Peter August Böckstiegel

 Peter August Böckstiegel,Self-Portrait, 1913

Peter August Böckstiegel (1889-1951) was born in Arrode, a village near Bielefeld in Westphalia, into a family of small farmers. He alreday showed artistic talent at an early age. In 1903 he began an apprenticeship as a painter and glazer passing his examinations in 1907. That same year saw the establishment of a school for crafts and decorative arts in Bielefeld, where Böckstiegel studied under Ludwig Godewols until 1913. In 1913 Böckstiegel began to study at the Royal Saxon Academy of Art in Dresden under Oskar Zwintscher and Otto Gussmann. In Dresden Böckstiegel befriended Conrad Felixmüller, whose portrait he painted twice in 1914.  

 Peter August Böckstiegel, Portrait of Conrad Felixmüller, 1914

At the beginning of 1915, Böckstiegel was drafted for military service and completed the picture Farewell, which shows him and his fiancée Hanna - Conrad Felixmüller's sister - whom he married in July 1919. Between 1916 and 1918 he was employed in Russia, Romania and Ukraine, but did not show any enthusiasm for the war. While serving in the army, Böckstiegel had the possibility to continue his artistic work, and he produced numerous expressive watercolours.

Peter August Böckstiegel, Farewell, 1915

During the war Böckstiegel frequently corresponded with Felixmüller, who by then had become active in numerous art projects with leftist political intentions. His return to Dresden in March 1919 relieved him of the nightmarish burden the war had become for him. Böckstiegel, together with Felixmüller, joined the group of artists known as Dresden Secession, but left it one year later. Politically moderate, Böckstiegel joined the Social Democratic Party whereas most of his painter friends sympathised with the Communists.

Peter August Böckstiegel, Departure of the Youngsters for War, 1914

Böckstiegel lived in Westphalia during the summer and spent the winters in Dresden. His choice of motifs was by now concentrated on his immediate surroundings. In the early 1920s Böckstiegel began to approach the working class with his art. Since there was not yet a museum in Bielefeld, he transported his paintings by handcart to factories, where he explained them to the workers.

Peter August Böckstiegel, The Word, 1920

In 1934 Böckstiegel was forced to become a member of the "Reich Chamber of Fine Art". The National Socialists were first ambivalent in their appraisal of Böckstiegel's work. On the one hand, he was not permitted to exhibit in Berlin, on the other, he received a couple of official commissions. Finally, in 1937, his work was officially declared as "degenerate" and more than hundred of his paintings were either sold abroad or burnt in the coutyard of the Berlin Fire Department. 

 Peter August Böckstiegel, Hanna [the artist's wife], 1927

Böckstiegel's studio was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. After the destruction of the city, Böckstiegel moved permanently to Arrode, where he became the first chairman of the "Westphalian Secession 1945". The first comprehensive retrospective of his work was shown between June and August 1950 at the Dresden State Art Collections. Peter August Böckstiegel died at his family home in Arrode on March 22nd, 1951. There is an excellent webpage by the "Friends of Peter August Böckstiegel" where you can see many more of his works.

Zygmunt Waliszewski

 Zygmunt Waliszewski, Self-Portrait, 1929

Zygmunt Waliszewski (1897-1936) was born in Saint Petersburg to the Polish family of an engineer. In 1907 his parents moved to Tbilisi, Georgia, where Waliszewski spent his childhood. In Tbilisi he began his artistic education in the School of Drawing and Painting. The work Waliszewski did while in Tbilisi (1917-1921) was influenced by French painting of the time - significant amounts of which he saw in various private collections - and by the art of the Russian avant-garde. 

 Zygmunt Waliszewski, Hamak, 1917

During World War I Waliszewski fought in the ranks of the Russian Army, returning to Tbilisi in 1917. He visited Moscow several times and became acquainted with the art of the Mir Isskustva (The World of Art Movement). In the early 1920s, Waliszewski departed for Poland, and settled in Kraków. Between 1921 and 1924 he studied at Krakow's Academy of Fine Arts in the studios of Wojciech Weiss and Jozef Pankiewicz. 

