Erwin Blumenfeld

 Erwin Blumenfeld, Autoportrait, 1932

Photographic history is chock-full of people who were painters before they became photographers, but very few were in women's wear to begin with. Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) was born in Berlin into a bourgeois Jewish family. For his very first photograph, at the age of 10, Erwin had assembled a still life that would have done a collagist, or a Dadaist, proud, with Michelangelo's Moses holding a half-peeled potato and a toothbrush in his lap and Blumenfeld's brother resting his lead on an upturned chamber pot, "wearing", as Blumenfeld wrote in his memoir, "Mama's pince-nez and Pa-Pa's mustache- trainer, and clutching Mama's rolled-up corset in his fist."

 Erwin Blumenfeld, Le pudeur, 1937

In 1903, Paul enrolled at the prestigious Askanisches Gymnasium. He left the school in 1913, giving up thoughts of further education on the death of his father - the family is virtually bankrupt. Instead, he started a three-year apprenticeship in the women’s garment trade. With his best friend from school, Paul Citroen, he began to frequent the Café des Westens, a favourite meeting place of the Expressionists; there he met a number of the key figures, including the poet Else Lasker-Schüler and George Grosz, who will become a lifelong friend. In 1916, Blumenfeld met Lena Citroen, a cousin of Paul Citroen. They became engaged soon after, and married in 1921.

 Erwin Blumenfeld, Dada collage (Charlie Chaplin), 1921

Conscripted into the German army in 1917, Blumenfeld was sent as an ambulance driver to the Western Front. He was the only survivor when, "driving with neither lights nor experience", his loaded "Corpse-Carrier" overturned. He was also the bookkeeper of Field Brothel No. 209 near the Belgian border - in service of a unit diagnosed as "one hundred percent syphilitic, attributable, perhaps, to the practice of recycling hard-to-find condoms." He also was a French tutor to an obtuse sergeant (who when hiring Blumenfeld awarded him the Iron Cross). On home leave in June of 1918, Blumenfeld tried to desert to Holland, but was arrested and imprisoned before he could put his plans into effect. Released, he returned to the Front where he learned of the death of his brother, Heinz, near Verdun. At war's end, Blumenfeld went to Holland to join his fiancée, Lena.

Erwin Blumenfeld: Bloomfield, President-Dada-Chaplinist. Collage sent to Tristan Tzara, 1921

In Holland, Blumenfeld made various attempts to secure a livelihood, including working for a bookseller. He joined Paul Citroen, who had set himself up as art dealer, but abandoned this attempt when it became evident that there was virtually no market in Holland for contemporary art. Instead, he became a "Sunday painter", made collages and drawings, and participated in the Dutch Dada Movement. He elected himself co-president of the Amsterdam branch of Dada, the other president, Paul Citroen,  being the only other member. In 1923, he went into the leather goods business, opening a shop at Kalverstraat, Amsterdam's busiest shopping street,  under the name "Fox Leather Company":

In 1929, Blumenfeld was arrested on Zandvoort beach for allowing a strap of his bathing suit to slip. This dashed chances of Dutch citizenship, for which he had applied, and would later send him - as a German citizen - to a French internment camp. In 1932, Blumenfeld moved premises further down the Kalverstraat and discovered an operational darkroom on the premises. He began to photograph female customers (for the most part portraits but also some nudes), both out of interest in photography and with the idea of making money. New portraits went into his shop window each morning among the crocodile extravagances. 

 Erwin Blumenfeld, The Dictator, 1936

Blumenfeld’s leather goods store went into bankruptcy in 1935. His first photographs were published the same year in the French magazine Photographie. His work was also included in a group show organized by Paul Citroen at the Nieuwe Kunstschool (New Art School) in Amsterdam, along with Grosz, Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Léger, Mondrian, Schwitters and others. After he had met George Rouault’s daughter Geneviève, a dentist, on a visit to his shop, she arranged to exhibit his work in her waiting room near the Opéra in Paris. Some months later, Blumenfeld left Holland and settled in Paris with the aim of becoming a professional photographer. Geneviève Rouault helped him to secure the first clients for portraits.

