Helmar Lerski

 Helmar Lerski, Yemenite Boy, 1933

Helmar Lerski (1871-1956) was born in Strasburg, then part of Germany, as Israel Schmuklerski. His parents were Jewish immigrants of Polish origin. In 1876 the family moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where they obtained Swiss citizenship. Lerski moved to New York in 1893 at the age of twenty-two to work as an actor, changing his name in 1896. He spent several years with a German theatre company in Chicago and Milwaukee, where he met his first wife, a photographer. 

 Helmar Lerski, A Boy, 1930

In 1911 Lerski began to experiment with photography by adapting dramatic stage lighting techniques to portrait photographs of fellow actors. In 1912, Lerski was encouraged to pursue a career in photography by Rudolph Dührkoop, who had come to St. Louis to demonstrate his photographic techniques. In 1914/15 he teached German language and literature at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1915, after more than twenty years in America, Lerski moved to Berlin, and after showing his portraits, was asked to become a cameraman at Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA studios), where he worked as a cameraman and expert for special effects for many films. 

 Helmar Lerski, The Metalworker, 1930

Between 1925 and 1927 Lerski was Technical Director for Schüfftan-Photography at Deutsche Spiegeltechnik GmbH & Co. This process was refined and popularized by the German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan while he was working with Lerski on Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1927). Lang wanted to insert the actors into shots of miniatures of skyscrapers and other buildings, so Schüfftan and Lerski used  specially made mirrors to create the illusion of actors interacting with huge, realistic-looking sets.

 Helmar Lerski, Transformations of Light (No.571), 1936

In 1931 Lerski published Köpfe des Alltags (Everyday Faces), a series of portraits of anonymous working-class figures. Extreme close-ups emphasized the archetypal characteristics of his models rather than their individuality. With fascism on the rise, Lerski immigrated to Palestine where he worked as a director and cameraman for documentary films. In 1937 he created his masterpiece, Transformation Through Light, on a rooftop terrace in Tel Aviv, in which he projected 175 different images of a single model, altered using multiple mirrors to direct intense sunlight towards his face at various angles and intensities. Siegfried Kracauer wrote about this series in his Theory of Film (Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 162):

 Helmar Lerski, Transformations of Light (No.569), 1936

"His model, he [Lerski] told me in Paris, was a young man with a nondescript face who posed on the roof of a house. Lerski took over a hundred pictures of that face from a very short distance, each time subtly changing the light with the aid of screens. Big close-ups, these pictures detailed the texture of the skin so that cheeks and brows turned into a maze of inscrutable runes reminiscent of soil formations, as they appear from an airplane. The result was amazing. None of the photographs recalled the model; and all of them differed from each other. 

 Helmar Lerski, Transformations of Light (No.569), 1936

Out of the original face there arose, evoked by the varying lights, a hundred different faces, among them those of a hero, a prophet, a peasant, a dying soldier, an old woman, a monk. Did these portraits, if portraits they were, anticipate the metamorphoses which the young man would undergo in the future? Or were they just plays of light whimsically projecting on his face dreams and experiences forever alien to him? Proust would have been delighted in Lerski's experiment with its unfathomable implications."

Helmar Lerski, Hand of a Graphic Designer, 1944

In 1948 Lerski moved back to Zurich, where he spent the rest of his life. Other photographic series of Lerski include Jewish Faces, Arabic Faces and Human Hands.

Wols

 Wols, c.  1940

Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913-1951) was born in Berlin  into a wealthy family; his father was a high-ranking civil servant and patron of the arts who maintained friendships with many prominent artists of the period, including Otto Dix. In 1919, the family moved to Dresden where his father was appointed head of the Saxon State Chancellery. The following year Wols started taking violin lessons, showing a precocious musical talent. Fritz Busch, the conductor of the Dresden Opera, then offered to get him a post as a first violinist with an orchestra. Instead he worked for a few months in the studio of the photographer Genja Jonas.

 Wols, Mademoiselle Nicole Bouban, 1936

In 1932 Wols travelled to Frankfurt am Main to study anthropology under the ethnologist Leo Frobenius, a friend of the family, though without his Abitur the plan was short-lived. He then moved to Berlin and entered the Bauhaus, recently transferred from Dessau, where he met László Moholy-Nagy who advised him to move to Paris. There, through Moholy-Nagy, he was introduced to Amédée Ozenfant, Fernand Léger and Hans Arp. He soon also met many artists associated with the Surrealist movement, such as Max Ernst and Joan Miró.