Zygmunt Waliszewski, Pejzaż zimowy z chatą, 1924

Waliszewski went to Paris in 1924 where he continued his studies in painting under the guidance of Pankiewicz. During his stay in Paris Waliszewski contracted the non-curable Buerger's disease and lost both his legs. 

Zygmunt Waliszewski, Wyspa miłości, 1935

In 1931 he returned to Poland, residing in Warsaw and Kraków. During this time Waliszewski designed scenery and posters, created book illustrations, drew and painted caricatures. He also composed fantastic, Comedia dell'arte inspired scenes and numerous variations on the motif of Don Quixote. Despite his deadly illness, he died in 1936, Waliszewski filled his paintings with humor, comic situations and irony. You can see more of his works here.

Madame d'Ora

Madame d'Ora, Self-Portrait, c. 1925

Dora Philippine Kallmus (1881-1963) was born to a Jewish family in Vienna. Though her mother, Malvine (née Sonnenberg), died when she was young, her family remained an important source of emotional and financial support in her career. She became interested in the field while assisting painter Hans Makart and in 1905 became the first woman accepted by the Association of Austrian photographers. At that time she was also the first woman allowed to study theory at the Graphischen Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, which only in 1908 granted women access to other courses in photography. 

 Madame d'Ora, Josephine Baker, c. 1925

In 1907 she completed an apprenticeship with portrait photographer Nicola Perscheid in Berlin. After returning to Vienna she established her own studio with the help of her family. Its name - Atelier d’Ora - reflected her love of French culture.  Her studio achieved rapid popularity among the Viennese elite. In 1908 she portrayed Gustav Klimt, and in 1916 d’Ora was asked to photograph the coronation of Kaiser Karl. The prominent position of her father, Dr. Philipp Kalmus, as a government lawyer brought people from high levels of the civil service, banking and business to her studio. In 1919, d’Ora converted to Roman Catholicism. She never married. 

 Madame d'Ora, Rhythmic Pose, c. 1930 

D’Ora was one of the first photographers to focus on the emerging areas of modern, expressive dance and fashion, particularly after 1920, when fashion photographs started to replace drawings in magazines. While her photographic technique was not radical, her avant-garde subject matter was a risky choice for a commercial studio. However, d’Ora’s photographs, which captured her clients’ individuality with new, natural positions in contrast to stiff, old-fashioned poses, quickly became popular. 

 Madame d'Ora, Anonymous photograph of a dancer, Vienna, 1923

From 1921 to1926 d’Ora spent the summers in Karlsbad seeking international clientele and in 1925 opened a studio in Paris. In Paris d’Ora gained access to the international fashion industry and also received long-term contracts from the fashion magazines Die Dame and Officiel de la Couture et de la Mode. Her Paris photographs reflect the glamorous style of her clients there, including Coco Chanel, Tamara de Lempicka, Colette and Maurice Chevalier. In addition, d’Ora often published her own short essays to accompany her photos. 

Madame D'Ora, Tamara de Lempicka, 1929

D’Ora sold her Paris studio soon after the invasion of the Germans in 1940. Despite her conversion, she remained in danger because of her Jewish background. During the war she hid in a cloister in La Lanvese, in the southern province of Ardèche, and later on a farm. Many of her family were killed in the Holocaust, including her sister Anna. 

 Madame d'Ora, Colette, 1953

Both the subject and style of d’Ora’s photographs changed radically after the war. Already in 1945 she documented the plight of refugees at a camp in Austria and in 1956, at the age of seventy-five, completed a series vividly depicting the brutality of Paris slaughterhouses. After she was hit by a motorcycle in 1959, d’Ora lost much of her memory and was unable to work. She spent her remaining years in Frohnleiten, Austria, in the family house that had been forcibly sold under the Nazis but later returned to her. She died there on October 28, 1963.

Gustav Klimt's Obsessions

 Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt in blue smock, 1913

In June 1902, Auguste Rodin was passing through Vienna, en route from Prague. While in town, he accepted an invitation to visit the current exhibition of the Vienna Secession movement, and to meet the artist whose monumental work, the Beethoven Frieze, was at the heart of the display: Gustav Klimt. The two artists - Rodin 62, and at the peak of his fame, Klimt just about to turn 40 - went to a café in the Prater garden. According to the art critic Berta Zuckerkandl, they sat down beside two remarkably beautiful young women at whom Rodin gazed enchantedly.

