Entartete Kunst: Degenerate Art

Starting from 1905 and working up to a crescendo in the 1920s, German art saw an incredible flowering of brilliance in the early decades of the last century. The art movement which encapsulates the work of many different artists and smaller aesthetic cross-currents is called German Expressionism. The formation of the Brücke artists’ group in Dresden by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl in 1905 is usually seen as the starting pistol for the whole Expressionist movement. Things developed very quickly from there. Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein joined Brücke the following year, and Vassily Kandinsky and Oskar Kokoschka began working in a similar vein.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Elbhafen
Lithograph, 1907


Wassily Kandinsky, Orientalisches
Woodcut, 1911

Wassily Kandinsky, Motif aus
improvisation 25: The Garden of Love
Woodcut, 1911


Oskar Kokoschka, Madchenbildnis
Lithograph, 1920

Lists of the major artists of German Expressionism usually include all the artists in the last paragraph except for Bleyl, with the addition of Franz Marc, Paul Klee, August Macke, Max Beckman, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Otto Mueller and Conrad Felixmüller. But as this post will show, there were many extraordinary talents working within Expressionism. German Expressionism was also unusually welcoming to female artists, such as Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin, Jacoba van Heemskerck, Maria Uhden and Käthe Kollwitz.


Conrad Felixmüller, Porträt Max John
Woodcut, 1919


Conrad Felixmüller, Mein Sohn Luca
Woodcut, 1919


George Grosz, Thomas Rowlandson zum Andenken
Lithograph, 1921


Heinrich Campendonk. Landschaft mit Ziegen und Wildkatzen
Woodcut, 1920


Ewald Mataré, Landschaft/Strasse
Woodcut, 1921


Eberhard Viegener, Simson im Temple
Woodcut, 1919


Georg Schrimpf, Mutter mit Kind
Woodcut, 1923


Maria Uhden, Frau am Wasser
Woodcut, 1918


Maria Uhden, Himmel
Woodcut, 1917

Usually when a country experiences an intense flowering of radical art, there is resistance to what Robert Hughes called “the shock of the new”. In Germany, this resistance was so strong it led to the persecution of almost every artist allied to Expressionism. Under the Nazis, many were dismissed from their positions in fine art academies, banned from creating or exhibiting art, or from buying art materials, and the art museums of Germany were looted to systematically remove, and either destroy or sell, any Expressionist works. An official exhibition of Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art, was staged in Munich in 1937, to hold the Expressionists up to public ridicule. In the case of Erich Heckel, for instance, 700 of his works were removed from German museums, and his woodblocks and copperplates were destroyed.


Erich Heckel, Liegende (Frau)
Woodcut, 1913, revised with newly-cut red forms in 1924


Karl Hofer, Tanzerin
Lithograph, 1921


Gerhard Marcks, Heimweg
Woodcut, 1923


Rudolf Grossman, Der alter Gärtner
Etching, 1921


Rudolf Grossman, Der Kritiker
Lithograph, 1919


Otto Schubert, Frühling
Etching, 1920


Felix Meseck, Landschaft
Etching, 1920s

It seems quite extraordinary now, but more than 16,500 works were removed from museums; many were destroyed, including some 4,000 paintings, drawings and prints burned in an auto-da-fé by the Berlin Fire Brigade in 1939. The most valuable were sold on the international art market through trusted dealers such as Hildebrand Gurlitt, the source of the treasure trove of 1,046 works found in the apartment of his son Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012, many of which have now passed to the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern. The name Gurlitt is entwined with the story of Expressionism and of Degenerate Art, for the Fritz Gurlitt gallery, run by Fritz’s son Wolfgang, and its associated publishing arm, the Gurlitt-Presse, was probably the most prominent promoter and publisher of Expressionist works. Wolfgang and Hildebrand Gurlitt were first cousins; both were suspect to the Nazis because of Jewish lineage and because of their association with Expressionism. Yet both profited from the exploitation of works seized either from museums or from Jewish owners by the Nazis.


