Gisèle Freund

 Gisèle Freund, Self portrait, early 1930s

Gisèle Freund (1908-2000) was born in Berlin into a wealthy Jewish family. Clara, her mother, came from a family of industrialists. Julius Freund, Gisèle's father, ran the family business; he was also an art collector. From an early age, Julius took her to art museums, and at home she met talented painters. 

 Max Slevogt, Portrait of Julius Freund, 1925

She studied sociology and art history at the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt am Main under Karl Mannheim, Max Horkheimer, and Norbert Elias. During this period Freund joined the communist student organization at the university. In 1933, when when the National Socialists came to power, the family emigrated to France. Freund smuggled out photographs she had taken of Hitler's political victims. 

 Gisèle Freund, Walter Benjamin à la Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, 1937

Freund entered at the Sorbonne, receiving her PhD in 1936. In the mid-1930s, Freund played chess with Walter Benjamin at a café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Also the Bibliothèque Nationale connected them. Benjamin did research there for his now famous Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), Freund wrote her dissertation on early French photography, La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle, a metrialistic account of the origins of photography (published in the 1970s in French and German under the title Photographie et société).

Gisèle Freund, Rue de la Pluie, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1935

In 1936 Freund photographed the effects of the Depression in England for the Life magazine. Freund's dissertation was first published in book form by Adrienne Monnier (1892-1955). Freund visited her bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres, first time in 1935. With Monnier's help, Freund was able to enter the literary circles. She also started to spent an increasing amount of time in the apartment of Adrienne and Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company Bookstore. 

 Gisèle Freund, Norbert Elias, Paris, 1935

Before the outbreak of the war, Freund made hundreds of portraits of artists and writers. Her subjects included among others her former teacher Norbert Elias (above), Louis Aragon, Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Marcel Duchamp, T.S. Eliot, André Gide, James Joyce, André Malraux, Romain Rolland, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Valéry and G.B. Shaw ("Above all, don't cut off my beard!", Shaw told her). 

 Gisèle Freund, George Bernard Shaw, Londres, 1939

In 1939 Freund had a private exhibition, entitled Ecrivains célèbres, at the Galerie Adrienne in Paris and the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery in London. After the German Invasion of France, Freund went into hinding in a village in the province of Lot, Southern France. In 1942 she fled to Argentina with the help Victoria Ocampo, who had founded in 1931 the magazine Sur, the most important literary magazine of its time in Latin America.

 Gisèle Freund, The last islands before Cape Horn, Patagonia, 1943

Later Freund moved on to Mexico. For years she traveled up and down through the countries of Latin America. During this period she photographed Eva Perón and also became acquainted with the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. To Mexico Freund was invited by the poet and writer Alfonso Reys, originally to give a lecture on French literature. Eventually her stay took two years. In 1950 Life published her critical photoreportage on Eva Peron, which drew the attention of the FBI and four years later she was blacklisted. 

 Gisèle Freund, Le lever d'Evita Peron, Buenos Aires, 1950

In 1944-45 Freund was a photojournalist for the France Libre propaganda services. From 1947 to 1954 she worked for Magnum Photos. Magnum was founded by the legendary Robert Capa. "If you want to make money, give up your job as a reporter," Capa said to Gisèle Freund. "It will earn you a good living, but you'll never get rich."  

Gisèle Freund, Simone de Beauvoir, 1948

In the 1970s, Freund traveled in Japan, the Near East, and the United States. Following the election of François Mitterand to the presidency in 1981, Freund became Mitterrand's official photographer. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne (Centre Georges-Pompidou) in 1991. Gisèle Freund died in Paris on March 31, 2000. You can see more photos of her here in my Flickr set.

Ludwig Meidner

I'm thinking of the most exciting things, apocalyptic swarms, Hebrew prophets and mass grave hallucinations - because the spirit is all, and nature means nothing to me. (Ludwig Meidner)

Ludwig Meidner, I and the City (Self-Portrait), 1913

Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966) was born in Bernstadt, Silesia. Following his parents' wishes the young Meidner began an apprenticeship as a mason, but broke it off. In 1903 he was admitted to the Breslau Academy for Fine Art, which he left after two years to move to Berlin. The instruction he took in etching from the artist Hermann Struck was important for his later career. In 1906 he went for about a year to Paris, where he met Amedeo Modigliani.

 Ludwig Meidner, The Suicide (Self-Portrait), 1912

The year 1912 was an important one for Meidner: he painted the first of his compelling self-portraits and Apocalyptic Landscapes. These works anticipate the horrors of the first world war by several years. The series, produced rapidly in a hectic heatwave, are some of the purest expressionist works, portraying the terror of the modern city in catastrophic settings; comets cross the sky like canon shells, fires rage, men scream and flee for their lives, buildings totter on the edge of collapse. 

