Art
& Design Since 1945
Week 1 Image List
The aftermath of WWII: Whatever happened to those "degenerate" artists?
An image list template is now available in .doc format. Otherwise, construct your own in any program that works for you and make it a habit to explore new artists on a regular basis.
The impact of the Nazi persecution of artists was widespread and widely felt. Some of the artists, like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, committed suicide. Others, like Oskar Kokoschka, had nervous breakdowns. Some, especially those who were able to escape to other parts of Europe or the United States before the war, managed to continue their careers. Some of these are the focus of this discussion. A significant number of Bauhaus members were included in the exhibit, but not all, so I've devoted a separate section to the Bauhaus in exile.
For a refresher course on "degenerate art" see my links from History of Art & Design II
Max Beckmann: On the day the Entartete Kunst exhibit opened, Beckmann and his wife departed for Amsterdam, where he stayed until they moved to the United States after the war. He died in 1950, shortly after completing his final triptych, The Argonauts. All the images listed, plus biographical and critical commentary, can be found at the Artchive.
Family Picture 1920
Self-Portrait with Saxophone 1930
Released 1937
Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket 1950
Departure 1932-33. See also this essay from Max Beckmann's Triptychs by Charles S. Kessler.
The Argonauts 1949-50 (and detail)
Mark Chagall: Although Chagall was a Russian Jew painting primarily in France, his work was popular in Germany, and hence dangerous. As Sandor Gilman points out in the film, the Nazis equated Jewishness with Bolshevism and "degeneracy," and Chagall was one of only six Jewish painters whose work was included.
Birthday 1915
Purim 1916-18 (Displayed in the Entartete Kunst exhibit)
The Chagall Windows 1962 at the synagogue of the Hadassa-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem.
Music 1962-63
Dance 1962-63
Otto Dix: As the film pointed out, Otto Dix got in trouble in part because of his anti-war sentiments, and his work critical of WWI. The Nazis saw war as one of the highest achievements of humankind, and had little patience for Dix's views.
Card-Playing War Cripples 1920 (Displayed in the Entartete Kunst exhibit; later destroyed)
Syphillitic 1920
Skull 1924
Masks As Ruins 1946 (this page shows a range of images from 1915 to 1946)
Self Portrait as a POW 1947 (other works as well; the link is to the whole page)
Max Ernst
Ernst escaped to the United States in 1941, with Peggy Guggenheim, whom he later married, and then divorced. While in New York (he later moved to Arizona, and then to France after marrying fellow surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning), he provided impetus for the Abstract Expressionist movement. See the Ernst Collection at the Guggenheim and the Met's Max Ernst Retrospective for the following images and more information.
Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person 1919-20
The Kiss 1927
Vox Angelica 1943
Garden of France 1962
The Bauhaus in Exile
It might be worth trying to find the 1995 film, Bauhaus in America, because many of its members moved to the United States as a result of the war; consequently their influence was both direct and profound. Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and Wassily Kandinsky died before the end of the war, but those who emigrated are noted below.
Mies van der Rohe: See MoMA's online exhibition, Mies in Berlin, Mies in America and designbloom's page on mies van der rohe in america. Mies left Germany in 1937 to direct the Armour Institute's School of Architecture (he lost the Harvard job to Gropius). After the war, he even helped to design the New National Gallery in Berlin.
The Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois 1951 (and this page from the Farnsworth House Foundation and a good photo of the interior from Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond. Go to "news" and the Mies/Goff tour.)
Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago 1948-51
Seagram Building, New York, 1954-58
Walter Gropius: After the Bauhaus closed, Gropius moved to England in 1934, and then to the United States in 1938, where he taught architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Among his students were I. M. Pei and Philip Johnson--both of whom left their mark on Dallas..
Gropius House, Lincoln Massachusetts, 1938. For links to more of Gropius's work, see the Digital Archive of American Architecture page.
