davidgmarin:

Anselm Feuerbach - (self)portraits - 19th century

Anselm Feuerbach (12 September 1829 – 4 January 1880) was a German painter. He was the leading classicist painter of the German 19th-century school.

Feuerbach was born at Speyer, the son of the well-known archaeologist Joseph Anselm Feuerbach and the grandson of the legal scholar Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach.

After having passed through the art schools of Düsseldorf and Munich, he went to Antwerp and subsequently to Paris, where he benefited by the teaching of Couture, and produced his first masterpiece, Hafiz at the Fountain in 1852. He subsequently worked at Karlsruhe, and then Venice. In Venice, he fell under the spell of the greatest school of colourists, and several of his work demonstrate a close study of the Italian masters. He then proceeded to Rome and then Vienna.

In Vienna, he associated with Johannes Brahms. In 1873, he became professor in the Vienna Academy, but disappointed with the reception given in Vienna to his design of The Fall of the Titans for the ceiling of the new Artists’ House Museum, he went to live in Venice, where he died in 1880. After his death, Brahms composed Nänie, a piece for chorus and orchestra, in his memory.

He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting.

Otto Scholderer - Selfportrait - 1860-61

Otto Scholderer (25 January 1834 – 22 January 1902) was a German painter.

He was born in Frankfurt am Main. On completing his schooling, Scholderer went to the Städel academy of arts in 1849, where he remained until 1851. Among his teachers were the art historian Johann David Passavant and the painter Jakob Becker. Subsequently, Scholderer established himself in Städel as a freelance painter. During this period his friendship with Victor Müller began; Scholderer became his brother-in-law in 1868.

Through Müller, Scholderer became acquainted with the works of Gustave Courbet. Scholderer made several short study trips to Paris between 1857 and 1858, where he became friends with Henri Fantin-Latour and Édouard Manet, whose influence can be seen in his subsequent work. Fantin-Latour depicted Scholderer in his picture Studio aux Batignolles . Starting from 1858, Scholderer worked and lived predominantly in Kronberg in Taunus, where his colleagues included Anton Burger, Peter Burnitz and Louis Eysen; he was close to the Kronberger painter colony.

In 1866, Scholderer established himself in Düsseldorf and made friends with Hans Thoma. With Thoma, Scholderer went in 1868 to Paris and returned to Germany only shortly before the outbreak of the French-German War. First Scholderer established himself in Munich, renewing his friendship with Wilhelm Leibl and becoming one of the artists of the Leibl-Kreis (Leibl circle). At the beginning of 1871 he went to London and worked there till the autumn of 1899. After 1899, Scholderer returned to his hometown of Frankfurt, where he died at the age of almost 68 years on 22 January 1902.

Otto Scholderer’s art, initially dominated by landscapes, later consisted primarily of portraits and still lifes. The important connection between the romantic period and the Impressionists is evident in his work.

Carl Schuch, Self-portrait, Munich - 1876

Carl Eduard Schuch (30 September 1846 – 13 September 1903) was an Austrian painter, born in Vienna, who spent most of his lifetime outside Austria, in Germany, Italy and France. He painted primarily still lifes and landscapes.

From 1865 to 1867, he studied landscape painting under the academician Ludwig Halauska. Among his early works are studies of heads which he said he wished to paint “like still-lifes, tone by tone, without emotion”. During the period 1882–94 he was based in Paris, where he was greatly impressed by the work of Claude Monet—whom he described as “the Rembrandt of plein-air painting”—although he was attracted most of all to Rembrandt and the artists of the Barbizon school. In 1884 and 1885 he spent the summer months in the Netherlands, studying the Dutch old masters as well as the contemporary painters of the Hague School, and filling notebooks with detailed descriptions of the colors he observed in paintings that he admired. Of all the artists belonging to the circle around Wilhelm Leibl (called the Leibl-Kreis), Schuch was the most devoted to color. His work marks the transition from the realist tradition to the modern movement in Vienna.

Schuch was financially independent and made little effort to exhibit his work; in his lifetime he sold only one painting. His later years were marked by a degenerative illness, and he stopped painting in 1891. He died in Vienna.

Julie Wolfthorn in her studio.

Julie Wolfthorn (January 8, 1864 – December 29, 1944) was a German painter. Born as Julie Wolf(f) to a family of Jewish faith, she later styled herself as Julie Wolfthorn after the city of Thorn, where she was born.

Wolfthorn was born in Thorn (Toruń) in the Prussian Province of Prussia. She studied painting in Berlin since 1890, and returned there after a stay in Paris. In 1898, she was co-founder of the Berlin Secession and the „Verein der Künstlerinnen und Kunstfreunde Berlin“. In 1905, Julie Wolfthorn and over 200 female artists signed a petition to be allowed to join the „Preußisch-Königliche Kunstakademie“, which was turned down.