 Erwin Blumenfeld, Nude under Wet Veil, 1936

In 1936, Blumenfeld made one of his best-known images, Nude under Wet Veil (above), which illustrates his boyhood discovery that Botticelli and Cranach had rendered their nudes even more naked by covering them with transparent veils. The same year, he printed an image of a half-draped classical torso opped by a beady-eyed calf's head and called it The Dictator (above). One of his 1933 photocollages of Hitler, the version with a jagged hole for a nose, (below) was exhibited in Paris in 1937 but had to be withdrawn because the German Ambassador was so incensed by it. The Germans got to see it anyway. The United States Air Force dropped millions of copies of this photograph over German cities in 1943. 

 Erwin Blumenfeld, Hitler, 1933

Blumenfeld met Cecil Beaton, who helped him secure a contract with French Vogue in 1938. The following year, he took his best-known Parisian fashion photograph, showing model Lisa Fonssagrives on the Eiffel Tower. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Blumenfeld was imprisoned in various French camps, but, in 1942, succeded to flee to the United States. His reminiscences about his brutal internment would later unleash some of his most hilarious rhetoric, not only at Hitler (the "idol of lavatory manufacturers") but also at the French collaborators.

Erwin Blumenfeld, Le miroir brisé, 1940

Blumenfeld settled in New York, where he was immediately put under contract by Harper’s Bazaar. He found an apartment at the Hotel des Artistes, 67th Street. For almost two years he shared the studio of Martin Munkacsi. In the 1940s and 1950s his work appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Life, Cosmopolitan and many other American and foreign publications. A selection of Blumenfeld's work was included in In and Out of Focus: A Survey of Today’s Photography, curated by Edward Steichen in 1947 at the Museum of Modern Art. 

  Erwin Blumenfeld, Untitled, 1940s

That year, the failed leather goods man was said to be the highest-paid photographer in the world. So in the end, Erwin Blumenfeld put all three of his careers together - women's wear, art and photography. One should add, that he was a gifted writer, too: In the 1960s, Blumenfeld worked on his caustic, vigorously sardonic memoir, which found no publisher because it was considered to be too ironic towards society, and was published only after his death. It has been published in German under the title Einbildungs Roman, Eichborn Verlag, 1998. The English translation has the title Eye to I. Following a heart attack, Erwin Blumenfeld died 1969 when in Rome. He is buried there. You can see more works by Blumenfeld in my Flickr set.

Edvard Munch in Germany

There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (Edvard Munch) 

 Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait in Hell, 1903

Edvard Munch's breakthrough as a great individualist in European art came in the form of what was known as the "scandal exhibition" in 1892. The Norwegian painter Adelsteen Normann, resident in Berlin and secretary of the Artists' Union there (Verein Berliner Künstler), had seen a major one-man show by Munch when travelling through Kristiania. He invited Munch to exhibit at the Union's November exhibition - the society’s first one-man exhibition. In the advance press Munch's paintings were referred to as "pictures of an Ibsenesque mood arousing curiosity both on a social and psychological level". Munch was pleased with the "great commotion", and wrote in a letter: "Never have I had such an amusing time - it’s incredible that something as innocent as painting should have created such a stir."

 Edvard Munch, The Hands, 1893

Since the war between Germany and France of 1870/71, artistic life in Berlin and Paris had polarised. While Paris was opening up to a mass of new impulses, Berlin was isolating itself around the idea of an ideal, educational national art and Munch's exhibition was exploited in this schism. The exhibition was opened with 55 works on November 5th, 1892 in the "Architektenhaus" (Wilhelmstraße 52). On the opening day the respected grandees of the Artists' Union, headed by the conservative painter Anton von Werner, Director of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, demanded that the premises should be closed to the public on the grounds that it was immoral to show such degenerate art. 

 Edvard Munch, The Day After, 1894

The exhibition was prematurely closed seven day later. The press referred to Munch as the epitome of a gifted "Germanic" artist who had let himself be influenced by decadent French taste and the result was "anarchic daubs". The event made Munch famous, or rather notorious, overnight and in the press was described as "Der Fall Munch" - the Munch Affair. A direct consequence of the affair was the foundation of the Berlin Secession, an association of progressive artists, with Max Liebermann as its first President.