Wols, On lui fait une radio, 1939

Wols permanently settled in Paris in 1933, producing his first paintings but also working as a photographer.  His photographic work of this period showed the clear influence of Surrealism. In 1936, he received official permission to live in Paris with the help of Fernand Léger; as an army deserter, Schulze had to report to the Paris police on a monthly basis. In 1937, the year in which he adopted his pseudonym WOLS, his photographs began to appear in fashion magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Femina as well as Revue de l’art. Many of these photographs anticipate the displays at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme held in Paris in the following year, in which much use was made of mannequins.

 Wols, Pavilion de l'elegance (Madeleine Vionnet), 1937

At the outbreak of World War II Wols, as a German citizen, was interned for 14 months in the notorious Les Milles camp - together with some 3500 other artists and intellectuals. He was not released until late 1940. After his release Wols moved for two years to Cassis, near Marseille, where he struggled to earn a living. The occupation of Southern France by the Germans in 1942 forced him to flee to Dieulefit, near Montélimar, where he met the writer Henri-Pierre Roché, one of his earliest collectors. He spent most of the war trying to emigrate to the United States, an unsuccessful and costly enterprise that may have driven him to alcoholism.

 Wols, Untitled (Cathedral), c. 1945 

After the war Wols returned to Paris where he met Jean-Paul Sartre, Tristan Tzara and Jean Paulhan. He started to paint in oils in 1946 at the suggestion of the dealer René Drouin, who showed 40 of his paintings at his gallery in 1947. The same year Wols began to work on a number of illustrations for books by Paulhan, Sartre, Franz Kafka and Antonin Artaud. He fell ill but lacked the money to go to hospital, and throughout 1948 he worked largely in bed on these illustrations. In 1949 he took part in the exhibition Huit oeuvres nouvelles at the Galerie Drouin, along with Jean Dubuffet, Roberto Matta, Henri Michaux and other artists with whom he had a stylistic affinity.

 Wols, Aquarell L´ìnsecte, 1940

Undergoing treatment for alcoholism, he moved to the country at Champigny-sur-Marne in June 1951. His early death later that year from food poisoning helped foster the legendary reputation that grew up around him soon afterwards. His paintings helped pioneer Art informel and Tachism, which dominated European art during and after the 1950s as a European counterpart to American Abstract Expressionism. Influenced by the writings of the philosopher Lao Tzu throughout his life, Wols also wrote poems and aphorisms that expressed his aesthetic and philosophical ideas.

The Pleasures of the Mariners

Sea, The
by Lewis Carroll

There are certain things - a spider, a ghost,
The income-tax, gout, an umbrella for three -
That I hate, but the thing that I hate the most
Is a thing they call the SEA.

Otto Dix, The Pleasures of the Mariners, 1923 

André Dignimont, Bar, c. 1935

Alexei Pakhomov, Bathing Red Army Sailors Plummeting from a Ship, 1933

Eugene Jansson, In Navy Bathing Hut, 1907

 Albert Janesh, Water Sport, 1936

 Charles Demuth, Dancing sailors, 1918

 Josef Maria Auchentaller, Portrait of Peter, 1906

 Otto Griebel, Ship Boilerman, 1920

 Marcel Ronay, Sailor and Girl, 1929

 Hans Bellmer, Marseille, 1932

 Cagnaccio di San Pietro, L'alzana, 1935

 Paul Cadmus, Sailors and Floosies, 1938

 Hilary Harkness, Iowa Class, 2003

Lasar Segall - The Eternal Wanderers

 Lasar Segall (right) and Conrad Felixmüller (left) in Segall`s Dresden studio, 1919

Lasar Segall (1891-1957) was born in the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius, Lithuania, which at that time was part of Imperial Russia. He was the son of a Torah scribe. Segall moved to Berlin at the age of 15 and studied at the Akademie der Künste from 1906 to 1909. He then continued his studies at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. Frustrated with the academic school of painting there, he left for Dresden in 1910 where he worked in the Meisterschule Art Academy as a teacher.