With Käthe Kollwitz, she founded the exhibition cooperation „Verbindung Bildender Künstlerinnen“. The two women are elected to directors of the „Secession“ in 1912, but she and Fanny Remak are expelled in 1933. Julie Wolfthorn stays in Berlin, cooperating with the „Kulturbund Deutscher Juden“ under pressure from the Nazis, which declare it illegal in 1941, arresting the members and seizing the possessions.

On October 28, 1942, 78 year old Julie Wolfthorn and her sister Luise Wolf (which like all other family members except the painter called themselves Wolff or Wolf) were transported to Theresienstadt. She is said to have continued drawing, as far as possible under the circumstances, until her death on December 29, 1944.

Wolfthorn was known for her portraits, among others of Ida Dehmel, Richard Dehmel, Carl Ludwig Schleich, Hedda Eulenberg, Gabriele Reuter, family members of writers Hedwig Lachmann and Gustav Landauer, the family of architect Hermann Muthesius, opera singer Irmgard Scheffner, many actrices like Tilla Durieux or Carola Neher, and many other famous people of her time from Berlin, mainly female activists.

Max Beckmann - ‘Self-portrait with Horn’, 1938-1940

Max Beckmann (February 12, 1884 – December 28, 1950) was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism.

Unlike several of his avant-garde contemporaries, Beckmann rejected non-representational painting; instead, he took up and advanced the tradition of figurative painting. He greatly admired Cézanne, but also Van Gogh, Blake, Rembrandt, Rubens and Northern European artists of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance such as Bosch, Bruegel and Matthias Grünewald. His style and method of composition are also rooted in the imagery of medieval stained glass.

Encompassing portraiture, landscape, still life, mythology and the fantastic, his work created a very personal but authentic version of modernism, combining this with traditional plasticity. Beckmann reinvented the triptych and expanded this archetype of medieval painting into a looking glass of contemporary humanity.

From its beginnings in the fin de siècle up to its completion after World War II, Beckmann’s work reflects an era of radical changes in both art and history. Many of Max Beckmann‘s paintings express the agonies of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Some of his imagery refers to the decadent glamor of the Weimar Republic’s cabaret culture, but from the 1930s on, his works often contain mythologized references to the brutalities of the Nazis. Beyond these immediate concerns, his subjects and symbols assume a larger meaning, voicing universal themes of terror, redemption, and the mysteries of eternity and fate.

Beckmann enjoyed great success and official honors during the Weimar Republic. In 1925 he was selected to teach a master class at the Städelschule Academy of Fine Art in Frankfurt. Some of his most famous students included Theo Garve, Leo Maillet and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky. In 1927 he received the Honorary Empire Prize for German Art and the Gold Medal of the City of Düsseldorf; the National Gallery in Berlin acquired his painting The Bark and, in 1928, purchased his Self-Portrait in Tuxedo. By the early 1930s, a series of major exhibitions, including large retrospectives at the Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim (1928) and in Basle and Zurich (1930) together with numerous publications, showed the high esteem in which Beckmann was held.

His fortunes changed with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, whose dislike of Modern Art quickly led to its suppression by the state. In 1933, the Nazi government called Beckmann a “cultural Bolshevik” and dismissed him from his teaching position at the Art School in Frankfurt. In 1937 more than 500 of his works were confiscated from German museums, and several of these works were put on display in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. The day after Hitler’s infamous radio speech about degenerate art in 1937, Beckmann left Germany with his second wife, Quappi. For ten years, Beckmann lived in poverty in self-imposed exile in Amsterdam, failing in his desperate attempts to obtain a visa for the US. In 1944 the Germans attempted to draft him into the army, despite the fact that the sixty-year-old artist had suffered a heart attack. The works completed in his Amsterdam studio were even more powerful and intense than the ones of his master years in Frankfurt, and included several large triptychs, which stand as a summation of Beckmann’s art.

Wilhelm Trübner - Selbstbildnis mit zugekniffenem Auge/self portrait - 1872

Wilhelm Trübner (February 3, 1851 – December 21, 1917) was a German realist painter of the circle of Wilhelm Leibl.

Trübner was born in Heidelberg and had early training as a goldsmith. In 1867 he met classicist painter Anselm Feuerbach who encouraged him to study painting, and he began studies in Karlsruhe under Fedor Dietz. The next year saw him studying at the Kunstacademie in Munich, where he was to be greatly impressed by an international exhibition of paintings by Leibl and Gustave Courbet. Courbet visited Munich in 1869, not only exhibiting his work but demonstrating his alla prima method of working quickly from nature in public performances. This had an immediate impact on many of the city’s young artists, who found Courbet’s approach an invigorating alternative to the shopworn academic tradition.

