Tag: germany

Raoul Hausmann

Raoul Hausmann, “The Spirit of Our Time”, 1920, Assemblage with Wooden Head

Rauol Hausmann was an Austrian artist, a founder and a central figure in the Dada Movement in Berlin. He began his formal training at the atelier of Arthur Lewin-Funcke where he focused on anatomy and nude drawing. He later connected with the German Expressionist movement, studying woodcutting and lithography under Erich Heckel.

In 1917, Hausmann met Richard Hulsenbedk, who introduced him to the principles and philosophy of Dada, a new and visual art and literary movement. Dada artists and writers created provocative works that questioned capitalism and conformity, which they believed to be the fundamental motivations for the first World War which had just ended, leaving chaos and destruction throughout Europe.

‘Spirit of Our Time’ was a sculptural metaphor for the inability of the establishment to inspire the changes necessary to rebuild a better Germany. This sculpture illustrated Raoul Hausmann’s belief that the average supporter of what he considered to be a corrupt society had no more capabilities than those which chance had glued to the outside of his skull; his brain remained empty. With his eyes deliberately left blank, the ‘Spirit of Our Time’ was a blind automaton whose blinkered attitude excluded any possibility of creative thought.

Adolf von Hildebrand

Adolf von Hildebrand, “Stehender Junger Mann ( Standing Young Man ), 1881-1884. Marble, National Gallery, Berlin

Adolf von Hildebrand was a German sculptor, working in the Neo-classical tradition. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and at the Murnich Academy. Hildebrand designed the architectual setting for Hans von Marees’ murals in the library of the German marine Zoological Institute at Naples, Italy. He also executed a monumental fountain, the Witelisbacher Brunnen, In Berlin.

Alice Lex-Nerlinger

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, “Racecar Driver”, 1926, Vintage Silver Print from an Original Photogram, Private Collection

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, was born in 1893 to the owner of a gas lamp factory on Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Between 1911 and 1916, she studied painting and graphic art at the Teaching Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts under painter and lithographer Emil Orlik and other teachers. 

Personal experience of the First World War and the atmosphere of artistic experiment in 1920s Berlin created provided a source of ideas for Alice Lex-Nerlinger’s artistic works: heroism versus the soldier’s death, man and machine, capital and labour, state and censor, and not least, the misogynist. She found stimulus and confirmation in groups of artists with similar attitudes such as the Abstrakten (the Abstracts) and the Association of Revolutionary Fine Artists in Germany founded in 1928. Like Alice Lex, these groups rejected Expressionism, Cubism and Dadaism as bourgeois art. She expressed her political convictions by joining the German Communist Party (KPD) along with her husband Oskar Nerlinger in 1928.

Photographs, newspaper clippings and strikingly contrasted colors, such as red and blue, provided the ingredients for Lex-Nerlinger’s socially critical montages, specializing in photomontages and colored spray painting. Her work was often produced in sequential series creating rhythm and multi-dimensionality. Lex-Nerlinger succeeded in translating the complexity of political statements into simply structured individual images or compositions which prompted discussion and inquiry.

In 1933 Lex-Nerlinger was expelled from the German Association of Fine Artists by the National Socialists and banned from practicing her profession and from exhibiting her artwork. Censorship and this ban on her artwork drove her into engaging in underground political activities against the regime. 

Alice Lex-Nerlinger did manage to survive during National Socialism in Germany; but, fearful of persecution and house searches, she destroyed some of her artworks. After the Second World War, she worked in the German Democratic Republic primarily on official portrait commissions. She was honored with a honorary pension in 1960, which she received with the support of the Germany Academy of Arts, and was honored with the Patriotic Order of Merit of the GDR in 1974. 

Fox and His Friends

Gif from “Fox and His Friends”

“Fox and His Friends” is a 1975 West German film written and directed by Rainer Eerner Fassbinder, starring Fassbinder, Peter Chatel and Karlheinz Bohm. The plot follows the misadventures of a working-class homosexual man who wins the lottery, then falls in love with the elegant son of an industrialist.

Reblogged with thanks to http://gift-wrapped.tumblr.com

Fritz Kahn

Illustrations of Fritz Kahn

Fritz Kahn was a German physician who published popular science books and is known for his illustrations, which pioneered the art of infographics. Through the use of often startling metaphors, both verbal and visual, Kahn succeeded in making complex principles of nature and technology comprehensible to a person of average education.