 Lasar Segall, Self-Portrait, 1927

During his tenure at the Meisterschule, Segall became acquainted with Otto Dix and George Grosz. In 1912 he  painted a series of works in an insane asylum. Later that year, he moved to São Paulo, Brazil, where three of his siblings were already living, but returned to Dresden in 1914. In 1919, Segall founded the Dresden Secession Group together with Conrad Felixmüller and Otto Dix. 

Lasar Segall, Die Krankenstube (The Sickness Room), 1921

During the early 1920s, Segall illustrated a book by the poet Theodor Däubler (Ed. Fritz Gurlitt of Jewish Art and Culture), published the album  of lithographs Bübüe and the Erinnerung an Wilna - 1917 (Memoir of Vilna - 1917) with etchings. He also exhibited in many important German museums and galleries.

 Lasar Segall, The Eternal Wanderers, 1919

 

In 1923, Segall finally moved to São Paulo, Brazil, where he was to become a notable figure in Modern Art circles. Shortly after Segall's return to São Paulo he obtained Brazilian citizenship along with his first wife, Margarete Quack. Segall exhibited in the 1923 Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, and established his reputation as one of Brazil's outstanding modern artists during that time, like Candido Portinari and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti. Segall's preferred subject matters now became the Brazilian countryside, mulattoes, favelas, and prostitutes. Due to the harsh and extreme nature of his portrayals and his depiction of human suffering, Segall's artwork was not generally accepted in Brazil. 

 Lasar Segall, Pogrom, 1937

Segall frequently travelled to Paris and Germany for his own personal exhibitions. In 1932, he founded an organization known as Sociedade Pro-Arte Moderna (SPAM). SPAM's central idea was to serve as a link between artists, intellectuals, collectors and the public. But due to disagreements with anti-semitic Integralist members (Brazilian Fascists), the group soon fell apart. Back in Germany, Segall's work was now considered "degenerate" and and could no longer be shown in exhibitions. Segall created one of his most famous artworks in 1939, known as Navio de emigrantes (Ship of Emigrants). A ship is overcrowded with emigrant passengers. Their solemn faces and lack of expression  show the brutal reality of emigrants and their depressing voyage to a new life.

 Lasar Segall, Ship of Emigrants, 1939

Lasar Segall died in 1957. Ten years later his São Paulo home was transformed into a public museum, the Museu Lasar Segall. You can see many more of his works on the Museum's website.

This is the bad uncle Dix

I will either be famous or infamous - Otto Dix

 

 Gert Heinrich Wollheim, This is the bad uncle Dix, 1923

Otto Dix (1891-1969) was born in Untermhaus, Germany, now a part of the city of Gera. From his father, a mould maker in an iron foundry, he inherited his steel blue eyes; from his mother, a seamstress, he received a love of music and poetry. Otto first displayed his artistic talent - especially in drawing - during elementary school. At the age of ten, he modeled for the painter Fritz Amann and decided to become a painter himself. His school art teacher, Ernst Schunke, guided his study and helped him get financial assistance. The award required that he learn a craft while he continued to study art with Schunke, so he became an apprentice decorator for four years.

Otto Dix, Street Fight, 1927 (destroyed)

In 1909, Dix began his study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. There was a huge creative output in the city, with a well established and internationally renowned art and music scene that hosted large exhibitions and events. Dix did not struggle financially during art school: after the first semester he was exempt from paying fees and received a stipend.  He also made extra money selling small portraits and genre paintings. The Academy did not offer academic painting, but a more craft-oriented education. As a result, Dix was essentially a self-taught painter.

August Sander, The Painter Otto Dix and his Wife Martha, 1925

Through his intensive study of the Old Dutch, Italian and German masters, Dix taught himself how to paint with their methods - building up layers of paint to create depth and luminescence. However he was also impressed by the Expressionists and the Post-Impressionists, and in particular by a Van Gogh exhibition that he saw in 1913. Primarily painting portraits and landscapes, Dix experimented with pen and ink and made his first prints in 1913.

