Jankel Adler

 Jankel Adler, Portrait of a Man, 1923

Jankel Adler (1895-1949) was born as the seventh of ten children near Lodz, Poland. He grew up among hassic Jews surrounding the textile city of Lodz, influenced greatly by its Polish, German and Jewish population. Adler started an apprenticeship as an engraver with his uncle in Belgrade in 1912, after which he traveled through the Balkan countries. During World War I, as a "suspicious foreigner" Adler commenced his studies with Professor Gustav Wiethüchter at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Barmen, Germany.

Jankel Adler,  Seated Woman, 1928

After his studies he spent time in Poland, Berlin and Paris. In 1922, Jankel Adler moved to Düsseldorf. There he became a teacher at the Academy of Arts, and became acquainted with Paul Klee, who influenced his work. Both artists belonged to the artists group "Junges Rheinland". He also befriended the painter Anton Räderscheidt, a leading figure of the New Objectivity. 

 Anom., Jankel Adler (standing) with Anton Räderscheidt, 1920s

A painting by Adler received a gold medal at the exhibition “German Art Düsseldorf” in 1928.  In 1931 Adler moved into a studio at the Düsseldorf academy, which he abandoned in 1933 when leaving Germany upon friends' advice, after he had published together with other left-wing artists and intellectuals an "urgent appeal" against the Nazi policy and for communism during the campaigns for the parliamentary "elections" in February 1933. 

Jankel Adler, The Mutilated, 1942. The Mutilated was painted in London during heavy bombing and reflected, he said, his admiration for "the behaviour of Londoners under great stress and suffering, only then could humanity be seen at its best".

In that year, two of his pictures were displayed by the Nazis at the Mannheimer Arts Center as examples of degenerate art. Paintings of him and Marc Chagall were pulled on a hand-cart through the streets and publicly jeered at (see my article Chagall and Germany). Adler now left Germany, staying in Paris, where he regarded his exile consciously as political resistance against the fascist regime in Germany. In the years that followed, he made numerous journeys to Poland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Soviet Union. In 1937, twenty-five of his works were seized from public collections by the Nazis and four were shown in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich.

 Jankel Adler, Two Figures, 1944

When World War II broke out in 1939, Jankel Adler volunteered for the Polish army. Two years later, however, he was dismissed due to his bad health. Jankel Adler moved to Scotland and shortly after to London. During the 1940s a number of respectable exhibitions of Adler's works took place in London, Paris and New York. In 1949 Jankel Adler died in Albourne near London with the bitter knowledge that none of his nine brothers and sisters had survived the Holocaust.

Karl Zerbe

 Karl Zerbe, Self-Portrait, 1949

Karl Zerbe (1903-1972) was born in Berlin, Germany. The family lived in Paris, France from 1904-1914, where his father was an executive in an electrical supply concern. In 1914 they moved to Frankfurt where they lived until 1920. Karl Zerbe studied chemistry in 1920 at the Technische Hochschule, Friedberg. From 1921-1923 he lived in Munich, where he studied painting at the Debschitz School, mainly under Josef Eberz. From 1924-1926 Karl Zerbe worked and traveled in Italy on a fellowship from the City of Munich. 

 Karl Zerbe, Parrot and Decanter, 1934

In 1932 his oil painting titled: ‘"Herbstgarten’" (autumnal garden), of 1929, was acquired by the National-Galerie (the painting was destroyed by the Nazis as "degenerative art" in 1937). Recognized as one of Germany's major new artists, Zerbe's first exhibitions in Munich and Berlin attracted immediate attention and he was represented in some of the finest museums in the country. 

 Karl Zerbe, Armory, 1943

In 1934, at the age of 31, Karl Zerbe came to America fleeing Nazi persecution (he had a jewish background). While Zerbe's paintings were being removed and destroyed as Kulturbolschewismus ("degenerate art") from German museums, the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University gave him his first one-man show in America. From 1937- 1955 Karl Zerbe was the head of the Department of Painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1939 Karl Zerbe became a U.S. citizen. He died 1972 in Tallahassee, Florida. Today, Karl Zerbe's paintings are exhibited in many U.S. museums, but he is almost forgotten in Germany.

Karl Zerbe, Melancholia (triptych), 1946

Max Oppenheimer

 Egon Schiele, Portrait of Max Oppenheimer, 1910

Max Oppenheimer (1885-1954), a native of Vienna, began to study art at the Vienna Art Academy at the age of fifteen, continuing from 1903 at the Prague Art Academy. In 1906 Max Oppenheimer joined the Prague group OSMA (the Eight), one of the first associations of Czech avant-garde artists. 

