This is Jankel Adler

 Otto Dix, This is Jankel Adler, 1926

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon this rarely seen 1926 portrait of Jankel Adler. Compared with Dix' often brutal characterizations, this respectful portrait appears thoroughly restrained, even the title is unusual: This is Jankel Adler. Also remarkable is the sgraffito-like background with the ornate pattern of the wallpaper. Both of these reflect Adler’s own style of painting. 

August Sander, The Painter Jankel Adler, 1929

Moreover, the portrait echoes Picasso’s classical figurative style of the early twenties. In this way Dix deliberately invoked one of the artists who had especially inspired Adler. Otto Dix would later write of his portraits: The ‘exterior’ is the expression of the ‘interior’, that is to say that exterior and interior are one and the same. Three years later, in 1929, August Sander photographed Jankel Adler in a similar, pensative and sceptical mood.

Jankel Adler

 Jankel Adler, Portrait of a Man, 1923

Jankel Adler (1895-1949) was born as the seventh of ten children near Lodz, Poland. He grew up among hassic Jews surrounding the textile city of Lodz, influenced greatly by its Polish, German and Jewish population. Adler started an apprenticeship as an engraver with his uncle in Belgrade in 1912, after which he traveled through the Balkan countries. During World War I, as a "suspicious foreigner" Adler commenced his studies with Professor Gustav Wiethüchter at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Barmen, Germany.

Jankel Adler,  Seated Woman, 1928

After his studies he spent time in Poland, Berlin and Paris. In 1922, Jankel Adler moved to Düsseldorf. There he became a teacher at the Academy of Arts, and became acquainted with Paul Klee, who influenced his work. Both artists belonged to the artists group "Junges Rheinland". He also befriended the painter Anton Räderscheidt, a leading figure of the New Objectivity. 

 Anom., Jankel Adler (standing) with Anton Räderscheidt, 1920s

A painting by Adler received a gold medal at the exhibition “German Art Düsseldorf” in 1928.  In 1931 Adler moved into a studio at the Düsseldorf academy, which he abandoned in 1933 when leaving Germany upon friends' advice, after he had published together with other left-wing artists and intellectuals an "urgent appeal" against the Nazi policy and for communism during the campaigns for the parliamentary "elections" in February 1933. 

Jankel Adler, The Mutilated, 1942. The Mutilated was painted in London during heavy bombing and reflected, he said, his admiration for "the behaviour of Londoners under great stress and suffering, only then could humanity be seen at its best".

In that year, two of his pictures were displayed by the Nazis at the Mannheimer Arts Center as examples of degenerate art. Paintings of him and Marc Chagall were pulled on a hand-cart through the streets and publicly jeered at (see my article Chagall and Germany). Adler now left Germany, staying in Paris, where he regarded his exile consciously as political resistance against the fascist regime in Germany. In the years that followed, he made numerous journeys to Poland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Soviet Union. In 1937, twenty-five of his works were seized from public collections by the Nazis and four were shown in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich.

 Jankel Adler, Two Figures, 1944

When World War II broke out in 1939, Jankel Adler volunteered for the Polish army. Two years later, however, he was dismissed due to his bad health. Jankel Adler moved to Scotland and shortly after to London. During the 1940s a number of respectable exhibitions of Adler's works took place in London, Paris and New York. In 1949 Jankel Adler died in Albourne near London with the bitter knowledge that none of his nine brothers and sisters had survived the Holocaust.

Chagall and Germany

 Marc Chagall, Exodus, 1952

Chagall left Russia in 1922 and pursued his work in Berlin from May 1922 to October 1923 before he finally settled in Paris permanently at the end of 1923. His temporary stay in Berlin became decisive for his career as an artist because he could learn from Hermann Struck und Joseph Budko the art of woodcut and of etching. In Berlin he created under the patronage of  the art dealer Paul Cassirer his first etching series called “Mein Leben” (My Life). At the time, Berlin was a centre for Jewish artistic endeavours. Notable Jewish artists were pursuing their work there e.g. Jakob Steinhardt, Ludwig Meidner, El Lissitzky, Issachar Beer Ryback, and Jankel Adler, all whom Chagall knew personally. 

 Marc Chagall, The Pinch of Snuff, 1912

Chagall was a renowned painter of modern art, even and especially in Germany where notable museum directors such as Georg Swarzenski and Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub had purchased his pictures. Already in 1933 these purchases came to be the target of Nazi propaganda. In Mannheim at the exhibition “kulturbolschewistische Bilder” Chagall's famous painting “The Pinch of Snuff” (above) was pulled on a hand-cart through the streets and publicly jeered at together with a painting from Jankel Adler:

 Jankel Adler, Cléron, the Cat Creator, 1925

In 1938 all of Chagall's oil paintings and water-colour pictures were confiscated from the public collections. Four of these were on display at the exhibition of “Degenerate Art” (i.e. “Purim” from the Folkwang Museum Essen, “The Pinch of Snuff” from the Kunsthalle Mannheim, “ Winter” and “Men with Cow”, two water-colour paintings from the Städtische Galerie at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt). The confiscated works were later sold in Switzerland in exchange for foreign currencies. Today they are dispersed at notable museums throughout the world. Paintings that belonged to private collections shared about the same fate. For instance those that belonged to the vast private collection of Herwarth Walden. Today they are located in the U.S. and in Switzerland. 

Marc Chagall, Solitude, 1933

Chagall himself has made the beginning rule of tyranny in Germany an important theme in his paintings like in “Solitude” of 1933 (above) and “The Chute of Angels”, on which he worked from 1923 to 1947:

 Marc Chagall, The Chute of Angels, 1923-1947

Look at the clocks, it's ten past ten on both of them, close to midnight, and time is running out again:

 Marc Chagall, Clock, 1914

After Chagall heard of the pogroms during the Reichskristallnacht in 1938, he created a major work called “The White Crucifixion”, today in the Art Institute of Chicago:

Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion, 1938 

Chagall needs to flee France from the Germans in 1944. After his return from exile in the United States to Paris, as part of a memorial book dedicated to eighty-four Jewish artists who were killed by the Nazis in France, Chagall wrote a poem entitled "For the Slaughtered Artists: 1950":

I see them: trudging alone in rags,

barefoot on mute roads.

The brothers of Israels, Pissaro and

Modigliani, our brothers - pulled with ropes

by the sons of Dürer, Cranach

and Holbein - to death in the crematoria.