Edvard Munch, August Strindberg, 1892

The exhibition toured to Düsseldorf and Cologne, reopening in Berlin in December the same year. Munch sold almost nothing, but earned a respectable income from ticket sales. Everybody wanted to see an international scandal. Munch quickly became integrated in the Berlin circle of intellectuals and artists around August Strindberg and the Polish author Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who often met in the wine bar Zum schwarzen Ferkel (The Black Pig).  Munch stayed in Berlin the following four years; in 1897, after a stay in Paris,  he returned to Kristiania (Oslo).

Edvard Munch, Walter Rathenau, 1907

From 1902 until his breakdown in 1908 Munch was again almost permanently resident in Germany, where he completed a number of monumental full-length portraits which were greeted with general respect. These included the portraits of Walter Rathenau (above) and Harry Graf Kessler (below). Walter Rathenau - a prominent Jewish industialist and the role model for Count Paul Arnheim in Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities - was one of Munch's great supporters during this period (he was assassinated in a plot led by ultra-nationalist army officers a couple of months after he was appointed  Germany's Foreign Minister in 1922). Another of Munch's supporters was the "Red Count" Harry Graf Kessler, a famous diplomat, writer, patron of modern art - and one of the very few German dandies who really deserve this title.

 Edvard Munch, Harry Graf Kessler, 1907

In 1902, Munch's Frieze of Life was exhibited around all four walls of the Berlin Secession. Each of the four walls had its own title: the left-hand wall was called Love's Awakening, and included the pictures Red and White, Eye in Eye, Kiss and Madonna. On the next wall hung pictures characterised as Love Blossoms and Dies, including Ashes, Vampire (below), Jealousy, Sphinx and Melancholy. Then came Fear of Life, where we find The Scream, Anxiety and Red Virginia Creeper, and on the final wall hangs Death with pictures such as Death Struggle, Death in the Sickroom, The Girl and Death and The Dead Mother and Child. Munch himself referred to the frieze as "a poem of love, anxiety and death".

 Edvard Munch, Vampires, 1893

After the Frieze exhibition, the Berlin critics were beginning to appreciate Munch’s work even though the public still found his work alien and strange. The good press coverage gained Munch the attention of the influential art patron Max Linde in Lübeck. His portrait of the four sons of Linde has been classified as one of the finest children's portraits of the 20th century. Munch described the turn of events in his diary, "After twenty years of struggle and misery forces of good finally come to my aid in Germany - and a bright door opens up for me."

Edvard Munch, Self-portrait on the operating table, 1902

Also in 1902, Edvard Munch and his lover Tulla Larsen met for a "reconciliation". There was a revolver in the house and in a shooting accident Munch was wounded in the left hand. He blamed Tulla for the accident and subsequently broke off all contact with her. Later, Munch's concern about his hand almost amounted to monomania. His painting Self-Portrait on the Operating Table (above) clearly references the shooting incident and the emotional after effects. Strangely enough, four years before this accident, in 1898, Munch had already portrayed himself with a bleeding hand:

 Edvard Munch, Blossom of Pain, 1898

The work Munch produced during the 6 years between 1902 and 1908 was to become crucial to the development of the German Expressionist movement. In these years Munch came to take on a more extrovert attitude to life than previously, as indicated by the monumental Bathing Men. The painting was produced in the summer of 1907 when Munch settled down in Warnemünde on the Baltic coast and experimented in a number of different techniques. 

Edvard Munch. The Drowned Boy, 1908

Munch also spent the following summer in Warnemünde. One of the most interesting works from that summer is The Drowned Boy (above). The motif uses the the beach promenade outside Munch's house in Warnemünde, and we see a light and a dark male figure walking side by side. The experience of a split personality had occupied Munch for several years but here the feeling of "walking beside oneself"  is intensified. Soon afterwards Munch was to summarise the battle between the light and dark forces in his mind with the words: 

 Edvard Munch, Brothel Scene - Zum süßen Mädel, 1907

The influence of alcohol brought the schism of the mind or the soul to its extreme - until the two states like two birds in a single cage each pulled in their own direction and threatened to break down or tear apart the chain - Under the violent schism of these two mental states arose an increasingly stronger inner tension - a conflict - a fearful battle in the cage of the soul.

 Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Wine Bottle, 1906

After years of restless life, nervous illness and alcohol abuse, breakdown came in the autumn of 1908 and Munch spent the following eight months in a nerve clinic in Copenhagen. When he returned to Norway he first settled in Kragerø and here began a completely new chapter in his life and in his art. Germany came back to Munch in 1940, when the Wehrmacht invaded Norway and the Norwegian Nazi party took over the government. Munch was seventy-six years old. With his entire art collection in the second floor of his house, he lived in constant fear of a Nazi confiscation. Seventy-one of his paintings previously seized by the Nazis from German museums as "degenerate art" had found their way back to Norway through purchases by collectors (including The Scream and The Sick Child). 

 Edvard Munch, The Death Bed, 1895

Munch died in his house at Ekely near Oslo on January 23, 1944, about a month after his 80th birthday. Curiously, though his works were hung in the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937, Goebbels was a fervent admirer. Munch's funeral was hijacked and swathed in swastikas. His Nazi orchestrated funeral left the wrong impression with some observers that he was a Nazi sympathizer. The city of Oslo bought the Ekely estate from his heirs in 1946 and demolished his house in 1960. Munch would have loved Kierkegaard's last words: Sweep me up.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky

 

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Self-Portrait with Red Hat, 1920s

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906-1996) was born in Vienna. Her father Edmund Motesiczky von Kesseleökeö was of ancient Hungarian nobility. A talented amateur cellist and devoted huntsman, he died when Marie-Louise was only three years old. Her mother Henriette came from an extremely wealthy and cultured family of Jewish bankers whose relations included many distinguished names from the social and intellectual life of Vienna (among them Richard Strauss, Anton Rubinstein, and Henrik Ibsen). 

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, View from the Window, Vienna, 1925

The family had donated many art works to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and, in their palatial salon opposite the opera, Hugo von Hofmannsthal had read his first poems. Their own art collection at the family's country estate in Hinterbrühl was formidable.The family also made an impact on the origin of psychoanalysis, Motesiczky’s grandmother Anna von Lieben being one of Sigmund Freud’s early patients. Her case is recorded as Frau Cäcilie M. in the annals of Psychoanalysis.

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Psychoanalyst, n.d.

Aged 13, Motesiczky left school – a mistake, as she later admitted. She subsequently attended art classes in Vienna, The Hague, Frankfurt and Berlin. In 1926 she visited Paris where she rented a studio, and saw Max Beckmann from time to time. There she painted a first masterpiece (Paris Workman, below) and shortly afterwards a remarkable statuesque Self-portrait with Comb, now in the Belvedere, Vienna. A year later she was invited by Max Beckmann to join his master class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Beckmann had been introduced to the Motesiczky family in 1920. He left a strong and lasting impression on Motesiczky both as a person and an artist and was to become a life-long friend. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Paris Workman, 1926

Motesiczky spent a decade quietly developing her artistic skills, exhibiting only once, in 1933, with the Hagenbund. In the wake of Nazi Germany's invasion of Austria in 1938, she had to  leave her native country, as her family included Jewish descent. Motesiczky’s older brother Karl, a Marxist, was a friend of Heimito von Doderer and a close collaborator of Wilhelm Reich. Karl refused to leave Austria and used the family house near Vienna to shelter Jewish friends. In 1943 Karl was denounced and sent to Auschwitz where he died shortly afterwards. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Portrait of Karl von Motesiczky, n.d.

With her mother Motesiczky went to Holland where she had her first solo exhibition in 1939. Shortly afterwards they left for England and, after a brief stay in London, settled in Amersham. It was here that Motesiczky met the writer Elias Canetti (the 1981 Nobel Prize winner in literature), with whom she became romantically involved. Canetti was a close friend and companion for the next three decades, and she painted him several times. Canetti wrote large parts of his famous Crowds and Power in  Motesiczky's London home. His was the last major portrait she painted in 1993, not long before he died, now in the National Portrait Gallery.