Max Oppenheimer, Operation, 1912

In 1908 Max Oppenheimer moved back to Vienna, joining the circle of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. His encounter with Kokoschka's painting exerted a formative influence on Oppenheimer, especially in the field of the psychological portrait. After participating in several group shows, Oppenheimer had his first one-man show at the Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1911:

Max Oppenheimer, Exhibition Poster, 1911 (showing his canvas Bleeding Man)

That same year Oppenheimer began to work for the left-wing journal Die Aktion founded by Franz Pfemfert in Berlin. In 1915 Oppenheimer moved to Switzerland, where he would remain, with interruptions, until 1924. His style of painting subsequently incorporated Cubist elements that would become characteristic of his work. Introduced to Dada in 1916, Oppenheimer participated in the first Dada exhibition in Zurich that year. 

Max Oppenheimer, Gustav Mahler conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 1935

Oppenheimer went to Berlin again in 1926 but by 1931 the political situation in Germany was so tense, that he decided to return to Vienna. Two years later his work was confiscated during the widespread wave of persecution of Jews and SA defamation of their work that followed the Reichstag fire. In 1932 Oppenheimer participated a last time in a group show at the Vienna Künstlerhaus before fleeing to Switzerland in 1938. 

Max Oppenheimer, Kolisch-Quartett, 1940

In 1939 Oppenheimer emigrated to the US, where his work revealed a reversion to earlier ideas. Shortly before his death in his New York apartment on 19 May 1954, Max Oppenheimer was experimenting with American Abstract Expressionism.

Felix José Weil

 George Grosz, Portrait of Felix. J. Weil, 1926

Felix José Weil (1898-1975) was the original financial provider for the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The Institut later earned worldwide recognition by the works of, among others,  Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Jürgen Habermas. Weil was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and was the son of the wealthy German-Jewish merchant Hermann Weil and his wife Rosa Weil. At the age of 9 he was sent to attend school in Frankfurt. He went on to attend the universities in Tübingen and Frankfurt, where he graduated with a doctoral degree in political science. While at these universities he became increasingly interested in Marxism. 

Participants of the 1923 Marxist Work Week: Friedrich Pollock (above, 2. from left), Georg Lukács (above, 4. from left), Felix Weil (above, 2. from right).

In 1923 Felix Weil financed the First Marxist Work Week (Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche) in the German town of Ilmenau. The event was attended by figures such as Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch and Friedrich Pollock. Based on the success of this event he went on, along with his friend Friedrich Pollock, to found the Institute for Social Research in 1924 which he financed with a large part of his heritage. Describing himself later as a "Salon Bolshevik", Weil also supported left-wing artists like George Grosz whom he financed a trip to Italy. Since 1945 Weil permanently lived in California.  

 You can read more about Felix Weil here (page 11 ff).

Londa Felixmüller

Here is a striking 1933 portrait by Conrad Felixmüller of his wife Londa:

Conrad Felixmüller, Londa vor dem Spiegel, 1933

Chagall and Germany

 Marc Chagall, Exodus, 1952

Chagall left Russia in 1922 and pursued his work in Berlin from May 1922 to October 1923 before he finally settled in Paris permanently at the end of 1923. His temporary stay in Berlin became decisive for his career as an artist because he could learn from Hermann Struck und Joseph Budko the art of woodcut and of etching. In Berlin he created under the patronage of  the art dealer Paul Cassirer his first etching series called “Mein Leben” (My Life). At the time, Berlin was a centre for Jewish artistic endeavours. Notable Jewish artists were pursuing their work there e.g. Jakob Steinhardt, Ludwig Meidner, El Lissitzky, Issachar Beer Ryback, and Jankel Adler, all whom Chagall knew personally. 