The early 1870s were a period of discovery for Trübner. He travelled to Italy, Holland and Belgium, and in Paris encountered the art of Manet, whose influence can be seen in the spontaneous yet restrained style of Trübner’s portraits and landscapes. During this period he also made the acquaintance of Carl Schuch, Albert Lang and Hans Thoma, German painters who, like Trübner, greatly admired the unsentimental realism of Wilhelm Leibl. This group of artists came to be known as the “Leibl circle”.

He published writings on art theory in 1892 and 1898, which express above all the idea that “beauty must lie in the painting itself, not in the subject”. By urging the viewer to discover beauty in a painting’s formal values, its colors, proportions, and surface, Trübner advanced a philosophy of “art for art’s sake”. In 1901 he joined the recently formed Berlin Secession, at the time Germany’s most important forum for the exhibition of avant-garde art. From 1903 until his death in 1917 he was a professor at the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe, also serving as director from 1904 to 1910.

Trübner’s paintings are in many public collections, especially in Germany, including the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, the Belvedere,Vienna and the Neue Pinakothek in Munich.

Adolf Eduard Herstein - Schattiger Weg am Waldesrand - 1900s

Adolf Eduard Herstein (1869–1932) was a painter and engraver. Born in Warsaw, he worked and taught in France, Germany (where he was active in the Berlin Secession movement) and his native Poland. His oil painting relied on the use of heavy impasto and was in style closely related to Impressionism.

In Munich in 1894 he embarked upon an affair with Franziska, Gräfin (ie Countess) zu Reventlow (Fanny zu Reventlow). She was pregnant with Herstein’s child when in 1895 she married the politician Walter Lübke. The pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.

An engraving of his, called ‘The Standard Bearer’, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York. There are two works from the years 1914-5 held by the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

In the years 1904-1911 he was the owner of a private school of painting in Warsaw.

Herstein died in Berlin.

thebohmerian:

From the book “Haggadah Shel Pesach”; a 1923, woodcut illustration, featuring the work of Israeli artist Jacob Steinhardt.

Jacob Steinhardt (1887–1968) (Hebrew: יעקב שטיינהרדט‎) was an Israeli painter and woodcut artist.

Jacob Steinhardt was born in Żerków, Germany (now Poland). He attended the School of Art in Berlin in 1906, then studied painting with Louis Corinth and engraving with Hermann Struck in 1907. From 1908 to 1910 he lived in Paris, where he associated with Henri Matisse and Théophile Steinlen, and in 1911 he was in Italy. When World War I broke out, he enlisted in the German army, and served on the Eastern Front in Poland and Lithuania, and then in Macedonia. After the war, he returned to Berlin, and in 1922 married Minni Gumpert. They immigrated to Palestine in 1933, after he was harassed by the German police, dominated by the Nazis who recently came to power.

Steinhardt died in 1968. He is buried in Nahariya.

Jacob Steinhardt worked mainly in woodcuts depicting biblical and Jewish subjects. He participated in the Berlin Secession and founded the Pathetiker Group. He was a member of the Bezalel school group. In 1934, Steinhardt opened an art school in Jerusalem. In 1948, he became Chairman of the Graphics Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. He served as director of the school in 1954-1957.

The Jewish Museum Berlin houses the largest Steinhardt collection in the world, including numerous graphic artworks and unpublished documents donated by Josefa Bar-On Steinhardt, the artist’s daughter. The museum owns paintings, several hundred print graphics, and a collection of books illustrated by the artist.

Lovis Corinth - Der Maler Makkabäus-Hermann Struck - 1918

oil on canvas, 80.5 × 59.5 cm (31.7 × 23.4 in)

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München, Germany

Lovis Corinth (21 July 1858 – 17 July 1925) was a German painter and printmaker whose mature work realized a synthesis of impressionism and expressionism.

Corinth studied in Paris and Munich, joined the Berlin Secession group, later succeeding Max Liebermann as the group’s president. His early work was naturalistic in approach. Corinth was initially antagonistic towards the expressionist movement, but after a stroke in 1911 his style loosened and took on many expressionistic qualities. His use of color became more vibrant, and he created portraits and landscapes of extraordinary vitality and power. Corinth’s subject matter also included nudes and biblical scenes.

Hermann Struck (1876 – 1944) was a German Jewish artist known for his etchings.