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Elias Canetti, 1930s

Motesiczky was one of a menage à quatre, which Canetti himself characterized this way: "One complains, the other staggers, and the third breathes through gills. The proud owner of three very different women." The plaintiff was his wife Veza Canetti, his lurching lover the poet Friedl Benedikt, and Marie-Louise was the wife with the gills: Motesiczky often dreamed of fishes (they often appear in her paintings too). In 1942, Canetti dedicated a collection of aphorisms to Motesiczky, Aufzeichnungen für Marie-Louise, which was only published in 2005. These are records from the time of the Blitzkrieg, in which we already find Canetti's major themes: language, death, time, and utopia.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky,The Travellers, 1940

In 1943, Motesiczky joined the Artists’ International Association and took part in several of their exhibitions. The following year, Motesiczky’s first solo exhibition in London took place at the Czechoslovak Institute. She also renewed her acquaintance with Oskar Kokoschka who had been a friend of the family in Vienna. After the war Motesiczky moved to London. Two solo exhibitions in The Hague and Amsterdam in 1952 were followed two years later by one at the Städtische Galerie in Munich and one at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1960. The first success in Austria came in 1966 when the Wiener Secession staged a large solo exhibition which subsequently travelled to Linz, Bremen and Munich. In the early 1960s, she bought the house at 6 Chesterford Gardens where her mother soon joined her. By the time Henriette died in 1978, aged 96, Motesiczky had produced a series of beautiful and moving images of her. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Magic Fish, n.d.

The artistic breakthrough in the United Kingdom came with the major solo exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in London in 1985 which achieved enormous critical acclaim. By the time the Österreichische Galerie im Belvedere in Vienna held a retrospective exhibition of Motesiczky’s work in 1994, she had already established her reputation as an important Austrian painter of the twentieth century. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky died in London on 10 June 1996.

The Sucker

Apollinaire - Le bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée (1911)

Le Poulpe 

Jetant son encre vers les cieux,
Suçant le sang de ce qu’il aime
Et le trouvant délicieux,
Ce monstre inhumain, c’est moi-même. 

Alfred Kubin, Der Sauger (The Sucker), c. 1900

The Octopus
Hurling his ink at skies above,
Sucking the blood of what he loves
And finding it delicious,
Is myself the monster, vicious.

Victor Brauner

  Victor Brauner, The Surrealist, 1947

Victor Brauner (1903-1966) was born in Piatra Neamt in the historical region of Moldavia, eastern Romania. He was the son of a Romanian-jewish timber manufacturer who settled in Vienna with his family for a few years. It was there that Victor attended the elementary school. When his family returned to Romania in 1914, he continued his studies at the evangelical school in Braila. Brauner attended the Art School in Bucharest (1919-1921), and started painting landscapes à la Cézanne. Then, as he testified himself, he went through all the stages: "Dadaist, Abstractionist, Expressionist". 

 Victor Brauner, Poet in Exile, 1930s

In 1924, the Mozart Galleries in Bucharest hosted Brauner's first personal exhibition. In that period he met the poet Ilarie Voronca, with whom he founded the 15HP avantgarde magazine. In this magazine Brauner published the articles The pictopoetry and The surrationalism. In 1925, he undertook his first journey to Paris, from where he returned to Romania in 1927. In the period 1928-1931 he was a contributor of Unu magazine (an avant-garde periodical of Dadaist and Surrealist conceptions), which published reproductions of most of his paintings and graphic works.

 Victor Brauner, Self-Portrait with a Plucked Eye, 1931

In 1930, Brauner settled permanently in Paris, where he became a friend of the Romanian poet Benjamin Fondane and met Yves Tanguy, who would later introduce him to the circle of the Surrealists. He lived on Rue Moulin Vert, in the same building as Giacometti and Tanguy. There he painted his famous Self-Portrait with a Plucked Eye (above) - a premonitory theme, since seven years later Brauner lost his left eye in a violent argument between the Spanish surrealist painters Oscar Dominguez and Esteban Francés (Brauner attempted to protect Francés and was hit by a glass thrown by Dominguez).

 Victor Brauner, Mr. K's Power of Concentration (part of left side of diptych), 1934

In 1933, André Breton opened Brauner’s first personal exhibition in Paris, at the Pierre Gallery. Mr. K’s power of concentration (above) and The strange case of Mr. K (below) were paintings that André Breton compared with Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, "a huge, caricature-like satire of the bourgeoisie". The strange case of Mr. K can also be interpreted as a brilliant visualization of  Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Structured as a diptych, Mr. K’s power of concentration combines oil painting with a collage of heterogeneous objects. With this anonymous character, elephantine in figure and idiotic in look, Brauner evokes a ridiculous dictator, a kind of Ubu, with celluloid dolls clustered on his face and body. As André Breton remarked, however, given the history of the 20th century, "this image stopped making us laugh a long time ago."

