Niklaus Stoecklin

 Niklaus Stoecklin, Self-Portrait, 1918

The son of a middle-class Swiss merchant, Niklaus Stoecklin (1896-1982) grew up in his native Basel, developing a propensity for art at home. From his grandfather, an entomologist and illustrator of scientific publications, he inherited a passion for observation and the analytical transposition of flora and fauna into drawing. From April to August 1914 he studied applied art in Munich. When the war broke out, he returned to Basel, where he began to attend the Academy of Fine Arts; he staged his first solo show of paintings and graphic works in 1915. 

 Niklaus Stoecklin, Wig Stand Mannequin with Pear-Shaped Money-Box, 1929

The period from 1917 to 1919 was one of training and experimentation. Stoecklin became intrigued by the late Gothic masters - particularly Konrad Witz - and worked in close contact with the Expressionists Albert Müller and Ignaz Epper, drawing inspiration from their works. In 1918 he was one of the promoters of  Das Neue Leben (The New Life), a Basel art group, participated in its discussions about Cubism and Futurism, and became fascinated with Robert Delaunay’s Orphism. 

 Niklaus Stoecklin, Nelly or Street Girl, 1918

At the same time, Stoecklin earned a living by designing posters for the Wasserman graphics company, working for them regularly for about ten years. He began to be successful during this period: in 1917 the collector Georg Reinhart purchased his painting Casa rossa. The following year this very work was published in Das Kunstblatt, the journal that, in the early 1920s, would host the first extensive critical discussions of the emerging trend towards figurative art, a movement that would be dubbed Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). 

 Niklaus Stoecklin, Still Life with Burning Candle, Matchbox and Dead Moth, 1950

Stoecklin made his international debut in 1925: he was the only non-German artist to be represented at the ground-breaking Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim, where he presented the sizeable number of six paintings. In his essay Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism, published that year, Franz Roh included him in a list of exponents of post-Expressionist trends. In the second half of the 1920s Stoecklin travelled frequently and these journeys were a source of inspiration for several series of paintings and drawings. Between 1927 and 1930 Stoecklin stayed in Paris a number of times where he painted the following portrait of the dancer Tatjana Barbakoff (see my post about Gert Wollheim): 

 Niklaus Stoecklin, Tatjana Barbakoff, 1929

The Kunstmuseum in Winterthur and the Kunsthalle in Basel devoted extensive monographic exhibitions to him, respectively in 1927 and 1928. In the mid-1930s, several public institutions and important companies in Basel, such as Hoffmann-La Roche, commissioned him to design and execute murals. In the 1940s and 1950s he worked almost exclusively on book illustrations and advertising graphics, and as a professor at the Schule für Gestaltung in Basel he trained an entire generation of graphic artists. Starting in the 1970s, Stoecklin’s works were presented at international exhibitions devoted to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. You can see more of his works in my Flickr set.

Gert Wollheim

Wollheim was born in Dresden and studied at the College of Fine Arts in Weimar from 1911 to 1913. From 1914–1917 he was in military service in World War I.

 Gert Wollheim, The Wounded Man, 1919

Wollheim himself was shot in the stomach and nearly died from the serious wound - and it is certain this experience was the inspiration for this disturbing work. After the war he lived in Berlin until 1919, when Wollheim, Otto Pankok (whom he had met at the academy in Weimar), Ulfert Lüken, Hermann Hundt and others created an artists' colony in Remels, (East Frisia).

At the end of 1919 Wollheim and Pankok went to Düsseldorf and became founding members of the Young Rhineland Group, which also included Max Ernst, Otto Dix, and Ulrich Leman. 

 Gert Heinrich Wollheim, This is the bad uncle Dix, 1923

 
He also became part of the aggressively political Aktivistenbund 1919 (Activist League 1919), a group of artists and intellectuals dedicated to pacifism and working class politics. Wollheim was one of the artists associated with the art dealer Johanna Ey. In 1925 he moved to Berlin, and his work began a new phase of coolly objective representation.

Gert Wollheim, Farewell from  Düsseldorf, 1924

Immediately after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 his works were declared degenerate art and many were destroyed. He fled to France and became active in the Resistance. In 1937 he was one of the joint founders of the artist federation “L´union de l'artistes libres” in Paris, and he became the companion of the dancer Tatjana Barbakoff who was murdered 1944 in Auschwitz.

Wilhelm Schmurr, The Dancer Tatjana Barbakoff, c. 1925

In Munich, three of his pictures were displayed in the defamatory Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937. From Paris he fled to Saarbrücken and later to Switzerland. In 1939 he was arrested and held in a labor camp until his escape in 1942, after which he hid in the Pyrénées.

Gert Wollheim, Untitled, 1926

At war's end in 1945 he returned to France, and in 1947 moved to New York and became an American citizen. He died in New York in 1974.