Lovis Corinth, Umarmung
Etching, 1915


Max Liebermann, Selbstbildnis
Etching, 1917


Max Liebermann, Amsterdammer Judengasse
Etching, 1908

All of the artists whose work decorates this post (except Maria Uhden, who died in 1918) were persecuted by the Nazis, driven from their teaching posts, forbidden to work or exhibit, their work publicly mocked and destroyed. Although only a small proportion of the “degenerate” artists were Jewish, many suffered terrible anxiety about their fate at the hands of a state machine seemingly intent on wiping them and their art from the face of the earth. Some of the stories are beyond sad. Perhaps the most prominent German-Jewish artist in the last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century was Max Liebermann, the man who imported the Impressionist aesthetic into Germany. When he watched the Nazis march through the Brandenburg Gate in 1933 in celebration of their election victory, he rather memorably declared, Ich kann gar nicht soviel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte. ("I could not possibly eat as much as I would like to throw up."). Liebermann died unheralded in 1935. In 1943 the Nazis thought it necessary to notify his 85-year-old widow Martha, who had suffered a stroke and was bedridden, of her imminent deportation to Theresienstadt concentration camp; she killed herself before the police could arrive to take her away. Another artist, Franz Heckendorf, not himself Jewish, organized a kind of “underground railway” in Berlin to help Jews to escape to Switzerland; for this he was arrested in 1943 and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in the potash mines, the prosecution failing in their attempt to push for the death sentence.


Franz Heckendorf, Landschaft
Lithograph, 1921


Michel Fingesten, Marsyas
Etching, 1919

A particularly bitter twist of fate awaited the etcher and painter Michel Fingesten, an interesting artist who supplied a Surrealist strand to German Expressionism. A close friend of Oskar Kokoschka, Fingesten was a prominent artist in the 1920s, but as he was a Jew the doors closed on his career in 1933. After this he created very few large-scale prints, and concentrated on creating exlibris bookplates for private clients. In 1936 Michel Fingesten fled Nazi persecution and took up residence in Italy. This probably seemed a sensible option at the time – his mother was an Italian Jew, so he was comfortable with the language and the culture. But it proved to be a disastrous choice. Fingesten spent the years 1940-43 in Fascist internment camps, and though he was liberated from the Ferramonti-Tarsia camp by British troops on 14 September 1943, he died just weeks later on 8 October 1943 from complications of injuries sustained in an earlier bombing raid.

Michel Fingesten, Exlibris Fingesten
Etching, c.1939

If Michel Fingesten's virtual erasure from art history proved the effectiveness of censorship, the revival of his reputation in recent years has proved its ineffectiveness. Starting with admirers of his ex libris (which have been the subject of a catalogue raisonné by Ernst Deeken), other aspects of Fingesten's art have been reassessed. In 1994 Norbert Nechwatal published Michel Fingesten: Das Graphische Werk. In 2008 the Robert Guttman Gallery in Prague held the exhibition The Unknown Michel Fingesten: Paintings, Prints and Ex Libris from the Ernst Deeken Collection, with an accompanying catalogue. There is also a dedicated Michel Fingesten Collection at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Of the artists featured in this post, the following had work hung in the most famous Entartete Kunst exhibition: Ernst Barlach, Heinrich Campendonk, Lovis Corinth, Conrad Felixmüller, Rudolph Grossmann, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Karl Hofer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Gerhard Marcks, Ewald Mataré, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Otto Schubert.

War and the pity of war: Kathe Kollwitz

I've posted before about the German Expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz, so I'll not rehearse all my previous thoughts again: you can read them here. But having acquired a new etching by Kollwitz I felt I wanted to share it with you, partly as my own inadequate response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. Initially this picture seems to have nothing to do with war or terror: it is simply a mother caressing her baby in the cradle, the kind of image Mary Cassatt made famous.

Käthe Kollwitz, Frau an der Wiege

Etching, 1897

Klipstein 38 IIIc, Knesebeck 40

But look again at that mother. She is not entranced by the happy, healthy presence of her baby; she is traumatised by the anticipation of grief and loss, already holding her head in her hands. When she made this image in 1897, after the birth of her second child, Peter, how could Käthe Kollwitz have known that such sadness lay ahead? But it did. Peter was killed in action in WWI in October 1914, aged just 19. Everyone knows how much it hurts a mother to lose a child. If everyone in the world who is tempted to acts of war or terrorism could just remember, in the moment before they pull the trigger or shed the bomb, that every one of those they kill is a son or a daughter, surely they would think again?