Kahn described the human body as the most competent machine in the world; and his work reflects the technical and cultural state of development of Germany during the Wiemer Republic. He himself did not draw well; the illustrations were made by others on his instructions. Kahn established studios for this purpose in Berlin, New York and Copenhagen.

In late 1938, shortly after the Kristallnacht in Germany, Kahn’s books were placed on the list of “damaging and undesirable writing” and in addition his book on sexuality, “Unser Geschlechtsleben”, was banned by the police and all available copies destroyed. Fritz Kahn’s illustrations were returned to public attention in 2009 with the release of Uta and Thilo von Debschitz’s monograph “Fritz Kahn- Man Machine”. The first exhibition of his work was held in 2010 at the Berlin Museum of the Histoy of Medicine.

Club des Belugas, “Let’s Go”

Club des Belugas, “Let’s Go” from the Album “Fishing for Zebras”

Club des Belugas is one of the leading lounge & nujazz projects in Germany, perhaps in Europe. They combine Contemporary European Lounge & Nujazz Styles with Brazilian Beats and American Black Soul of the fifties, sixties and seventies, using their unique creativity and intensity.

Main members are Maxim Illion & Kitty the Bill, with such exquisite guests as the Californian jazz lady Brenda Boykin, trumpeter Reiner Winterschladen (Nighthawks), Swedish singer Anna Luca, London based jazz singer Iain Mackenzie, Anne Schnell from Jojo Effect, Dean Bowman from New York and trumpet player Thomas Siffling.

Meute, “REJ”

Meute, “REJ”, 2016

MEUTE is a techno marching band – a dozen drummers and horn players from Hamburg, Germany, who fulfil the job of a dj with their acoustic instruments. The archaic conglomerate of brass and drums creates a new genre by combining hypnotic driving techno and expressive brass band music. MEUTE detaches electronic music from the dj desk and evolves the thrust of energy on stage or directly in the crowd, be it on the streets or in the club, with or without electricity.

In this video, MEUTE plays a street version of the all time deep house classic “REJ”, originally performed by Berlin based Duo ÂME.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Abendland (Twilight of the West)”, 1989, Lead Sheet, Polymer Paint, Ash, Plaster, Cement, Earth, Vanish on Canvas and Wood, 400 x 380 x 12 Centimeters, National Gallery of Australia

The huge scale of “Twilight of the West” creates a confrontational impact on the viewer that is not achieved with smaller easel paintings. Kiefer constructs works of this size with an underlying skeleton of broad gestural marks reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. He adopts a wide variety of pictorial devices, in particular the nineteenth-century Romantics’ use of the symbolic landscape to create a drama of epic proportions.

Kiefer uses his camera as a sketching tool: a number of his works are painted directly onto enlarged photographs or are based on photographs. The image of the railway tracks was recorded during his visit to Bordeaux perhaps as early as 1984. The sky is a vast sheet of lead above the horizon line. The metal sheet is worked, wrinkled and crumpled like paper. Lead is a powerful metal, both as a protection against radiation and as an industrial pollutant. It also has associations with alchemy as the base metal that might be transmuted into gold and, as such, it parallels the idea of metamorphosis that underlies Kiefer’s art.

Like the lead curtain, the landscape below it is near monochromatic. The limited range of colour reproduces the muting effect of twilight, with its dominance of red-browns and raking illumination. The sun, an impression of a manhole cover stamped in the soft lead sheet, is low on the horizon. Twilight, and a leaden veil of darkness, descends on our civilisation in this painting. But just as the manhole suggests a way out, so the sun will follow the night.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer: Paintings from the “Walhalla” Series

Anselm Kiefer, a German painter and sculptor, was born in 1945 and grew up playing in the rubble of postwar Germany, a childhood that has had a huge effect on his life and art. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. He works incorporating materials into his work, such as straw, ash, clay, lead and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan, whose works were also affected by the horrors of the war, played a role in developing Kiefer’s themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust.

Markus Ecke Wie Kante

Markus Ecke Wie Kante, Urbex Places in Germany

Fantastic shots of urbex places around Germany by Markus Ecke Wie Kante, talented self-taught photographer, adventurer and urban explorer based in Berlin, Germany. Markus focuses on abandoned photography. He travels all over Europe to capture impressive urbex places.

Images reblogged with thanks to https://photogrist.com