or 1917. He continued nonetheless to produce woodcut series and illustrations for books, as well as paintings which incorporated traditionally religious and mythological motifs into contemporary settings. While placing a new print into the press, he fell dead to the ground, the victim of a stroke. A dissertation on his woodcuts was completed in 1923, evidence of the strength of his artistic vision and its influence on Munich artists immediately following World War I.

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