Rilke and Slevogt: The Panther

As soon as I saw this etching by Max Slevogt of a black panther, I thought of Rainer Maria Rilke's 1902 or 1903 poem Der Panther, written as a response to Rilke's friend Rodin's urging to work directly from life. So as I had a bit of time on holiday this week, I tried to make my own version of Rilke's poem. I wouldn't call it a translation, as apart from retaining the four quatrains, I have ignored the form of the original - the metre and the rhyme. The best proper translation I know is that of my late friend Stephen Cohn in Neue Gedichte: New Poems (Carcanet, 1992). I didn't have this with me while I sat and struggled with the hilarious responses of Google Translate, but I did have the sensitive translation of Susan Ranson from Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems (OUP, 2011). Back home I have taken the precaution of checking Google's grasp of German with the literal prose translation of Patrick Bridgwater in Twentieth-Century German Verse (Penguin, 1963). Any boo-boos remain, of course, my own.

Max Slevogt (1868-1932), Schwarzer Panther

Etching (with three extra panthers as drypoint remarques), 1914

THE PANTHER

Jardin des Plantes, Paris

His barred eyes have grown so tired

of pacing, they have emptied out.

As if there were a thousand bars

and beyond those thousand bars, a hollowness.

The supple flexure of his paws,

revolving in an ever-tightening gyre,

creates a passionate dance around

the still centre of his fierce, numbed will.

Just sometimes, the shutter of his lens

lifts, without a sound.

An image enters, pulses through the coiled spring of his sinews,

and winks out in his heart’s great silence.

translation © copyright Neil Philip 2014

Tears of rage, tears of grief: Käthe Kollwitz and her circle

Käthe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker are the two most famous female artists in early twentieth-century Germany, but they were by no means alone: there are plenty of interesting women working alongside them. Gabriele Münter, Jacoba van Heemskerck, and Marianne von Werefkin are just three of the more well-known names. As I've recently acquired two etchings by Kollwitz, I thought I'd post these alongside some work by other female artists of the period with less of a public profile.

Käthe Kollwitz was born Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg in 1867. She made her initial studies at an art school for women in Berlin, where her teacher was Karl Stauffer-Bern; she then went to the Women's Art School in Munich. From 1891 she lived and worked in Berlin, where her husband Karl was a doctor. Kollwitz is widely recognised as one of the most important etchers of her day. Her art expresses a profound sympathy with the lives of the poor, as in her early masterworks for the series The Revolt of the Weavers.

Käthe Kollwitz, Der Sturm (The Riot)

Etching for The Revolt of the Weavers, 1897

Ref: Klipstein 33

Two further themes in the work of Käthe Kollwitz are her loathing of war and the suffering it brings (she herself lost both of her sons to the great conflicts of the twentieth century), and her profound self-questioning, in a sequence of some 50 self-portraits. I can't think of any artist other than Rembrandt who has examined themselves with such unflinching honesty as Käthe Kollwitz. The sense of anguish in the self-portrait below is almost tangible.

Käthe Kollwitz,  Selbstbildnis, mit der Hand an der Stirn (Self-portrait, hand at the forehead)

Etching, 1910

Ref: Klistein 106 iib

Clara Siewert, who was born in 1862, was a close friend of Käthe Kollwitz, with whom she studied under Karl Stauffer-Bern. When Clara Siewert moved to Berlin in 1900 she lived in the same house as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein; she also good friends with Max Slevogt and Lovis Corinth. Clara Siewert was born in Budda, East Prussia, and died in Berlin.

Clara Siewert, Junges Mädchen (Young Girl)

Lithograph, 1908

Although (as with Kollwitz) much of her work was destroyed in WWII when her studio was hit by a bomb, the art of Clara Siewert is being rediscovered today, amid new interest in the work of women artists. There was a retrospective exhibition with catalogue in 2008: "Clara Siewert - zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit" in the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg. Like Käthe Kollwitz, Clara Siewert died in 1945, having lived through two cataclysmic world wars and endured the miseries of the Third Reich.

Sella Hasse, Kohlenlöschen im Schnee (Unloading Coal in the Snow)

Etching, 1913

The artist Sella Hasse was born in Bitterfeld in 1878, and died in Berlin in 1863. She studied under Walter Leistikow, Franz Skarbina, and Lovis Corinth. Sella Hasse was a socially-committed artist, who became a close friend of Käthe Kollwitz. Her work was declared "degenerate" by the Nazis. There is a collection of her paintings and watercolours in the Wismar Museum.

