Tag: germany

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Margarette”, Oil and Straw on Canvas, 1981, 280 x 380 cm, Tate Museum, London, England

Anselm Kiefer was born 1945 in Donauschingen, Germany, at the close of World War II. He studied art formally under Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy in the early 1970s where history and myth became central themes in his work.

In 1971 Kiefer produced his first large-scale landscape paintings and from 1973 he began to experiment with wooden interiors on a monumental scale. His preoccupation with recent German history is seen throughout his work and his use of recurring motifs, such as an artist’s palette symbolises his emotional journey relating to this period. Kiefer has made increasing use of materials such as sand, straw, wood, dirt and photographs, as well as sewn materials and lead model soldiers. By adding found materials to the painted surface Kiefer invented a compelling third space between painting and sculpture. Recent work has broadened his range yet further: in 2006 he showed a series of paintings based around the little-known work of the modernist Russian poet Velimir Chlebnikov.

Lyonel Feininger

Artwork by Lyonel Feininger

Born in July of 1871, Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger was an American-born German painter, the son of a concert violinist and a singer and pianist from Germany. In 1887, he followed his parents to Europe where he attended the drawing and painting class at Hamburg’s Gewerbeschule. From 1888 to 1892, Feininger studied at Berlin’s Königliche Kunst-Akademie and later attended the private art school of the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi in Paris.

Feininger, along with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky, founded the Die Blauen Vier group in 1924. He presented work at Berlin’s 1931 Kronprinzen-Palais, the first comprehensive retrospective of the group’s work. In 1933, Feininger relocated to Berlin; however, as his situation in Berlin intensified under the National Socialist government, he emigrated to the United States in 1937. That same year, Feininger was declared a degenerate artist and four-hundred of his works were confiscated by Goebbel’s Reich Chamber of Culture.

Lyonel Feininger did not achieve his breakthrough as an artist in the United States until 1944, the year of his successful retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Beginning in 1945, he held summer courses at North Carolina’s prestigious art colony, Black Mountain College. At this highly influential college, Feininger met such notables as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, a pioneer of modernist architecture, and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Feininger’s classes, his written work and later watercolors were essential parts of the development of Abstract Expressionist painting in the United States. 

Lyonel Feininger died in New York City in January of 1956 at the age of eighty-four. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2011 to 2012. It initially opened at the Whitney Museum of Art from June to October of 2011 and then traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where it was viewed from January to May of 2012. 

Top Insert Image: Andreas Feininger, “Lyonel Feininger”, 1928, Gelatin Silver Print on Board, 34.4 x 25.6 cm, Bauhaus Archive Berlin, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Lyonel Feininger, “Gaberndorf II”, 1924, Oil on Canvas, 100.2 x 78.1 cm, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri 

Peter Aurisch

Cubist Tattoos by Peter Aurisch

Based in a quiet undisclosed studio a short train ride outside of downtown Berlin, artist Peter Aurisch creates some of the most original tattoos in the city—and in a place with an estimated 2,000 tattoo artists, that’s saying something. To keep his ideas fresh and original, Aurisch may only begin planning a new piece when the client first arrives. He tends to work freehand without sketches or source imagery, and instead draws inspiration from stories and details provided by his customers.

Aurisch is also printmaker and painter and his works (both on skin and off) are influenced in part by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and the cubism of Picasso.

Aurisch’s studio is called Johnny Nevada, a space he shares with Jessica Mach whose tattoos you should also definitely check out. He takes only a single appointment daily. Explore more of his most recent work on Instagram.

Norbet Bisky

Paintings by Norbet Bisky

Norbert Bisky is a German painter based in Berlin, best known for his frescos depicting adolescents. He was born at Leipzig in the former German Democratic Republic. The son of a Communist official, he grew up in a home in which Communism assumed the power of a religion. He studied from the mid-1990s at the Hochschule der Künste where he was a master student of Georg Baselitz in Berlin and at the Salzburg Summer Academy in the class of Jim Dine.

His work is greatly influenced by the socialist realism which was the official art of the GDR. In recent years he has shifted to darker themes of disaster, disease and decapitation while retaining the consummate painterliness which is the hallmark of his work. His figures, in many cases are floating, falling, tumbling, without any gravitational axis. The tumult surrounding the figures is punctuated by the cross pollination of cues from Christian ideology, art history, gay culture, pornography and apocalyptic visions. Bisky transmits an impression of instability on the canvas that distinctly resonates with our contemporary state of affairs.

Christian Voigt

Photography by Christian Voigt

Born in Munich, Germany, Christian Voigt lives and works in Hamburg and The South of France. His current studio is situated in Hamburg. Voigt works with large-format cameras, both digital and analogue. He experiments with new camera techniques and makes the best use of the digital medium. In the museum edition, his large-format pictures can measure as much as eight metres in width; but his strictly limited editions come in various sizes for collectors.

Voigt continually works to refine a pictorial idiom, the stories he wants to tell, the feelings he convey. This is visible in his pictures; landscape and architecture are his principal areas of interest. Voigt’s series on the vanished architecture of the past and its appearance in our own times come across just as vividly as the craziness of today’s societies that his images depict.