 Victor Brauner, The strange case of Mr. K, 1933

In 1935, Brauner returned to Bucharest. He joined the ranks of the Communist Party for a short while, without a very firm conviction. In 1938, he returned to France. The same year, he met Jaqueline Abraham, who was to become his wife. At the time, he created a series of paintings called lycanthropic or chimeras. After Nazi Germany's invasion of France in 1940, Brauner had to leave Paris. He lived for a while in Perpignan  and Saint Feliu d’Amont. However, he kept in touch with the Surrealists that had taken refuge in Marseille, and, in 1941, he was granted the permission to move there too. 

 Victor Brauner, Prelude to a Civilization, 1954

After the war, Brauner settled in Paris again. In 1954, he produced Prelude to a civilization (above), one of his best known paintings. Brauner executed this work in encaustic, a technique in which paint is mixed with molten wax. Into the resulting hardened surface, he incised the figures with pen and ink. He had first employed this medium after he was forced to take refuge in Southern France and was unable to obtain his usual working materials. 

 Victor Brauner, La fiancée de la nuit, 1937

Around 1960, Brauner settled in Varengeville (Noremandie), where he spent most of his time working. In 1965, he created an ensemble of object-paintings full of vivacity, grouped under the titles Mythologie and Fêtes des mères. In 1966 he was chosen to represent France at the biannual exhibition in Venice, where an entire hall was dedicated to him. Brauner died in Paris, on March 12, 1966, as a result of a prolonged illness. The epitaph on his tomb at Montmartre cemetery is a phrase from one of his notebooks: "Peindre, c'est la vie, la vraie vie, ma vie". You can see more works by Victor Brauner in my Flickr set.

The Flea

Apollinaire - Le bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée (1911)

La Puce 

Puces, amis, amantes même,
Qu’ils sont cruels ceux qui nous aiment !
Tout notre sang coule pour eux.
Les bien-aimés sont malheureux. 

Conrad Felixmüller, The Flea, 1928

The Flea

Fleas, friends, lovers too,
How cruel are those who love us!
All our blood pours out for them.
The well-beloved are wretched then.

Arthur Kaufmann

 Arthur Kaufmann, Self-Portrait, 1931

Arthur Kaufmann (1888-1971) was born in Mühlheim, an industrial town in the Ruhr Valley. From 1904 to 1906 he studied at the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts. During the next years, he visited Italy England and France where he continued his studies with  Le Fauconnier in Paris at the prestigious Académie Julian.

Arthur Kaufmann, Lady in Black Coat, 1926

He was a founding member of Das Junge Rheinland (Young Rhineland), a stylistically diverse group co-led by Herbert Eulenberg, Gerd Wollheim, and Adolf Uzarski, which was united by a rejection of academic art. Other members included Otto Dix and Jankel Adler. During this era, he created such masterpieces as The Contemporaries (below) and a portrait of Jankel Adler (1927).

Arthur Kaufmann, The Contemporaries, 1925. The Painting shows members of the artist's association "Das Junge Rheinland" (The Young Rhineland). 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.

Jewish in origin, Kaufmann was labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933 and discharged - along with Paul Klee (Klee's self-portrait Struck from the List (1933) commemorates the sad occasion), as well as many more of his colleagues - from his post at the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts. Kaufmann relocated to the Netherlands, and then to the United States, where he embarked upon a career as a celebrated portrait painter. 

 Arthur Kaufmann, Untitled, c. 1930

In the United States, Kaufmann specialized in depictions of well-known men, including Edward G. Robinson, Albert Einstein, and George Gershwin (whose affidavit was responsible for Kaufmann's safe departure from Germany). His portrait of Gershwin is now held by the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. Kaufmann died in 1971 in Novo Friburgo, Brazil, during a stay with his daughter.

Arthur Kaufmann, The Intellectual Emigration, 1938-1965

Kaufmann's best known work today is the above tryptich Die Geistige Emigration (The Intellectual Emigration) which he started painting in 1938 and only completed in 1965. It depicts 38 German and Austrian celebrities (including Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Ernst Bloch and George Grosz) who emigrated to the United States after 1933. You can see Arthur Kaufmann next to his wife far right in the middle row.