Otto Dix, The Match Seller, 1920

When the First World War erupted in 1914, Dix enthusiastically volunteered for the German Army. He was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In the fall of 1915 he was assigned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit in the Western front and took part of the Battle of the Somme. He was seriously wounded several times. In 1917, his unit was transferred to the Eastern front until the end of hostilities with Russia. Back to the western front in 1918, he fought in the German Spring offensive. He earned the Iron Cross (second class) and reached the rank of vice-sergeant-major.

 Otto Dix, Stormtroopers during a Gas Attack, 1924

Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war, and would later describe a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through destroyed houses. He represented his traumatic experiences in many subsequent works, including his famous portfolio of fifty etchings called Der Krieg (The War), published in 1924 by Karl Nierendorf. You can see the whole series on the website of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Otto Dix, Group Portrait: Günther Franke, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, and Karl Nierendorf
1923

In the aftermath of the war, Dresden was a shadow if its former self. No longer a seat of government, it suffered a huge drop in income and severe rationing. However, the artistic scene adapted and came back full force. With the value of money and political ideas in constant flux, Dix was driven to experiment. He had already taken on some elements of Futurism and Cubism during the war years; now he began integrating Dada and Expressionist elements into his work. Dix also created surreal portraits and woodcuts, even delving into collage and mixed media. In 1919, he founded the Dresden Secession Group together with Conrad Felixmüller and Lasar Segall. Other members included Peter August Böckstiegel, Otto Griebel, Oskar Kokoschka, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler and Gert Wollheim.

Otto Dix, Self-portrait with Nude Model, 1923

On his arrival in Dresden in 1919, Otto Dix made contact with numerous figures in the city’s cultural circles. Hugo Erfurth was one such figure. Fifteen years old than Dix, Erfurth was by that time an established photographer and his studio welcomed the leading personalities of the German Weimar Republic. In 1921 Dix participated in exhibitions in Berlin and Dresden before moving to Düsseldorf in 1922. This relocation was an important shift as he studied with new teachers, Heinrich Nauen and Wilhelm Herbeholz. He became a part of Johanna Ey's art salon circle where he met and befriended the painter Jankel Adler.  Dix also joined the artist's association "Das Junge Rheinland" (The Young Rhineland).

Arthur Kaufmann, The Contemporaries, 1925. The Painting shows members of the artist's association Das Junge Rheinland. Lower row left to right: Gert Wollheim, Johanna Ey, Karl Schwesig, Adalbert Trillhaase. Upper Row left to right:Herbert Eulenberg, Theo Champion, Jankel Adler, Hilde Schewior, Ernst te Peerdt, Arthur Kaufmann, Walter Ophey, Otto Dix, Lisbeth Kaufmann, Hans Heinrich Nicolini.

In 1923 Dix married Martha Koch, and over the next decade had three children, all of whom were captured on canvas throughout their childhoods. Throughout the 1920s Dix was included in many of the most significant exhibitions of new art in Germany. Most importantly he was included in Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1925 that gave its name to the movement Dix would forever be associated with. Neue Sachlichkeit evolved out of Expressionism, but took on qualities of the classical, linear realism that was becoming prevalent in Italy at that time. 

 Otto Dix, Portrait of Poet Ivar von Lücken, 1926

In 1927 Dix became a professor at the Dresden Academy and was appointed a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in1931. The same year he showed work in exhibitions all over Germany and at MoMA in New York. This renown was relatively short-lived, however, as the Nazis began to target him, regarding his art as "degenerate". As such, he was forbidden to exhibit in Germany, but he traveled to Switzerland several times during the mid 1930s and participated in several exhibitions there.

Otto Dix, Dedicated to Sadists, 1922

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they immediately dismissed Dix from his post at the Dresden Academy. In response to his dismissal Dix created The Seven Cardinal Sins (below). The figure of Sloth, depicted in the center, is a skeleton whose outstretched arms and scythe form a sort of swastika. Dix felt that this sloth or lack of concern and unwillingness to take early action by the German people had allowed Hitler's rise to power. The most poignant aspect of this picture is the representation of Envy, riding on the back of Avarice: he wears a Hitler mask. However, it wasn't until after the war that Dix painted in the telltale mustache. 