Hermann Struck (Chaim Aaron ben David) was born in Berlin. He studied at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. In 1904, he joined the modern art movement known as the Berlin Secession. In 1900, Struck met Jozef Israëls, a Dutch artist, who became his mentor. Both were recognized as leading artists of their time. In 1908, Struck published “Die Kunst des Radierens” (“The Art of Etching”), which became a seminal work on the subject. His students included Marc Chagall, Lovis Corinth, Jacob Steinhardt, Lesser Ury and Max Liebermann.

In 1899, upon completing his studies at the Berlin Academy, he was banned from teaching there because he was Jewish. He signed his work with his Hebrew name, Chaim Aaron ben David, and a Star of David. Struck did commissioned portraits of Ibsen, Nietzsche, Freud, Albert Einstein, Herzl, Oscar Wilde and other leading figures of the time.

Struck was a fervent Zionist and Jewish activist. He visited the Land of Israel in 1903, displayed his art at the Fifth Zionist Congress, and was a founder of the Mizrachi Religious Zionist movement. At the same time, he was a German patriot and volunteered for military service in World War I serving as a translator, liaison officer and military artist. He was awarded the Iron Cross I class and promoted to an officer for bravery, in 1917 he became the referent for Jewish affairs at the German Eastern Front High Command.

Struck immigrated to Palestine in 1922, taught at Bezalel Academy and helped establish the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. He visited Berlin every summer until the Nazis rose to power.

german-expressionists:

Lyonel Feininger, The Green Bridge II, 1916 

Lyonel Charles Feininger (July 17, 1871 – January 13, 1956) was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist.

Lyonel Feininger was born to German-American violinist and composer Karl Feininger and American singer Elizabeth Feininger. He was born and grew up in New York City, but traveled to Germany at the age of 16 in 1887 to study. In 1888, he moved to Berlin and studied at the Königliche Akademie Berlin under Ernst Hancke. He continued his studies at art schools in Berlin with Karl Schlabitz, and in Paris with sculptor Filippo Colarossi. He started as a caricaturist for several magazines including Harper’s Round Table, Harper’s Young People, Humoristische Blätter, Lustige Blätter, Das Narrenschiff, Berliner Tageblatt and Ulk.

In 1900, he met Clara Fürst, daughter of the painter Gustav Fürst. He married her in 1901, and they had two daughters. In 1905, he separated from his wife after meeting Julia Berg. He married Berg in 1908 and had several children with her.

The artist is represented with drawings at the exhibitions of the annual Berlin Secession in the years 1901 through 1903.

Feininger’s career as cartoonist started in 1894. He was working for several German, French and American magazines. In February 1906, when a quarter of Chicago’s population was of German descent, James Keeley, editor of The Chicago Tribune traveled to Germany to procure the services of the most popular humor artists. He recruited Feininger to illustrate two comic strips “The Kin-der-Kids” and “Wee Willie Winkie’s World” for the Chicago Tribune. The strips were noted for their fey humor and graphic experimentation. He also worked as a commercial caricaturist for 20 years for various newspapers and magazines in both the USA and Germany. Later, Art Spiegelman wrote in The New York Times Book Review, that Feininger’s comics have “achieved a breathtaking formal grace unsurpassed in the history of the medium.”

Feininger started working as a fine artist at the age of 36. He was a member of the Berliner Sezession in 1909, and he was associated with German expressionist groups: Die Brücke, the Novembergruppe, Gruppe 1919, the Blaue Reiter circle and Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). His first solo exhibit was at Sturm Gallery in Berlin, 1917. When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Germany in 1919, Feininger was his first faculty appointment, and became the master artist in charge of the printmaking workshop. He designed the cover for the Bauhaus 1919 manifesto: an expressionist woodcut ‘cathedral’. He taught at the Bauhaus for several years. Among the students who attended his workshops were Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (German/Australian (1893–1965), Hans Friedrich Grohs (German 1892 - 1981) and Margarete Koehler-Bittkow (German/American, 1898–1964).

When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, the situation became unbearable for Feininger and his wife. The Nazi Party declared his work to be “degenerate.” They moved to America after his work was exhibited in the ‘degenerate art’ (Entartete Kunst) in 1936, but before the 1937 exhibition in Munich. He taught at Mills College before returning to New York. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955.

In addition to drawing, Feininger created art with painted toy figures being photographed in front of drawn backgrounds.

Feininger produced a large body of photographic works between 1928 and the mid-1950s. He kept his photographic work within his circle of friends, and it was not shared with the public in his lifetime. He gave some prints away to his colleagues Walter Gropius and Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

Feininger also had intermittent activity as a pianist and composer, with several piano compositions and fugues for organ extant.

His sons, Andreas Feininger and T. Lux Feininger, both became noted artists, the former as a photographer and the latter as a photographer and painter. T. Lux Feininger died July 7, 2011 at the age of 101.