Lotte Jacobi

 Lotte Jacobi, Self-Portrait, Berlin, 1929

Lotte Jacobi (1896-1990) was born in Thorn,  Prussia, in what is now Poland. When she was two years old, her family moved to nearby Posen. After Posen became part of Poland in 1921, the Jacobi family moved to Berlin and Lotte began her film and camera work, studying film at the University of Munich, while simultaneously attending the Bavarian State Academy of Photography.

 Ruth Jacobi, Berlin, 1928

Photography ran in the Jacobi family. Lotte’s great-grandfather, Samuel Jacobi, visited Paris between 1839 and 1842, where he obtained a camera, a license, and some instruction from L.J.M. Daguerre and then returned to Thorn to set up a studio. He prospered at his trade and eventually passed the business on to his son, Alexander. Alexander, in turn, handed the business down to his three sons, the eldest of whom was Lotte’s father, Sigismund. Thus, there was always the expectation that Lotte would continue the family business. With such a heritage, she once commented, “I was to be a photographer and that was that.”

Lotte Jacobi, Peter Lorre, 1930. Best known for his villainous roles, actor Peter Lorre (né László Löwenstein, 1904-1964) became famous as the child murderer in Fritz Lang's first sound movie, M (1931). After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, he went on to build a prominent film career in America, with roles in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), and others.

 After completing her formal studies, Jacobi entered the family business in 1927. During this same period (1926-27) she began her professional work as a photographer, and she also produced four films, the most important being “Portrait of the Artist,” a study of the German painter Josef Scharl. 

 Josef Scharl, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1942

From October of 1932 to January of 1933, Jacobi travelled to the Soviet Union, in particular to Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan, taking photographs of what she saw. She returned to Berlin in February 1933, one month after Hitler came to power. As persecution against Jews increased, Lotte left Germany with her son, arriving in New York City in September 1935 where she opened a studio in Manhattan. In 1940, Lotte married Erich Reiss, a distinguished German publisher and writer, a marriage that lasted until his death in 1951. During this time, she continued portrait photography at her studio, while also embarking upon an experimental type of photographic work that artist Leo Katz later named photogenics.

 Lotte Jacobi, Lotte Lenya, c. 1930. Lenya, wife of composer Kurt Weill, became famous as Jenny in the first performance of The Threepenny Opera in 1928.

In 1955, Lotte left New York with her son and daughter-in-law and moved to Deering, New Hampshire. There she opened a new studio, where she both continued her own work and displayed works by other artists. She became interested in politics and was a fervent Democrat, representing New Hampshire at the Democratic National Convention in 1980. She travelled extensively (in the U.S., Europe, and Peru) and enjoyed new-found fame in the 1970s and 1980s. She died in 1990 at the age of 93.

 Lotte Jacobi, Albert Einstein, 1938

Lotte Jacobi is best known for her photographic portraits, which act as a “chronicle of an era.” The list of her subjects reads like a who’s who of the 20th century: W.H. Auden, Martin Buber, Marc Chagall, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Käthe Kollwitz, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Thomas Mann, Max Planck, Eleanor Roosevelt, J.D. Salinger, Alfred Stieglitz, and Chaim Weizmann – to name but a few. 

 Lotte Jacobi, Käthe Kollwitz, c. 1930

Hugo Erfurth

 Otto Dix, The Photographer Hugo Erfurth, 1925

Hugo Erfurth (1874-1948) was the portrait photographer par excellence of the intellectual and artistic avant-garde of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Many artists, including Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall and Paul Klee had their portraits taken in his atelier. He developed an elegiac style of portraiture. Erfurth’s work is characterized by a simple natural use of light, great psychological insight into the character of each of his subjects, and a masterful use of the technique of oil-pigment printing.

Hugo Erfurth,  Otto Dix with his painting class at the Dresden Academy, 1929

Erfurth studied art at the Academy of Arts in Dresden, Germany, from 1892 to 1896. Where he was trained in the aesthetics of Pictorialism and shaped by the compositional style of Art Nouveau. He worked as a portrait photographer in Dresden from 1896 until about 1925. From 1924 to 1948 he was chairman of the jury of the prestigious Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner (GDL). He worked in Cologne, Germany, from 1934 to 1943 and in Gaienhofen (Bodensee) from 1943 until his death in 1948. 

 Hugo Erfurth, Otto Dix and [actor] Heinrich George in front of his portrait, 1933

Otto Dix, Portrait of the Actor Heinrich George, 1932

 

Hugo Erfurth, Marc and Bella Chagall, 1923

 

 Hugo Erfurth, Oskar Kokoschka, 1920

 

Hugo Erfurth, Max Beckmann, 1928

 

 Otto Dix, Hugo Erfurth with Dog, 1926

Niklaus Stoecklin

 Niklaus Stoecklin, Self-Portrait, 1918

The son of a middle-class Swiss merchant, Niklaus Stoecklin (1896-1982) grew up in his native Basel, developing a propensity for art at home. From his grandfather, an entomologist and illustrator of scientific publications, he inherited a passion for observation and the analytical transposition of flora and fauna into drawing. From April to August 1914 he studied applied art in Munich. When the war broke out, he returned to Basel, where he began to attend the Academy of Fine Arts; he staged his first solo show of paintings and graphic works in 1915. 

 Niklaus Stoecklin, Wig Stand Mannequin with Pear-Shaped Money-Box, 1929

The period from 1917 to 1919 was one of training and experimentation. Stoecklin became intrigued by the late Gothic masters - particularly Konrad Witz - and worked in close contact with the Expressionists Albert Müller and Ignaz Epper, drawing inspiration from their works. In 1918 he was one of the promoters of  Das Neue Leben (The New Life), a Basel art group, participated in its discussions about Cubism and Futurism, and became fascinated with Robert Delaunay’s Orphism. 

