Jacob Steinhardt

 Jacob Steinhardt, The City, 1913

Jacob Steinhardt (1887 –1968) was a painter and woodcut artist, who worked mainly in woodcuts depicting biblical and other Jewish subjects. He was born in the Silesian town Zerkow (now Poland). Steinhardt studied at the University of Art in Berlin in 1906, then took painting lessons with Lovis Corinth and, together with fellow student Ludwig Meidner, learned engraving with Hermann Struck in 1907.

 Jacob Steinhardt, Workers Uprising - Red Flag, c. 1920

From 1908 to 1910 Steinhardt lived in Paris, where he associated with Henri Matisse and Théophile Steinlen, and in 1911 he was in Italy. When World War I broke out, he enlisted in the German army, and served on the Eastern Front in Poland and Lithuania, and then in Macedonia. After the war, he returned to Berlin where he participated in the artist group New Sezession and joined forces with Ludwig Meidner and Richard Janthur to found "Die Pathetiker" (The pathetic ones), a group that showed their works at Herwarth Walden's gallery. 

Jakob Steinhardt, Sabbath in the village, 1923

 When the Nazis came into power in 1933, Steinhardt emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine, and opened an art school in Jerusalem in 1934. In 1948 he closed the art school and became Chairman of the Graphics Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. From 1954-57 he was the Director of that school. Steinhardt died 1968 and was buried in Nahariya.

 Jacob Steinhardt, Deportation, 1946

You can view more works by Jacob Steinhardt 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.

Lovis Corinth

 Lovis Corinth, Ecce Homo, 1925

Ja! Ich weiß, woher ich stamme!
Ungesättigt gleich der Flamme
Glühe und verzehr' ich mich.
Licht wird Alles, was ich fasse,
Kohle Alles, was ich lasse:
Flamme bin ich sicherlich.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1882)

Lovis Corinth was born in 1858 in the town of Tapiau in East Prussia (now Russia), the son of a tanner. Corinth grew up in a rural setting, with little or no exposure to works of art. From a very early age, however, he enjoyed sketching and painting. At the age of nine he was enrolled first in the public school in nearby Königsberg (today Kaliningrad) and then at the Königsberg Academy of Art.

 Lovis Corinth, Nana, 1911

Corinth continued his artistic training in Munich (1880-1882), and then in Antwerp and Paris (1884-1886), where he studied with Adolphe William Bouguereau. During this period Corinth remained uninfluenced by the "modern" painters of the day, such as Manet and Monet; he preferred instead the naturalistic style of Wilhelm Leibl, who had been a pupil of Gustave Courbet. He also admired works by Rubens in the Louvre in Paris and by Rembrandt.

 Lovis Corinth, Cain, 1917

Corinth returned to Germany in 1891 and continued his painting career. He became a part of the art world of Berlin at the turn of the century and in 1901 he opened a school for painters there. His first student, Charlotte Berend, became his wife two years later. Other students  of Corint were Magnus Zeller and Jacob Steinhardt.

 Lovis Corinth, Salome II 1899

In the first decade of the 20th century, Corinth's palette became brighter and he began to employ the freer brush-work characteristic of the German Impressionists, represented by Max Liebermann. In addition to his landscapes and figure compositions, he achieved great success as a portrait painter, and his services were much in demand. Corinth was elected chairman of the Berlin Secession, to which he had belonged since 1899, in 1911. In that same year he completed 61 oils, as well as many drawings, etchings, and lithographs, and all of his work was selling well. He was named president of the Berlin Secession in 1915, an artist association with prominent members like Max Beckmann, Lyonel Feininger and Max Slevogt.

Lovis Corinth, Portrait of Hermann Struck, 1915. In 1915, Struck was thirty-nine. A painter, engraver and art critic, he posed for his friend Corinth wearing the uniform of the officer he had become. Neither the subject nor the painter give in to the exalted belligerency of the moment. Despite the fact that Corinth paints with emphatic touches, he keeps his distance from all forms of expressionism, in order, to depict the worry, the melancholy and the unease of the artist in his soldier's uniform. After the war, Struck left Germany where life had become too distressing for him, and settled in Palestine.

At the end of 1911, Corinth suffered a massive stroke which threatened to end his career. His left side was paralyzed, but through great perserverance and determination he was able to resume painting the following year. From 1912 until his death in 1925 Corinth continued to work and to struggle against his increasing debility. He produced some 500 oils and about 1,000 prints, in addition to drawings and watercolors. He painted numerous self-portraits, and made a habit of painting one self every year on his birthday as a means of self-examination.

 Lovis Corinth, Self-portrait, 1896

In Corinth's late work expressive elements dominate, reflecting his own personal struggles against his illness and, perhaps, an increased perception of the world around him. He created numerous portraits and self-portraits, notable for their profound psychological insights, and his work influenced later generations of German artists. Corinth died in July 1925 while on a visit to Holland to see paintings by Rembrandt and Frans Hals. One of his most famous paintings, Ecce Homo, shown here at the beginning, was done earlier in the year. 

 Lovis Corinth, Samson Blinded, 1912

Lovis Corinth's work was condemned by the Nazis as "degenerate", and 295 of his works were removed from German museums (most of them were sold to Switzerland). The Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg denounced him as "Butcher of the brush, dissolved in the syrian mud of Berlin". Today, Corinth is seen as a major artist whose paintings combined elements from the Old Masters he admired, such as Rembrandt, with late 19th-century Impressionism to create, in his late work, a fully modern idiom. His paintings, drawings, and prints are included in numerous public and private collections throughout the world.

You can see many more of his paintings in high resolution at Zeno.