“My pictures are created with the camera, not on the computer,” he says, with a reference to the complicated technology and processing that goes into his creations. “But without the computer technology of today, the pictures couldn’t be crafted into their final form.”-Christian Voigt

Solo shows and Art Fairs have been staged in Basel, Hamburg, New York, Los Angeles, London, Saint Tropez, Amsterdam, Madrid

Jürgen Wittdorf

Woodcut Prints and Linocuts by Jürgen Wittdorf

Jürgen Wittdorf is a German painter and graphic artist, mainly known through his book illustrations and large sized woodcuts and linocuts. In 1960-1961, he created a series called “For the Youth”, which portrayed young hooligans and youths either dressed in jeans or posed in full frontal nudity. This “Westernization” earned Wittdorf criticisms from the German state.

Note: An interesting and extensive article to read on the attitudes regarding homosexuality in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the last half of the twentieth-century is Eric A. Gordon’s homage to his friend Michael Kuschnia which was published in the January 2021 online People’s World. The article, which covers their fifty-year friendship and correspondences can be found at: https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/homage-to-michael-my-east-german-friend-of-half-a-century/

Susannah Martin

Susannah Martin, “Salon Dogs” and “The Day I Quit”

Susannah Martin is a German-based artist whose subject matter is timeless. Her realistically-rendered pastel drawings and oil paintings feature nude subjects who are exploring an idyllic landscape. As they wade through streams and pass by mountains, men, women, and children encounter different wild life.

“The history of the painted nude in landscape documents exactly this eternal longing. Setting aside for a moment, any erotic motivations, the nude has always also been a symbol for man in his purist form, his original form, his primordial form. Stripped of all social indicators; clothing, possessions , etc., he exists independent of identity in a time of pure being ( ein Zeit des Seins). Being is our eternal home. Nature does not possess an identity, it is. The nude in a natural setting has always been associated with our return to a time of pure being, a return home.” – Susannah Martin

Hermann Lismann

Hermann Lismann, “Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas

Born in Munich, Hermann Lismann belonged to the group of artists that met regularly at the Café du Dôme. After serving in the German army in World War I, he settled in Frankfurt, where many of his works were acquired by the local museum, and where for several years he taught aesthetics at the university.

After the rise of Hitler Lismann immigrated to France, residing in Tours. He was interned by the French at the outbreak of World War II as an enemy alien, but managed to escape to Montauban near Toulouse, in the unoccupied zone. However, in 1943 Lismann was deported to his death in the extermination camp of Majdanek.

Lismann’s post-impressionist works in the Staedelsches Museum at Frankfurt and in the museum of Wuppertal, were confiscated by the Nazis and disappeared. Nevertheless, a memorial exhibition held by the Frankfurt Kunstverein in 1959 was able to assemble 132 of his works.

Albert Janesch

Albert Janesch. “Water Sports”, 1937, Tempera on Canvas, 153 x 208 cm. Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

Austrian portrait and genre painter Albert Janesch studied in Wien, Vienna, from 1904-12. During World War One,  he was an official war artist, as he was during World War Two in France, Russia and Greece. After 1945 Janesch produced murals for the “Iron Room” of the Museum of Military History located in Wien, which he finished in 1954.

One of his works, “Water Sports”, was submitted for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was a representation of the perfect beauty of a race steeled in battle and sport, inspired not by antiquity or classicism but by the pulsing life of current events. Adolf Hitler took this painting for his private collection.

Franz Von Stuck

Franz Von Stuck, “Narcissus”, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 64.3 x 59.8 cm, Private Collection

Franz Von Stuck was am influential German Symbolist  and Art Nouveau painter, sculptor, engraver, and architect born at Tettenweis near Griesbach in Lower Bavaria, Germany. He was noted for his treatment of erotic and comic aspects of mythological themes.

As a child Von Stuck quickly became a gifted caricaturist. From 1878 to 1881 he attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich, where he received particular encouragement from German Sculptor and painter Ferdinand Barth.

Von Stuck attended the Munich School for the Applied Arts after secondary school, transferring in 1881 to the “Königliche Akademie der bildenden Künste” (Royal Academy for the Fine Arts). The drawings he did for the portfolio ‘Allegorien und Embleme’ (‘Allegories and Emblems’), published by Gerlach and Schenk in Vienna, made his reputation as an outstanding draughtsman as early as 1882.

The many other prizes and honours awarded to Franz Von Stuck included the Ritterkreuz des Verdienstordens der Bayerischen Krone (Cross of Knighthood in the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown), a distinction coupled with elevation to knighthood. In the last phase of his work, Von Stuck concentrated primarily on sculpture.

The recipient of so many distinctions and an honorary member of numerous European academies, Franz Von Stuck died in Munich of 1928. He was buried at the Waldfriedhof in Munich and his wife Mary rests beside him. His villa at the Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich is now a art museum.

Klaus Nomi, “Total Eclipse”

Klaus Nomi, “Total Eclipse”, Live 1981

Klaus Sperber (January 24, 1944 – August 6, 1983), better known as Klaus Nomi, was a German countertenor noted for his wide vocal range and an unusual, otherworldly stage persona.

Nomi was known for his bizarrely visionary theatrical live performances, heavy make-up, unusual costumes, and a highly stylized signature hairdo which flaunted a receding hairline. His songs were equally unusual, ranging from synthesizer-laden interpretations of classical music opera to covers of 1960s pop standards like Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and Lou Christie’s “Lightnin’ Strikes”. He is remembered in the US as one of David Bowie’s backup singers for a 1979 performance on Saturday Night Live.

Nomi died in 1983, alone in Manhattan’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center at the age of 39, as a result of complications from AIDS. His ashes were spread over New York City.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)