 Gustav Klimt, Two Girlfriends, 1916

"That afternoon, slim and lovely vamps came buzzing around Klimt and Rodin, those two fiery lovers," Zuckerkandl recalled. "Rodin leaned over and to Klimt and said, 'I have never before experienced such an atmosphere - your tragic and magnificent Beethoven fresco, your unforgettable, temple-like exhibition, and now this garden, these women, this music. What is the reason for it all?' And Klimt slowly nodded his beautiful head, and answered only one word: 'Austria.'" 

Gustav Klimt - Beethove Frieze, The Hostile Powers, 1902

In Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, it seems, that hostile powers - naked temptresses and a huge snarling ape - above all symbolised the disease syphilis of which he was terrified - and understandably, since he had contracted it at an early age. Thus, his frieze brought together the themes of music, death, love and sex - so fundamentally fascinating to the Vienna of Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler. That was perhaps what Klimt meant by his laconic answer to Rodin's question. 

Madame d'Ora, Portrait of Gustav Klimt, 1908

A young woman named Frederike Beer-Monti rang on Klimt's doorbell in 1915, hoping he would paint her portrait (she had already posed for his younger rival, Schiele). She found him both taciturn and formidable. Klimt took her hand, looked at it, turned it over and for a long time,  but said not a single word. Beer-Monti was finally allowed to enter. But, "it took a lot of talking to make him a little friendlier." Klimt eventually agreed to paint her. Though the result was a magnificent picture, Beer-Monti was ambivalent about the artist. "Klimt was exceptionally animal-like. His body exuded a peculiar odour. As a woman, one was really afraid of him." 

 Gustav Klimt, Friedericke Maria Beer-Monti, 1916.

Three models inhabited Klimt's studio, rather like his pet cats. When he was painting Frederike Beer-Monti, he took a break every hour and went into an adjacent room to relax and chat for a while with the models who were always there. Alma Schindler reported that he "would take them to the theatre or races, always slipped them a banknote." Alma Schindler herself - later Alma Mahler, and subsequently the lover of Oskar Kokoschka was one of Klimt's failed conquests. He pursued her to Italy in 1899, where she was on holiday with her family. He kissed her in a Genoese hotel room, but she, though wildly in love, was firm ("not without a ring on my finger"). 

 Gustav Klimt, Lady with Hat and feather Boa, 1909

About the same time, Klimt fathered three sons by two other women, and began a long-lasting, though apparently open, relationship with a talented proprietor of a Viennese fashion salon, Emilie Flöge. The names of the models and other women in his life do not always survive, partly because Flöge burnt much of Klimt's correspondence after his death from a stroke in 1918. One who has been identified by chance recently was Hilde Roth, a beautiful Bohemian redhead from Budapest whose face can be seen in Lady with Hat and feather Boa (above).

 Gustav Klimt, The Bride, 1918

When Klimt died, an unfinished painting entitled The Bride was left in his studio. The right half was dominated by a semi-naked female figure. The knees were bent and the legs splayed out to expose a carefully detailed pubic area on which the artist had leisurely begun to paint an overlay 'dress' of suggestive and symbolic ornamental shapes. Thus Klimt's own death revealed the sexual obsession that lay beneath his shimmering surfaces.

Gerda Taro

 Gerda Taro, A woman in Barcelona training for the Republican militia, August 1936

Gerda Taro (1910-1937) was born Gerda Pohorylle, daughter of a liberal Jewish family in Stuttgart, Germany. The family moved to Leipzig when Gerda was nineteen, where the growing strength of the National Socialists and a new circle of friends drew her into involvement in local leftist organizations. In 1933, she was arrested for participating in an anti-Nazi protest campaign. Eventually, the entire Pohorylle family was forced to leave Nazi Germany toward different destinations. Taro, who left for Paris,  would not see her family again.

