Peter Drömmer - Revolutionary Take-Offs

 Peter Drömmer, The Card Player [probably Richard Blunck], 1919

Friedrich Peter Drömmer (1889-1968) was a German expressionistic visual artist and designer who is almost completely forgotten today. Drömmer was born in Kiel as son of a carpenter family. He left school early and started a painter apprenticeship which he finished in 1908. Between 1908 and 1912, he studied at Kiel's Art and Crafts School (Städtische Handwerker und Kunstgewerbeschule). Drömmer's artistic talents were spottet by Wilhelm Ahlmann, the doyen of an old Kiel banking family, who financed his academic education at Weimar's prestigious Academy of Art (1912-1913). 

 Peter Drömmer, Masurenschlacht (Battle of Masuria), 1914

Like Karl Peter Röhl, another of Kiel's "revolutionary expressionists", Drömmer studied In Weimar under the famous Austrian painter Albin Egger-Lienz. In 1914, Drömmer returned to Kiel where he worked in a studio at his parent's home. Still in a patriotic mood, it was probably there where he painted Masurenschlacht (above). The painting refers to the First Battle of the  Masurian Lakes between German and Russian troops (there is a brilliant novel by Aleksandr  Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, about this dramatic engagement). Drömmer was drafted in 1915, and served at the Western and Eastern front until 1918. He visualized his war experiences in his Kriegsfurienbilder (war fury paintings). 

 Peter Drömmer, The Rider (Yellow Incarnation), 1918

Under the impression of the Kiel mutiny, Drömmer painted in 1918 The Rider (above), a pathetic glorification of this important revolutionary event (I have previously written about Heinrich Ehmsen, another forgotten painter from Kiel, who produced a series of great paintings depicting the bloody aftermath of the failed German revolution). After the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919, Drömmer produced a series of "solidarity paintings", and an utterly expressive self-portray which he labeled The Revolutionary:

 Peter Drömmer, The Revolutionary, 1919

Together with the painters Karl Peter Röhl, Werner Lange, and Adolph Meyer - all of them born in Kiel - Drömmer joined the progressive artist group Expressionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kiel (Expressionistic Working Group Kiel), which had been  founded around 1916 by the writers Richard Blunck and Gerhard Ausleger. The group published the magazine Schöne Rarität which combined texts and graphics, and worked closely together with similar groups in Berlin and Dresden, headed by Georg Tappert and Conrad Felixmüller. 

 Peter Drömmer, War Memorial, 1921

Highlights of the group's activities in 1919 and 1920 were two exhibitions in the "bourgeois temple of art", Kunsthalle Kiel, with the intention to overcome Kiel's reactionary image as the principal Prussian navy base. The modest exhibition slogan was: Still nobody has put the sun in his buttonhole. There, Drömmer first showed his architectural phantasies, paintings between Gothic cathedral and prismatic abstraction symbolizing the social and cultural utopia of a classless society, and reminescent of similar ideas by Lyonel Feininger (Cathedral of Socialism, 1919), and Wenzel Hablik. 

Peter Drömmer, City, 1923

Until 1923, Drömmer worked as a freelance artist producing a series of visionary architectural and cityscape works which put him into contact with The Bauhau in Dessau. Between 1923 and 1933, he headed the promotion and corporate design department of the Junkers-Werke, also located in Dessau, and at that time Germany's largest aeroplane manufacturer. Hugo Junkers, the visionary company founder and leader was passionate in his support of The Bauhaus and from that, Junkers and Bauhaus people formed relationships. 

Revolutionary take-off in 1929: Peter Drömmer (right) with Hugo Junkers (3rd from right) in front of the Junkers G38 ("Flying House") after its maiden flight. At the time, the G38 was the world's largest terrestrial airplane. You can see that some of the passenger seats were located inside the wings. Only two of these monsters were built. Luft Hansa employed one of them for its regular services between Berlin and London via Amsterdam until 1939.

