Karl Hubbuch

Karl Hubbuch (1891 – 1979) was a painter, printmaker, and draftsman associated with the New Objectivity.

Hubbuch was born in Karlsruhe and studied art at the Karlsruhe Academy from 1908 to 1912, forming friendships with fellow students Georg Scholz and Rudolf Schlichter. He continued his studies with Emil Orlik at the Berlin Museum of Arts and Crafts School, followed by military service (from 1914 to 1918) in the First World War. Having contracted malaria, he spent the period after the war recuperating before resuming his studies in a master class at the Karlsruhe Academy. In 1924, he was given a position as an assistant lithography instructor at the Karlsruhe Academy, and he was appointed professor in 1928, becoming the head of the drawing department.

Karl Hubbuch, The Swimmer of Cologne, 1926

During this period, Hubbuch was much more active as a draftsman than as a painter. His drawings and prints of the early 1920s, sharply realistic in style, are highly critical of the social and economic order. A trip to Berlin in 1922—during which he met George Grosz—inspired the creation of several paintings in which Hubbuch depicted himself as an observer who reacts to the urban dynamism surrounding him. He exhibited several drawings and prints, as well as his oil painting, The Classroom, in the seminal "Neue Sachlichkeit' ("New Objectivity") exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Mannheim in 1925.

Karl Hubbuch, Triplets, 1927 

In 1927 he married Hilde (née Isai), who came from Trier, and who had studied photography at the Bauhaus. Her likeness is recognizable in many of Hubbuch's works, such as Zweimal Hilde ("Hilde Twice"), painted in 1923.

Karl Hubbuch, Zweimal Hilde, 1927

Hubbuch published collections of satirical drawings, and in 1930 he collaborated with Erwin Spuler and Anton Weber in publishing the critical and satirical magazine "Zakpo". As a known antifascist, Hubbuch was dismissed in 1933 from his teaching position and forbidden to paint by the Nazi authorities. Until 1945 he would support himself with commercial jobs which included decorating ceramics and painting clock faces.

Karl Hubbuch, Lissy im Cafe, 1930

After the war he was able to resume his post as a professor of painting at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts, where he would teach until 1957. He worked in relative obscurity during this later period, painting and drawing in a style close to expressionism. In the 1960s the revival of interest in figurative art brought new attention to his work, along with a reevaluation of the artists of the New Objectivity in general. Failing eyesight forced him to stop working after 1970. Karl Hubbuch died in 1979 in Karlsruhe, where approximately 100 of his works are now housed in Gochsheim Castle.

You can see more of Hubbuch's works here on my Flickr page.

Otto Dix - Flandern

Otto Dix, Flandern, 1934

Dix worked on this large-format (78 x 98") painting from 1934 to 1936. By that point, the National Socialists had already dismissed him from his professorial position at the Dresden Art Academy, and he was living in Randegg bei Singen. The painting shows a field in Flanders where three devastating battles were fought. In contrast to war-time propaganda images, Dix's canvas introduces war in the form of a battlefield where corpses and mud predominate, the one rotting and merging into the other. With this nightmarish tableau, Dix commemorated the victims of one World War in the hopes of preventing another.

Barthel Gilles

Barthel Gilles, Ruhr Battle, 1930

In Ruhrkampf, Barthel Gilles (1891-1977) portrayed a battle that took place ten years earlier in the Ruhr industrial area between radical workers and the regular army and police. The workers had been on strike and were suffering terrible repression - they eventually turned to arms for self defense. Fighting soon broke out with the authorities and escalated to civil war proportions. The workers were defeated by the army and police only after hundreds of workers had been killed. Gilles was a member of the German Communist Party (KPD) and during the Nazi era was prohibited from painting or exhibiting his work publicly.

 Barthel Gilles, Self-Portrait with Gas Mask, 1930

Rudolf Schlichter - Karola Neher

Rudolf Schlichter, Portrait of Karola Neher, 1929

Karola Neher was a well-known actress in Germany during the inter-war period and played Polly Peachum in the 1931 film adaptation of the theatrical hit The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht. Neher was also Brecht’s mistress for a time. A Communist sympathiser, Neher fled to Moscow with her second husband Anatol Becker in 1934. There they became victims of the Stalinist purges, Becker being executed by firing squad in 1937 while Neher was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp. She died of typhoid in a camp in 1942 aged 41. This magnificent portrait was presumed lost until 2007.

via artinconnu.blogspot.com/

Learn your History!

My young son asks me...

by Bertold Brecht  (1940)

My young son asks me: Must I learn mathematics?
What is the use, I feel like saying. That two pieces
Of bread are more than one's about all you'll end up with.
My young son asks me: Must I learn French?
What is the use, I feel like saying. This State's collapsing.

And if you just rub your belly with your hand and
Groan, you'll be understood with little trouble.
My young son asks me: Must I learn history?
What is the use, I feel like saying. Learn to stick
Your head in the earth, and maybe you'll still survive.

Yes, learn mathematics, I tell him.
Learn your French, learn your history!

Karl Hubbuch, Children in School, 1925

Magnus Zeller

Magnus Zeller, Loving Couple, 1919

Magnus Zeller (1888-1972) was an expressionistic painter and graphic artist. Between 1908 and 1911 he studied painting in Berlin under Lovis Corinth. During the First World War Zeller served in the German Army (1915-1918). In 1918 he participated in the revolutionary struggle of the Berlin Worker's and Soldier's Council.

Magnus Zeller, The Orator, 1920

Under the Nazi-Régime his works were banned as "entarted" (anti-arian) and he didn't get the necessary official permit to buy painting materials. Nevertheless, under risk of his life, Zeller secretly painted some anti-fascist works like this one:

Magnus Zeller, The Total State (Hitler's State), 1938

After the Second World War Zeller moved to East-Berlin where he participated in major exhibitions despite the fact that the communist authorities classified his work as "formalistic", i.e. not conforming to the official style of "Socialistic Realism". Magnus Zeller died 1972 in East-Berlin.

Anita Rée

Anita Rée, Nude (Self-Portrait), 1923

Anita Rée came from an old Jewish merchant family. She was born in Hamburg, in 1885. Problems with state and church officials, attacks in the NSDAP press, and finally personal disappointments led this psychically and physically fragile artist to flee to the island of Sylt. Lonely and suffering the fear of persecution she was deeply concerned by the disbanding of the Hamburg Secession and the political developments in Germany. At the age of forty-eight she did not feel able to emigrate. She who had been conversant with the idea of suicide since 1916 took her own life in December 1933 by taking barbitone.

Anita Rée, White Trees, 1925