 Anom., Gerda Taro and Robert Capa in Paris, 1936

After a year in Paris spent struggling for work, Gerda met Hungarian photographer André Friedmann, who would later change his name to Robert Capa. A romance developed between Gerda and André, and Gerda increasingly managed the business side of André’s work, while beginning to experiment with taking her own photographs. In February of 1936, she obtained her first press card. Gerda and André, frustrated with their lack of success selling his stories, constructed a fictional American photographer named Robert Capa, under whose identity they might fare better than as one of many Eastern European Jewish émigrés in Paris. Gerda, in turn, changed her last name to Taro, taken from the Japanese artist Taro Okamoto. 

Gerda Taro, Onboard the Jaime I, "The Spanish Battleship Potemkin", Almería, 1937

When the Spanish Civil War broke out on July 17, 1936, Taro and Capa immediately arranged to go to Barcelona. They photographed side-by-side, often recording the same scenes. Their pictures from this period are easily distinguishable because they used cameras that produced negatives with different proportions; Taro the square-format Rollei, and Capa the rectangular Leica. From the outset, the photographic team of Taro and Capa published in magazines with established reputations like Vu in France or the Züricher Illustrierte in Switzerland. 

Gerda Taro, Boy in the uniform of the Iberian Anarchist Federation, 1936

Taro and Capa returned to Paris for the fall and early winter, and made a second trip to Spain in February of 1937. Capa remained in Spain only briefly, returning to Paris at the end of the month, while Taro stayed on. It appears that their romance had cooled by this point, and Taro was distinguishing herself with a successful independent career in the French leftist press. Some of Taro’s most arresting photographs were taken in the spring of 1937, in a hospital and morgue following the bombing of Valencia. Taro seems to have predated Capa’s famous assertion that “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough” with her unflinching images of the civilian casualties of the war.

Gerda Taro, Republican soldiers, Battle of Brunete, July 1937

In July 1937, Taro went to Brunete, outside of the capital, to cover fighting for Ce Soir. For two weeks, Taro photographed the battle for the city, and her images were widely reproduced, in part because they demonstrated that the Republicans were holding the Brunete, despite General Franco's troops claim to the contrary. On July 25, as the Republican position faltered, Taro found herself in the midst of a hasty retreat. She jumped on the running-board of a car transporting casualties. A tank sideswiped the car, knocking Taro to the ground. She died the next day. 

 Anom., Gerda Taro at Brunete, 1937

Due to her political commitment, Taro had become an anti-fascist figure. On August 1, on what would have been her 27th birthday, the French Communist Party gave her a grand funeral in Paris, which was attended by tens of thousands. She was buried her at Père Lachaise Cemetery, where Alberto Giacometti created a monument for her grave. You can see more photos of Gerda Taro in a slide show of the New York Times.

Italian Modernism

Bruschetti, Aereoveduta del Fiume, 1932

The following is a reproduction of the first two pages of Emily Braun's brilliant book Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, which was published by Cambridge University in 2000. Her book explains why Mario Sironi (I have previously written about him here) and many other Italian artists could, on the one hand, openly support Mussolini's repressive regime and, at the same time, produce avant-garde art that still fascinates us today. I have illustrated Emily's text with some paintings of "not so widely known" Italian artists.

 Ferruccio Ferrazzi, Viaggio tragico, 1925

"On 26 March 1923, at the inauguration of the exhibition Sette Pittori del Novecento (Seven Painters of the Twentieth Century) in Milan, Benito Mussolini first declared his intentions about state interventions in the arts. Installed as prime minister only five months earlier, on a wave of Fascist violence and parliamentary paralysis, he was more attuned to pressing matters of political consolidation than to the fine points of aesthetic discourse. 

 Carlo Sbisà, Il palombaro, 1931

Nonetheless, Mussolini astutely acknowledged both the privileged position of creative autonomy and the artist's role in shaping a Fascist Italy. In a shrewd, opportunistic statement, the new leader offered an arrangement of benign mutual support in the interest of the "human spirit":

I declare that it is far from my idea to encourage anything like an art of the State. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The State has only duty: not to undermine art, to provide human conditions for artists, and to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view.

Cesare Sofianopulo, Maschere, 1930

Over the course of twenty years, as the Fascist movement was transformed into a regime, as revolution gave way first to normalization, then to dictatorship, and finally to totalitarian rule, Mussolini's liberal attitude toward the fine arts changed little. The credo that "art belongs to the domain of the individual" became one of the most potent means of drawing intellectuals to the Fascist state while creating an impression of the regime as an enlightened patron. 