Professor Junkers who almost always shunned the spotlight even showed up on December 4, 1926 when Walter Gropius' splendid  Bauhaus Building was formally dedicated and reportedly stayed at the party past midnight. It wasn’t long before the impact of Drömmer was felt and seen by millions aboard Junkers aircraft: He created the stylized Flying Man, the elegant logo of the Junkers factory:

Peter  Drömmer's "Flying Man", Logo of the Junkers Aerospace Company, c. 1925

Responsible for Junker's corporate design, which he developped in close cooperation with The Bauhaus, Drömmer became quite influential at the company. Based upon his autonomous position, and with the support of Hugo Junkers, he was even able to hire some of his leftist friends from Kiel, among them Heinrich Ehmsen and Richard Blunck (who later wrote Hugo Junker's first biography). Hugo Junkers wanted modern, functional design not only for the exterior of his airplanes, but also in the interior appointments. As a result, starting in 1925, Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer and Drömmer were able to develop their first steel tube furniture, which in a modified form was later installed in Junkers commercial airplanes. You can read more about this here (in German).

Peter Drömmer, Portrait Adolf Dethmann [Director of Junkers-Werke 1931-33], 1921

Almost nothing is known about Drömmer's following years. After Hitler came to power in 1933, he was arrested by the Gestapo, and, since 1935, had to work as a freelance designer (he designed the logo of the Deutz Company at that time). During the Second World War, he moved to Southern Germany, and, shortly after the war, suffered a complete physical and mental breakdown. Friedrich Peter Drömmer died in 1968 in Gräfeling, Bavaria.

Oskar Schlemmer - The Higher State of Marionettes

 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Portrait of Oskar Schlemmer, 1914

Born in Stuttgart, Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) was the youngest of six children. His parents both died around 1900 and the young Oskar learned at an early age to provide for himself. By 1903 he was completely independent and supporting himself as an apprentice in an inlay workshop. Schlemmer studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule as well as the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. In 1914 Schlemmer was enlisted to fight on the Western Front in World War I until he was wounded and moved to a position with a military cartography unit in Colmar.

 Oskar Schlemmer's Triadisches Ballett, Stuttgart 1922

In 1919 Schlemmer turned to sculpture and had an exhibition of his work at Herwarth Walden's gallery Der Sturm in Berlin. In 1921 Schlemmer created the set design for Oskar Kokoschka's Murderer, the Hope of Women and, one year later, became known internationally with the première of his Triadisches Ballett in Stuttgart.  After his marriage to Helena Tutein in 1920, Schlemmer was invited to Weimar by Walter Gropius to run the mural-painting and sculpture departments at the Bauhaus School before heading its theater workshop in 1923. 

Erich Consemüller, Woman in B3 club chair by Marcel Breuer wearing a mask by Oskar Schlemmer and a dress in fabric designed by Lis Beyer, 1926 

As director of stage research and production Schlemmer created a provocative series of robotic ballets and until he left in 1928 his art can be seen as a manifesto for a robot society, both artistically, as it mocks the late-Romantic individualism of German painters such as Emil Nolde, and politically: in the wake of the Russian revolution a kind of machine communism was very alluring. 

 Oskar Schlemmer, Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet Costume), 1922 

The Bauhaus was launched as a centre of art and design education in 1919 with Walter Gropius' Proclamation of the Weimar Bauhaus, in which he called for "a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions, which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist". Going back to Ruskin and Morris's ideas for a communal, craft-guild art and way of life, the Bauhaus encompassed politics from democratic socialism to communism. Its teachers included Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky. 

Group Picture with Lady - Bauhaus Staff: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl, Oskar Schlemmer (left to right)

By 1923, when Schlemmer became director of the Bauhaus Stage, Gropius was committing the institution to a belief in mass production and functional design. Later, it came under severe attack for its alien, supposedly Marxist modernity from far-right politicians. In 1932, the Bauhaus left Dessau, disbanding permanently soon afterwards. In 1933 Hitler became chancellor of Germany.  

Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Stairway, 1932

Schlemmer's Stairway painting is a farewell. All but one of the students on an ordinary day at the Bauhaus are walking away from us, up the stairs, towards the huge windows - the Bauhaus belongs in a higher realm than this one. Schlemmer painted it in the year the Bauhaus was forced to abandon its beautiful modern building in Dessau. Another image, Yamawaki's collage The End of the Dessau Bauhaus (1932), makes no bones about what this meant: it shows a jackbooted Nazi leading a moustached politician to stomp on the Bauhaus:

Iwao Yamawaki, The End of the Dessau Bauhaus, 1932

Schlemmer's painting is more elegiac, looking back at the Bauhaus as an utopia rooted in everyday life: these are ordinary, modern young people. They have the rounded, simplified, geometrical bodies that Schlemmer created in his ballets, as they ascend to the higher state of modern marionettes. And yet this is not a mad or violent idealism. There is humour and grace to it. The Dessau Bauhaus, designed by Gropius, was a beautifully calm and spatially free modern building, and in this painting the staircase forms a dynamic, brilliantly lit modern stage. In grace and seriousness of movement, and in the rational theatre of modern architecture, the painting asserts a vision of a new society. But this future was already receding.  

Bauhaus Student Building in Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius in 1925
Photo with kind permission of Andreas Levers

After leaving the Bauhaus in 1929, Schlemmer took a post at the Akademie in Breslau, where he painted his Bauhaus Stairway. In 1932 he took up a professorship at Berlin's Vereinigte Staatsschulen which he held until 1933 when he was forced to resign due to pressure from the Nazis. The Schlemmers then moved to a small village near the Swiss border. His pictures were displayed at the National Socialist exhibition of "Degenerate Art." The last ten years of his life were spent in a state of  "inner emigration".

 Oskar Schlemmer, Before the Mirror, 1931

During World War II Schlemmer worked at the Institut für Malstoffe in Wuppertal along with Willi Baumeister and Georg Muche, run by the philanthropist Kurt Herbert. The factory offered Schlemmer the opportunity to paint without the fear of persecution. His series of eighteen small, mystical paintings entitled Fensterbilder (Window Pictures, 1942) were painted while looking out the window of his house and observing neighbors engaged in their domestic tasks. These were Schlemmer's final works before his death in a hospital at Baden-Baden in 1943.

Sándor Bortnyik

    Sándor Bortnyik, The Twentieth Century, 1927

Sándor Bortnyik (1893-1976) was born in Marosvásárhely, Transylvania (today  Târgu Mureş, Romania). Since 1910 he studied at the Free Art School in Budapest with József Rippl-Rónai und János Vaszary.  Bortnyik was one of the first followers of Lajos Kassák, with his lino-engravings published in the journal MA (Today) in 1918. In 1919, after the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Bortnyik had to emigrate to Vienna. 

 Oskar Schlemmer, Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet), 1922. Costume.

He broke with Kassák in 1922 and moved to Weimar, where he studied the principles of the Bauhaus. Bortnyik participated in De Stijl-Seminr of Theo van Doesberg and was interested in the theatre workshops of Oskar Schlemmer. In Weimar, Bortnyik produced abstract compositions which clearly show Schlemmer's influence:

 Sándor Bortnyik, The New Eve, 1924

In 1923, Bortnyik had his own exhibition in Berlin at Galerie Nierendorf. On his return to Budapest in 1924, he became a founding member, author and set-designer of the Green Ass avant-guard theatre company. Bortnyik also created a number of cutting-edge posters for advertisements in the twenties.

Sandor Bortnyik, Blue-Red Composition, 1919

Based upon the Bauhaus principles Bortnyik opened his own art school in Budapest in 1928. Victor Vasarely was among his pupils. Bortnyik soon became the leading figure of Hungarian advertisement art and Budapest one of its European hot spots. I particularly like the following poster of Robert Berény for the Modiano cigarette paper company:

Robert Berény, Modiano Poster, 1930

After the Second World War Bortnyik taught at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts and was active as the chief editor of the journal Free Art. He died 1976 in Budapest.You can see more of Bortnyik's works here on my Flickr page.