Erna Frank, Rue Berger in Paris

Lithograph, 1913

The etcher, lithographer and pastellist Erna Frank was born in Cologne in 1881. She studied under Paul Baum, and lived and worked in Berlin. In 1914 Erna Frank won the bronze medal at the international graphics exhibition the Bugra Leipzig. Erna Frank's etchings were published by Hermann Abell, Paul Cassirer, and J. B. Neumann, and in the Leipzig art revue Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst. The cityscape was her favored subject. Erna Frank died in 1931

Marie Gey-Heinze, Frühling (Spring)

Etching with aquatint, 1906

Despite the title of this blog post, I can't be sure that my next two subjects knew Käthe Kollwitz personally, but they would certainly have been aware of her art, as they were working at the same time, and contributing to the same art revues - so in the circle of influence, at least. The painter and printmaker Marie Caroline Gey-Heinze was born in Cologne in 1881. Born Marie Caroline Gey, she studied under Otto Fischer at the Dresden Academy. She married the Leipzig physician Paul Heinze and quickly made a reputation for herself under the name Marie Gey-Heinze with pastels and also with etchings such as Spring and Guinea-pigs (Meerschweinsen) published by Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst.

Marie Gey-Heinze, Meerschweinchen (Guinea-pigs)

Etching, 1908

Sadly, Marie Gey-Heinze's promising career was to come to an end when she shot herself at the age of 26, in her home in Oetzsch. There is a memorial Marie Gey Fountain in Dresden, designed by George Wrba.

Marie Stein, Porträtstudie (Portrait Study)

Etching, 1899

The etcher Marie Stein (Marie Stein-Ranke) was born in Oldenburg in 1873, into a Jewish family. Unable because she was a woman to study at the Düsseldorf Academy, she chose to study in the ateliers of Walter Petersen, Friedrich Fehr, and Paul Nauen. From 1896-1898 she lived and worked in Paris, before returning to Düsseldorf and becoming a successful society portraitist. Her closest artistic friend was the landscapist Georg Müller. In 1904 Marie Stein was awarded third prize in the annual competition of the revue Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst, judged by Klinger, Liebermann, Köpping, Tschudi, Lehrs, and Graul.

Marie Stein, Bildnis (Portrait)

Etching, 1905

In 1906 Marie Stein married the eminent Egyptologist Hermann Ranke. Their life together was happy but blighted by the untimely deaths of their three children, and persecution by the Nazis because of Marie Stein's Jewish background. The bulk of her artist activity appears to date from before her marriage. Marie Stein-Ranke died in Nussloch near Heidelberg in 1964.

The artist as fire-eater: Willibald Wolf Rudinoff

After my last post about the resourceful Philip Gilbert Hamerton, who took his carefully-prepared etching plates with him on a canoeing trip, I thought I should follow up with the the wonderfully-named Willibald Wolf Rudinoff, a circus performer and nightclub singer who carted his self--designed etching press with him across the world. Rudinoff (sometimes listed as Willi, Willy, or Wilhelm Rudinoff and also under the surname Morgenstern, or Morgenstern-Rudinoff) was born in Angermünde, Germany on 4 August 1866. Rudinoff came from an Eastern European Jewish family (either Polish or Russian, the sources differ, but from somewhere in the Pale of Settlement); his father was a cantor, who was fleeing persecution. Rudinoff's education was spread across Russia, Germany, and France, and as an adult he cultivated a "citizen of the world" mentality. Willibald Wolf Rudinoff also worked as Willy Morgenstern. Apparently his passport was in the name Morgenstern, and this seems to have been his real name. Six foot two, with a commanding face and physique, he assumed the name Rudinoff as a stage name, travelling across Europe as a circus performer. In this capacity Rudinoff is recorded as a fire-eater, creator of shadow silhouettes, and also as a singer with a fine tenor voice, which he also used to imitate the cries of animals.