Herbert Bayer left Germany in 1938 and moved to the United States, where he designed ads for the Container Corporation of America and other companies. In 1946, he was hired as the consultant and architect for the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies.
Fonetik Alfabet and Bayer Universal fonts
Self-Portrait 1932
Plant Forms in Fall 1950
Symbols in Blue 1958
Orange Glow 1960
Cosmicgraph 1962
Double Ascension (sculpture) Los Angeles 1969-73. This will probably be familiar to Heroes fans as the focal point of "Kirby Plaza" at the end of season 1 (here's another shot at night of some guy named Jason acting like Sylar).
Lyonel Feininger: Although born in America, Feininger worked in Germany, where he was eventually associated with the Bauhaus. Upon learning that he was on the list of "degenerate" artists (400 of his works were confiscated, 19 of which were displayed in the Entartete Kunst exhibit), he left. He taught at Mills College in San Diego, toured the United States, and then returned to Germany--only to leave again because his Jewish wife was in danger. He lived for the rest of his life in New York City. The Art Institute of Chicago now has a nice collection of representative works online. He doesn't seem to have produced much for public consumption after the '30s.
How the Jimjam relief expedition set out (from his Kin-der-kids strip). Published in the Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1906. Feininger also wrote Wee Willie Winkie's World for the Trib in 1906 (see the Wikipedia page on Feininger for some information).
Cathedral of the Future 1919. Feininger's woodcut for the cover of the Bauhaus catalogue (MoMA); it's image #58 on the list (which contains 94 drawings and other images, well worth browsing through). Most of the early slides are from the comics, but there are also some of his works from 1915-1919 that show the influence of children's art. Be mindful of the fact that as MoMA adds works to its online collections, the numbers change--so if this isn't where I've linked it, try the "next" button.
Sunset 1930 (Boston Museum of Fine Art)
Storm Brewing 1939 (You'll have to click on the name of the painting; but while you're on this index page, check the two other works for which images are available.)
Josef Albers taught at the Bauhaus until it closed. Along with his wife Anni, a weaver, he was hired as the first art teacher at the innovative Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he influenced the likes of Robert Rauschenberg. From 1950-1958, he served as chair of the design department at Yale. For a retrospective of their work, see Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, and visit the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation website for more information.
Figure 1921
Impossibles 1931
Homage to the Square: Apparition 1959. Search the Dallas Museum of Art collections page (enter "Albers") for four more homages to the square.
Johannes Itten emigrated to Holland in 1938; he wrote his influential books on color and the Bauhaus Foundation Course after he left Germany. See this review of his book The Art of Color, from the Designare Design Collective (source of many good articles on design history); for a brief summary of his career at the Bauhaus, see the page from the Bauhaus Archiv Museum.
Space Composition I 1944
Space Composition II 1944 (both at MoMA)
László Moholy-Nagy left Germany for Amsterdam, then moved to London, and finally to Chicago, where he became the director of the The New Bauhaus (which only lasted a year). Later, he and fellow faculty members formed a new design school which became the Institute of Design in 1944. He died of leukemia in 1946. It might be helpful to read this review of a Tate Modern exhibit (2006) "From the Bauhaus to the New World" that featured Moholy-Nagy and Albers: When Modernism Works, from the Social Affairs Unit website. And here are some resources from my new History of Art & Design II Experimental Film project: The Moholy-Nagy Foundation (especially the Film Previews; requires QuickTime 5 or higher); still photographs from the George Eastman House; "The Fiery Stimulator," an informative article from the Guardian Unlimited (2006); also from the Tate: The Gesamtwerker by Stuart Bailey--an article that encompasses M-N's experimental films and the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. There are myriad other sources available online, and a Library advanced search using "experimental" and "film" will turn up some video resources, as will a look into the history of film and filmmaking.
Q 1922-23
Untitled (Positive) 1922-24
Untitled (photograph) 1939
Double Loop 1946
Leuk 5 1946