 Otto Dix, The Seven Cardinal Sins, 1933

Dix, like all other practicing artists who had not left Germany, was forced to join the Nazi government's Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Kuenste), a subdivision of Goebbels' Cultural Ministry (Reichskulturkammer). Membership was mandatory for all artists in the Reich. But Dix still managed to secretly paint an occasional allegorical painting that criticized Nazi ideals. Dix's paintings The Trench and War Cripples were exhibited in the state-sponsored Munich 1937 exhibition of degenerate art, Entartete Kunst. They were later burned.

Otto Dix, Melancholie, 1930

A couple of months after his dismissal Dix went into "inner emigration" moving to a small village at Lake Constance near the Swiss border, where he lived on private commissions. In 1939 he was arrested on a trumped-up charge of being involved in Georg Elsner's attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler but was later released. Drafted into the Volkssturm during the last weeks of the war, Dix was captured by the French army and held prisoner until 1946. Not wasting time, he painted a triptych for the prison camp chapel.

Otto Dix, Portrait of a Prisoner, 1945

After returning to Germany, Dix picked up where the war had interrupted his career. He resumed showing works and began making lithographs documenting his war experiences and its effects in his work. Much of Dix's later work focuses on post-war suffering, religious allegories and Biblical scenes. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, he traveled a great deal and exhibited his work constantly. He was appointed to membership of many arts academies in Florence, Berlin and Dresden. In 1967, after traveling to Greece, he suffered a stroke, which paralyzed his left hand; he died in 1969. You can see a timeline of Otto Dix's work on my Flickr page.

Revolution by Night

The blind man rocks a pretty child

The doe with all her fauns slips by

The dwarf observes with saddened pose

How Harlequin magically grows

Apollinaire, Twilight (Last verse), 1913

 Max Ernst, Revolution by Night, 1923 

Max Ernst (1891-1976) was the son of a teacher for blind and deaf children from Cologne. His father also was an amateur painter who once painted Max in the character of the infant Jesus. Seeing a Van Gogh exhibition inspired him to become a painter, but the First World War, in which Ernst - like Apollinaire - served as an artillery engineer, radicalised him. On his discharge, he joined the dada movement, attacking militarist Germany in darkly witty, enigmatic collages. The French poet André Breton organised an Ernst show in Paris in 1921; Breton rejected dada in favour of his own movement, surrealism, taking Freud's idea of the unconscious as a critique of rational bourgeois society.

 Neo Rauch, Father, 2007

The figure carried by the bowler-hatted man is generally accepted to be a self-portrait; it has Ernst's features. The bowler-hatted man is a portrait of Ernst's moustachioed father. Ernst - who was a vivid reader of Hegel, Max Stirner, Nietzsche and Freud -  thought of his father as a fool. He was not just a Sunday painter, but one with a heavy academic style. Ernst's entire career was a rejection of the middle-class idea of art for which his father stood.  A staunch Catholic, Ernst's father later denounced his son's work.

Max Ernst, The Virgin punishing Jesus in front of three witnesses: André Breton, Paul Eluard and the painter, 1926

And yet it is his father who takes on the role of the Virgin Mary in this Pieta, a representation of the cradling of the dead Christ by his mother. Here the child is not dead but on the verge of sleep, about to be carried up to bed. Father and son are at the bottom of a staircase on which a bearded figure, his head bandaged, sleepwalks. 

 Apollinaire with bandaged head, March 1916

This figure has been interpreted as a portrait of the French poet and critic Apollinaire, wounded in the head in the first world war. Max Ernst and Apollinaire met in Paris in 1913. It might well be that Ernst's Pieta was inspired by Apollinaire's Twilight - The blind man rocks a pretty child. And young Max's classical Roman hairstyle is certainly a reference to de Chirico's famous portait of Apollinaire:

 Giorgio de Chirico, Portrait prémonitoire de Guillaume Apollinaire, 1914

The Pieta in Renaissance art is an image of maternal love. In Ernst's painting, the father becomes a mother. The son, instead of raging against him in the Oedipal drama familiar to Ernst as a student of Freud, becomes as passive as a corpse. The father in his bowler hat, at once phallic and stultifying, has downcast eyes; he too is passive, an automaton. The funnel on the wall appears to be a communications device to take orders from the unconscious. It is floppy, another image of the phallus softened. The revolution here is not one fought across barricades, but a dreamy one in which barricades disintegrate and the boundaries of identity dissolve.