Willibald Wolf Rudinoff, An der Elbe

Etching, 1901

In 1891 Rudinoff became close friends with the dramatist Frank Wedekind, who was attracted by Rudinoff's mastery of pantomime. Sometime around 1900 Rudinoff made the switch from circus artist to fine artist. Rudinoff is known to have studied art for some months at the Munich Academy, and also at the Académie Julian in Paris. However, he continued performing as a singer in cabarets and nightclubs across the world. In June 1903, for instance, he was performing at the Tivoli in Sydney, and a reporter from the Sydney Mail recorded that, "He has become one of the most sought-after and highest salaried attractions on the variety stage, and his engagements all over the world have made the world his sketching ground." As a consequence, Rudinoff was active as an artist across Western and Northern Europe. The Sydney Mail reporter documents the contents of his lodgings: "From the traditional artistic litter his etching press - made after his own design - is easily identifiable. This in itself constitutes a nice little item for weekly carriage, weighing as it does four hundredweight, and when you add to this stacks of canvases, reams of water-colour paper, iron-bound chests of oils, brushes, crayons, pastes, acids, and baths for etching, violin, guitar, copper plates, and a collection of etchings that would grace the walls of any picture gallery, you may form some slight idea of Rudinoff's enthusiasm."

Willibald Wolf Rudinoff, Dot Hardy (Porträtstudie)

Etching, 1902

My first etching by Rudinoff is a post-Impressionist boating scene on the river Elbe in Germany, My second was created in Sheffield, and seems to depict a fellow music-hall or cabaret artist, Dot Hardy. Sadly, Google searches for Dot or Dorothy Hardy have not yielded any information about this lively-looking young woman. Willibald Wolf Rudinoff is remembered primarily as an etcher, but was also a master watercolorist. Rudinoff produced scenes of music halls and circuses, landscapes, coastal scenes, and figure studies in an artistic career that deserves more attention than it has received. In 1902 he showed 70 works at the Grafton Galleries, London; about the same time, the Munich National Gallery acquired a complete set of his etchings to date for their print room. The last dated piece of his art that I have found is from 1929. His date of death is not known.

A Jugendstil Masterpiece: Sehnsucht by Gotz Dohler

In the early years of the twentieth century, many German artists were busy constructing the vocabulary of Expressionism. But some remained faithful to the Symbolist/Art Nouveau aesthetic of the end of the previous century, known as Jugendstil. I think the etching in this post, published in 1906 by the Leipzig art revue Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst, is one of the masterpieces of late Jugendstil. It's one of the most perfect summations of Jugendstil I have seen - intricate, brooding, romantic, with a magical transformation between human and natural forms. Please click on the image to get a larger version with more detail.

C. Götz Döhler, Sehnsucht (Longing)

Etching with aquatint, 1906

What is perhaps most surprising about this work is that the artist who created it, Götz Dohler, remains almost completely unknown. I have managed to discover a first initial, C., and a year of birth, 1867, and that's it. He's not listed in Bénézit, Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs. Google comes up with almost nothing. I can't find any record of work by Döhler being sold or offered for sale. Via Libri doesn't come up with any books or journals illustrated by him. It's as if he just created this one perfect work and then vanished into thin air. And yet no one acquires the technical skill shown in Sehnsucht without a lot of practice. I can imagine that if Götz Döhler remained doggedly faithful to Judgendstil he would have faded from view as that style became outmoded, and equally that his lush romantic sensibility would have been out-of-tune with the times once the catastrophe of the First World War go under way. But it still seems mysterious that so little can be ascertained about an artist of such stature. Do any of my readers know anything more about him?

Update 15 September 2013:
I correct myself: C. Götz Döhler is listed in Bénézit, with the variant spelling Doehler. He was born in Glachau on the 31st of March 1867. He studied in Leipzig, and seems to have lived and worked there. Although he is described as a painter and printmaker, his main work seems to have been designing and executing large decorative paintings.

A Lamplit Dreamscape: Karl Hofer

Karl Hofer, Nächtliche Überfahrt (Night journey)

Etching with aquatint, 1899

When I first saw this haunting etching with aquatint, I wasn't sure who the artist was. Paul Klee? Marc Chagall? Both seemed likely possibilities. But in fact it's a very early work, predating both Klee and Chagall, by the German Expressionist Karl Hofer. Born in 1878 in Karlsruhe, Karl Christian Ludwig Hofer (sometimes listed as Carl Hofer) studied at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Art from 1896-1900; this stiking etching was made while he was still a student.