 Alberto Savinio, Self Portrait in the Form of an Owl, c. 1930

As dictator, Mussolini never sanctioned an official style, despite concerted efforts by both intellectuals and party bureaucrats to forge an art of the state. Instead, the regime instigated a cultural policy based on a series of administrative controls, which aimed to discourage opposition with an insidious combination of coercion and tolerance. As a result, the Fascist period was marked by pluralism in the visual arts, which permitted the avantgarde and the retrograde, abstraction and neoclassicism, to be deftly absorbed by the State's eclectic patronage. 

 Alberto Martini, Ritratto di Wally Toscanini, 1925

Questions of style were generally left to the artists and critics, often resulting in bitter polemics that diverted attention to matters of form rather than content. Intentionally or not, Mussolini's hands.off policy had the effect of dividing and conquering the intellectual community. This made organizing a cultural opposition a remote possibility: the strategy of allowing a margin of creative freedom while awarding capitulation led the majority of artists to coexist with, if not openly support, the regime. Fascist Italy's tolerance of diversity in the fine arts was very different from the attitude of Nazi Germany, where a monolithic and absolute cultural policy dictated both the overall model of volkish culture and a specific style of illustrative realism. 

 Ernesto Thayaht, Il grande nocchiero, 1939

Moreover, unlike the totalitarian regimes of Germany and the Soviet Union, the Italian Fascist government did not persecute or subjugate the avant-garde, despite attempts to do so by hardliners. (The exception, of course, is Jewish artists, who were persecuted as Jews rather than as artists after the Racial Laws of 1938.) Instead, the Italian situation presents a unique set of historical and moral problems that is tainted by a less than heroic story of accomodation, opportunism, and outright support, rather than rebellion, among the cultural elite."

Käthe Kollwitz

 Käthe Kollwitz, Self-Portrait, 1923

Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1942) was born in Königsberg (today Kaliningrad, Russia) into a relatively wealthy home. She was the fifth child of Karl and Katharina Schmidt. Karl Schmidt had first studied law but he then turned his back to the legal profession and became a master-mason. Kollwitz grew up in an atmosphere of religious teachings and radical thought. She was encouraged to draw as a child by her father. Her first painting Kollwitz created at sixteen. In 1884 she entered an academy established specially for women in Berlin. Kollwitz continued her art studies in Köningsberg, and in Munich's School for Women Artists, where she realized that she was not a painter at all - the graphic arts were her medium. In her early period Kollwitz took influences from Zola's approach to reality and Max Klinger's symbolist engravings. 

 Käthe Kollwitz, The Weavers' Revolt (1893-98), Sheet IV

In 1891 Kollwitz married Dr. Karl Kollwitz; they had two sons, Hans and Peter. Karl was a physician for a workers' health insurance fund, who oftentimes treated the working poor free of charge. For the next half century they lived in Prenzlauer Berg, a working class suburb of North Berlin. Kollwitz's studio was next to her husband's office. Kollwitz's first series of lithographs, The Weavers' Revolt (above), was loosely based on Gerhart Hauptmann's play. The Weavers set is considered a landmark in class-conscious art. It was shown at the annual Berlin art show in 1898. Due to its politically powerful content, Kaiser Wilhelm refused to award her the medal she had won. However, Kollwitz was appointed to teach graphics and nude studies at the Berlin Künstlerinnenschule (Berlin Art School for Women). 

 Käthe Kollwitz, Outbreak, 1921

Kollwitz's later print series include the woodcuts The Peasants' War (1903-08), in which the chief figure of "Outbreak" (above) was the furious Black Anna, portrayed from her back, and Proletariat (1925). Also Die Carmagnole (1901), about women dancing around a guillotine, was partly inspired by a literary source, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. Kollwitz's sturdy figures show the influence of her friend, Ernst Barlach, whose graphic technique also inspired her woodcut of Karl Liebknecht, a friend of the family. Kollwitz had made drawings of Liebknecht's corpse before his funeral. The widely distributed work created a symbolic connection with Christ's martyrdom and the murder of a Marxist revolutionary by Government troops: 