 Marc Chagall, The Pinch of Snuff, 1912

Chagall was a renowned painter of modern art, even and especially in Germany where notable museum directors such as Georg Swarzenski and Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub had purchased his pictures. Already in 1933 these purchases came to be the target of Nazi propaganda. In Mannheim at the exhibition “kulturbolschewistische Bilder” Chagall's famous painting “The Pinch of Snuff” (above) was pulled on a hand-cart through the streets and publicly jeered at together with a painting from Jankel Adler:

 Jankel Adler, Cléron, the Cat Creator, 1925

In 1938 all of Chagall's oil paintings and water-colour pictures were confiscated from the public collections. Four of these were on display at the exhibition of “Degenerate Art” (i.e. “Purim” from the Folkwang Museum Essen, “The Pinch of Snuff” from the Kunsthalle Mannheim, “ Winter” and “Men with Cow”, two water-colour paintings from the Städtische Galerie at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt). The confiscated works were later sold in Switzerland in exchange for foreign currencies. Today they are dispersed at notable museums throughout the world. Paintings that belonged to private collections shared about the same fate. For instance those that belonged to the vast private collection of Herwarth Walden. Today they are located in the U.S. and in Switzerland. 

Marc Chagall, Solitude, 1933

Chagall himself has made the beginning rule of tyranny in Germany an important theme in his paintings like in “Solitude” of 1933 (above) and “The Chute of Angels”, on which he worked from 1923 to 1947:

 Marc Chagall, The Chute of Angels, 1923-1947

Look at the clocks, it's ten past ten on both of them, close to midnight, and time is running out again:

 Marc Chagall, Clock, 1914

After Chagall heard of the pogroms during the Reichskristallnacht in 1938, he created a major work called “The White Crucifixion”, today in the Art Institute of Chicago:

Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion, 1938 

Chagall needs to flee France from the Germans in 1944. After his return from exile in the United States to Paris, as part of a memorial book dedicated to eighty-four Jewish artists who were killed by the Nazis in France, Chagall wrote a poem entitled "For the Slaughtered Artists: 1950":

I see them: trudging alone in rags,

barefoot on mute roads.

The brothers of Israels, Pissaro and

Modigliani, our brothers - pulled with ropes

by the sons of Dürer, Cranach

and Holbein - to death in the crematoria.

Hanns Ludwig Katz

 Hanns Ludwig Katz and his first wife, c. 1930

Hanns Ludwig Katz (1892–1940) was born in Karlsruhe, Germany. After leaving school he made a short sojourn in Paris at the atelier of Henri Matisse. From 1913 to 1918 Katz studied painting, history of art, and architecture in Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, and Munich. He married the pianist Franziska Ehrenreich and they moved to Frankfurt in 1920, after he had published a series of expressionist lithographs entitled Danse macabre which alluded to the revolution in 1919. 

 Hanns Ludwig Katz, Self-Portrait, c. 1930

In Frankfurt, Katz became known as a painter of portraits, cityscapes, and still lifes, which revealed the influence of Max Beckmann and the Neue Sachlichkeit. But despite the success and the support of the art critic Max Osborn, he had to become a partner in a whitewashing company in 1923 in order to make a living. 

 

Hanns Ludwig Katz, Eye Operation, 1929

After the Nazi takeover in 1933, Katz took an active part in the Frankfurt section of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, (Jewish Cultural Association) and in 1935, one year after his wife died, he planned to establish a semiautonomous Jewish settlement in Yugoslavia. After his endeavors failed he immigrated to South Africa in 1936. Before leaving Frankfurt, Katz married Ruth Wolf, who followed him into exile. Thus he was able to escape before one of his best expressionist portraits - of the anarchist Gustav Landauer (1919) - was publicly denounced in the Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1938. 

 Hanns Ludwig Katz, Miss Mary (Detail), 1926

Despite becoming deeply involved in painting the landscapes of his new homeland, Katz was unable to make headway in the South African art scene. Apart from a small circle of friends, mostly drawn from a similar German-Jewish leftist background, he was intellectually isolated. He earned a living as a house painter and his wife Ruth, a sculptor, supplemented their income by designing record covers.

 Hanns Ludwig Katz, Self-Portrait, c. 1930

In 1940, Hanns Ludwig Katz died of cancer in Johannesburg. It took a half-century for Katz’s work to resurface in Germany, a crucial link being Hans Wongtschowsky, a fellow refugee, who had come to Johannesburg a few months earlier than Katz and shared a house with him. Wongtschowsky sent slides of Katz’s paintings to a relative in Germany, which were brought to the attention of Henri Nannen, whose new foundation had endowed the new Kunsthalle in Emden. Nannen alerted the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, where a few charcoal drawings of Katz’s were housed, to his paintings. They began intensive research into the work and life of the forgotten artist which culminated in a major retrospective exhibition of his work in 1992, under the auspices of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt and the Kunsthalle in Emden. In 1994, the exhibition was brought to the South African National Gallery in Cape Town.