 Ludwig Meidner, Apocalyptic Landscape, 1912

The years that followed in Berlin saw Meidner haunted by dire financial straits although he intensively experienced expressionist bohemian life. His portraits from 1915 to the end of the 1920s are a gallery of the leading expressionist and Dada writers and poets. Ludwig Meidner also was a habitual self-portraitist producing a remarkable series of self-portraits that provide a vivid illustration to his passing years. 

 Ludwig Meidner, Portrait of the Writer Johannes R. Becher, 1916

Meidner joined forces with Jacob Steinhardt and Richard Janthur to found "Die Pathetiker" (The pathetic ones), a group that showed their works at Herwarth Walden's gallery. There he met Robert Delaunay, whose Cubism, with Italian Futurism, inspired his style. In 1915, he portraied his friend Conrad Felixmüller who occasionally worked in Meidner's Berlin studio.

 Ludwig Meidner, Portrait of Conrad Felixmüller, 1915

Conscripted into the military in 1916, Meidner served as an interpreter and censor at an internment camp for prisoners of war. There he began to write. After the war, in 1918,  he joined the Novembergruppe (November Group) and the revolutionary Genossenschaft für proletarische Kunst (Cooperative for Proletarian Art). Meidner, at that time, had a combination of Jewish Messianism and a somewhat mystical Marxism that sometimes anticipated Walter Benjamin’s later synthesis. He was an evangelical adherent of the Arbeitsrat, writing "we artists and poets should be in the forefront of  the struggle. Socialism should be our new faith." 

Ludwig Meidner, Revolution, 1913

Disappointed at the failure of the Revolution, Meidner  retired to nurse his disillusionment in private, abandoning Expressionism, which by then was so popular that its commercial outlook increasingly brightened. In Autobiographische Plauderei (Autobiographical Chat) he offended companions and friends by repudiating his early work. Religious themes, landscapes, still lifes and more portraits would thenceforth be his dominant genres.

 Else Meidner, Self-Portrait, 1926

In 1927 Ludwig Meidner married Else, née Meyer, who was also an artist. As early as 1932, Meidner expressed his fears concerning growing anti-Semitism in a letter to his fellow painter, John Uhl: “We live in a highly-nationalistic area, are practically the only Jewish family in the neighbourhood and known as such, and might get into very dangerous situations.” After the Nazis came to power, Ludwig and Else Meidner's artistic possibilities became increasingly limited. Exhibitions were now only possible in Jewish cultural institutions such as the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture Association). 

 Ludwig Meidner, Self-Portrait, 1935

In order to escape the growing anti-Semitism in Berlin, Ludwig Meidner and his family moved to Cologne in 1935, where he had been offered a position as drawing teacher at the Jewish school Yavneh. After several other plans to emigrate had come to naught, the couple immigrated to England in August 1939, shortly before the war broke out. In England, the Meidners lived in abject poverty. After the war began, Ludwig Meidner was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. Many other German  intellectuals were imprisoned in the camp, and Ludwig Meidner considered his situation bearable because now at least his physical survival was ensured. Else Meidner, on the other hand, was forced to take on a position as a servant in order to make a living. 

 Ludwig Meidner, Crowd, c. 1915

Despite a certain degree of success – as, for example, when the Ben Uri Gallery put on a double show of the Meidners' work in 1949 – Ludwig Meidner lacked any prospects for artistic success in London. Even after ten years of living in exile, he had not managed to become established within the English art scene. Practically the only ones to take any notice of his art were other German-Jewish immigrants. He was invited to visit Germany in 1952, and the warm reception by old friends there as well as the outlook for success as an artist led him to return there for good in 1953. In a last, very productive, creative phase he further developed the style of painterly realism he had developed in the 1920s. In 1963 he had his first major exhibitions since 1918 in Recklinghausen and Berlin. Ludwig Meidner died on 14th May 1966 in Darmstadt, aged 82.

 Ludwig Meidner, My Night Visage, 1913

The Ludwig Meidner Archive at the Jewish Museum in Francfort contains many works from the estate of Ludwig Meidner. It comprises oil paint­ings, works on paper, sketchbooks, drawings, prints and works by fellow artists. The archive also holds the copyright to Meidner's oeuvre. Moreover, works from the estates of Else Meidner, Kurt Levy and Arie Goral are also theld here. The archive collects work by Jewish and exiled artists from the period 1933–45. You can see mor works of Ludwig Meidner here in my Flickr set.