 Käthe Kollwitz, Memory Page for Karl Liebknecht: The Living and the Dead, 1921

Kollwitz's social consciousness, which could be characterized as "critical humanitarianism", separated her from such pioneering Expressionist groups as Die Brücke and the Blaue Reiter, led by Kandinsky, Marc, and Klee. Following Goya and Daumier, she fully accepted the social function of art. "I am content that my art should have purpose outside itself," Kollwitz wrote in her diary. In spite of her mission, Kollwitz's works convey a feeling of inwardness and privacy which is in strange contrast with their public nature. "A certain melancholy was about her," said Geroge Grosz who met her only once, "far from talkative, rather moody." 

 Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with a Dead Child, 1903

In 1907 the Villa Romana Prize by Max Klinger enabled Kollwitz to spend time in Italy, where she took a walking tour from Florence to Rome with an English woman equipped with a revolver. Italian Renaissance art, with the exception of Michelangelo's work, did not inspire her. "The enormous galleries are confusing, and they put you off because of the masses of inferior stuff in the pompous Italian vein," she wrote in a letter.  In 1913 Kollwitz co-founded the Women's Arts Union, Frauenkunstverband. From the beginning of Kollwitz's career, the theme of romantic love did not interest her, but in some drawings she depicted tender feelings between women. "As a matter of fact I believe that bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production," Kollwitz once confessed, "at any rate, the tinge of masculinity within me helped me in my work."

 Anom., Käthe Kollwitz, 1927

After the outbreak of WWI, Peter Kollwitz, just eighteen, volunteered for the German Army. He died on the Belgian front. Devastated by the loss of her son, Kollwitz worked for many years on a memorial to the fallen. The deeply personal sculpture of two kneeling figures, "The Parents", was eventually revealed in 1932 in the Vladslo Military Cemetery in Belgium:

 Käthe Kollwitz, The Parents, Vladslo German Soldiers’ Cemetery, Vladslo (Belgium), 1932

Kollwitz's fiftieth birthday was commemorated in the summer of 1917 with a retrospective exhibition in Paul Cassirer's Gallery in Berlin. At the age of 52, Kollwitz became the first woman elected to the prestigious Prussian Academy of Art. Kollwitz made several prints as propaganda against war, such as the woodcut Die Freiwilligen (The Volunteers), a version of the dance of death:

 Käthe Kollwitz, The Volunteers, 1922

The feverish mass hysteria, which had gripped the nations at the outbreak of WWI, is portrayed through a group of young men following blindly the figure of Death. Among Kollwitz's most copied anti-war pieces is Never Again War (below), in which a male figure raises one arm high and the other hand is on his heart. Kollwitz was internationally known for her etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs, but also her posters for leftist organizations and humanitarian leaflets contributed to her fame.

 Käthe Kollwitz, Never Again War, 1924

In 1927 Kollwitz visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR). Although she was subsequently disillusioned, she did not denounce Stalinist culture and propaganda. In 1932 her works were shown in Leningrad and Moscow. In 1928 Kollwitz became the head of the master class in graphics at the Berlin Academy. After Hitler assumed power in 1933, most leftist artists went into exile or were forced to stop working. Kollwitz attempted to form with Heinrich Mann a front of artists against the Nazi administration, but soon she had to resign from the Academy, when the Nazis threatened to break it up. After Kollwitz gave an interview to a Russian reporter, she was interrogated by the Gestapo. In 1938 her husband's medical practice was banned. In 1934-35 Kollwitz made eight large lithographs called Death. The cycle culminated in her own self-portrait in Call of Death:

 Käthe Kollwitz, Call of Death, from the series "Death", 1934

Karl Kollwitz died in 1940. Two years later Kollwitz's grandson was killed in Russia. Her home and a number of her works were destroyed in 1943 in an air raid - only one portfolio survived. Because of the bombings, she was evacuated from Berlin. In 1944 she found a refuge in the Moritzburg estate of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony. Kollwitz died on 22 April, 1945, in Moritzburg. She was cremated and buried in Berlin with her husband, brothers, and sisters. You can see more of her works in my Flickr set.