Karl Hofer, Tänzerin

Lithograph, 1921

Although a prominent member of the Expressionist movement, Karl Hofer was never associated with one particular group. In common with most Expressionists, Karl Hofer's art was condemned as degenerate by the Nazis; one hundred and fifty of his canvases were destroyed in his studio. After the war, Karl Hofer was appointed Director of the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Berlin. He died in Berlin in 1955. The exhibition Eros, dreams and death. Between Symbolism and Expressionism: The early work of graphic Karl Hofer, Emil Rudolf Weiss and Wilhelm Laage was held at the Städtischen Kunstmuseum Spendhaus Reutlingen in 2012; I believe these two examples of Karl Hofer's art show how true that exhibition title was for him.

Bittersweet beauty: an etching by Eduard Einschlag

The elegant turn-of-the-century lady, dressed in the height of fashion, has a sad story to tell. Although this is just speculation on my part, I believe the model is Louise Victoria Einschlag, the wife of the artist Eduard David Einschlag, whose signature is etched in the plate top right, along with the date '03. The etching was published the following year by the Leipzig art revue Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst.

Eduard David Einschlag, Damenbildnis

Etching with aquatint, 1903

Eduard David Einschlag was born in Leipzig in 1879, into a Jewish family. He studied at the fine art Academies of Leipzig, Munich (where he learned etching from Peter Halm), and Berlin, returning to Leipzig to live and work in 1910. Eduard Einschlag is known for his paintings and for his masterly etchings in a post-Impressionist style. In 1938 Eduard and Louise Victoria Einschlag were deported by the Nazis, and both were murdered at the Treblinka extermination camp, sometime around 1942.

A forgotten Symbolist: Alexander Frenz

I really love this etching by the almost forgotten German Symbolist Alexander Frenz. Frenz seems to have drawn much of his inspiration from myth and fairytale, as in this mysterious scene in which a hooded man summons a tree nymph out of the stump of a blasted tree, with music he is playing on an antique stringed instrument. The etching was first published in Originalradirungen des Künstlerklubs St. Lucas, Düsseldorf, Heft 1 (c.1893). This copy as published by E. A. Seemann, Leipzig, for Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst, N. F. IV, 1893.

Alexander Frenz, Idylle

Etching with aquatint, 1893

Alexander Frenz was born in Rheydt in 1861. Frenz studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and Malerschule, and in the atelier of Franz von Lenbach. Like many German artists of his day, Alexander Frenz was profoundly influenced by the Symbolist art of Franz von Stuck. He died in Düsseldorf in 1941.

Dark night of the soul: the art of Felix Meseck

Felix Meseck was born in Danzig in 1883, and died in Holzminden in 1955. Meseck studied at the Fine Art Academies in Berlin and Königsberg, studying painting under Ludwig Dettmann and printmaking with Heinrich Wolff. In 1926 he was appointed professor at the Weimar Academy, a post from which he was forced out by the Nazis. Before WWI, in which he served at the front as an ordinary soldier, Meseck concentrated on painting; after the war he turned to printmaking, becoming especially known for his etchings and drypoints. Meseck was a member of the Berlin Secession, and contributed to leading journals such as Ganymed, as well as illustrating works by Shakespeare, Goethe, Novalis, and Brentano. Much of Felix Meseck's work was destroyed in the Red Army attack on Danzig in 1945.

Felix Meseck, Landschaft

Etching, 1920s

Felix Meseck's art is a curious blend of Expressionism, Romanticism and Symbolism, with a forlorn, desolate quality at its heart. His spiky, unsettling line is the opposite of everything fluid, supple, and sensuous. Instead there is a sense of jarred nerves and watchful unease. The overriding impression is one of neurasthenia, and I would not be at all surprised to discover that Meseck suffered from shell-shock (post-traumatic stress) after his experiences in WWI. His art has that hyper-aware inability to relax. The trees that are a recurring motif in his art certainly bring to mind the ravaged landscapes of WWI. Whether depicting landscapes or symbolic groups of people, there is something in Felix Meseck's work that speaks of unreachable loss. The people in his etchings for Hymnen an die Nacht seem disorientated and desperate, like the displaced and bereaved of war. This work was published very soon after the end of WWI, in 1919, and would certainly have carried that emotional charge for Meseck's contemporaries. It was printed at Gurlitt-Presse and published by Fritz Gurlitt in an edition of 125 copies, of which 50 were printed on heavyweight handmade wove paper, with all ten etchings hand-signed by the artist.

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht I

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht II

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht IV

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht V

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht VI

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht VII

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht IX

Etching, 1919

There was a retrospective exhibition of the art of Felix Meseck at the Museum Höxter Corvey in 1987.