 Niklaus Stoecklin, Nelly or Street Girl, 1918

At the same time, Stoecklin earned a living by designing posters for the Wasserman graphics company, working for them regularly for about ten years. He began to be successful during this period: in 1917 the collector Georg Reinhart purchased his painting Casa rossa. The following year this very work was published in Das Kunstblatt, the journal that, in the early 1920s, would host the first extensive critical discussions of the emerging trend towards figurative art, a movement that would be dubbed Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). 

 Niklaus Stoecklin, Still Life with Burning Candle, Matchbox and Dead Moth, 1950

Stoecklin made his international debut in 1925: he was the only non-German artist to be represented at the ground-breaking Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim, where he presented the sizeable number of six paintings. In his essay Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism, published that year, Franz Roh included him in a list of exponents of post-Expressionist trends. In the second half of the 1920s Stoecklin travelled frequently and these journeys were a source of inspiration for several series of paintings and drawings. Between 1927 and 1930 Stoecklin stayed in Paris a number of times where he painted the following portrait of the dancer Tatjana Barbakoff (see my post about Gert Wollheim): 

 Niklaus Stoecklin, Tatjana Barbakoff, 1929

The Kunstmuseum in Winterthur and the Kunsthalle in Basel devoted extensive monographic exhibitions to him, respectively in 1927 and 1928. In the mid-1930s, several public institutions and important companies in Basel, such as Hoffmann-La Roche, commissioned him to design and execute murals. In the 1940s and 1950s he worked almost exclusively on book illustrations and advertising graphics, and as a professor at the Schule für Gestaltung in Basel he trained an entire generation of graphic artists. Starting in the 1970s, Stoecklin’s works were presented at international exhibitions devoted to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. You can see more of his works in my Flickr set.

Painting Holes

That the most important things are done through tubes. Evidence: first, the reproductive organs, the pen and our gun (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher, 1770)

 

 

 Troops of the Kapp-putschists on Potsdamer Platz, Berlin

During street-fighting in Dresden during the 1920 right-wing Kapp Putsch, a shot fired by defending workers damaged Rubens' painting Bathsheba.  Ignoring the casualties (35 workers were killed and 151 wounded in the fighting) Oscar Kokoschka distributed a leaflet to defend the Rubens, beseeching the workers to fight elsewhere, because "the saving of such elevating works of art was in the end much greater than any political action." 

 

Franz W. Seiwert, Klassenkampf (Class warfare), 1922. Published in the radical newspaper, Die Aktion.

The progressive artist Frans Seiwert responded immediately: "Rubens' art had long been dead. For a few hundred years we have had enormous holes in gigantic frames. Such art paralysed the will of the present generation: it weighs heavily on us and prevents us from acting". 

 Eva Švankmajerová, The making of a hole, 1987 

Eleven years later, in an 1931 article for Die Weltbühne ("The Social Psychology of Holes"), Kurt Tucholsky found a kind of dialectic solution: 

"The hole is a permanent companion of the non-hole; I'm sorry, but there is no such thing as a hole in itself. If there were something everywhere, there would be no holes, but there wouldn't be any philosophy either, not to mention religion, which is holey in origin. A mouse couldn't exist without a hole, nor could man. It is the final salvation for both when they are hard-pressed by matter. A hole is always a Good Thing."

Philippe Rousseau, The Rat Who Withdrew From The World, 1885

 George Grosz, The Painter of the Hole I, 1948

Mark Tansey, Discarding The Frame, 1980s

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.

Felice Casorati

  Felice Casorati, Dreaming of Pomegranates, 1913

Felice Casorati (1883-1963) was born in Novara and showed an early interest in music and art. To please his parents he studied law at the University of Padua until 1906, but his ambition was to be a painter, an ambition confirmed in 1907 when a painting of his was shown in the Venice Biennale. The works he produced in the early years of his career were naturalistic in style. After 1910 the influence of the symbolists and particularly of Gustav Klimt (who also influenced  Ubaldo Oppi) turned him toward a more visionary approach. 

 Felice Casorati, Meriggio, 1923

In 1919, following his military service in World War I Casorati settled in Turin, intrigued by the decadent atmosphere of Turin with its sinister views. His works of the next decade typify, in their emphasis on geometry and formal clarity, the "return to order" then prevalent in the arts as a reaction to the war. Often working in tempera, Casorati drew inspiration from his study of Renaissance masters, especially Piero della Francesca, as in his 1922 portrait entitled Silvana Cenni:

 Felice Casorati, Portrait of Silvana Cenni, 1922

This symmetrical composition of a seated woman in a white dress is perhaps the best-known of the artist's works. In it, the careful rendering of volumes results paradoxically in a sense of unreality; this is characteristic of Casorati's art and it connects him to the metaphysical painters. 

 Felice Casorati, Beethoven, 1928

Briefly arrested in 1923 for his involvement with an anti-Fascist group, Casorati subsequently avoided opposing Mussolini's regime. After 1930 the severity of Casorati's earlier style softened somewhat and his palette brightened. He continued to exhibit widely, winning many awards, including the First Prize at the Venice Biennale of 1938. He was also involved in stage design. Felice Casorati died in Turin in 1963.

 Felice Casorati, La donna e l'armatura, 1921

Most of Casorati's important works are in Italian collections, public and private, including the Modern Art Revoltella Museum in Trieste and Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna. You can see more of his works here in my Flickr set.

François Barraud

François Emile Barraud, Untitled, 1930s

There are two excellent posts by Art Inconnu about the Swiss New Objectivity painter François Barraud. You can read them here and here.