Karen Wilkin
“Beauteous Strivings”: Fritz Ascher, Works on Paper
New York Studio School, New York (USA)
New York Studio School
8 W 8th St, New York, NY, United States
For the first time in the United States, this exhibition presents works on paper by the German Expressionist Fritz Ascher (1893-1970). In these landscapes, made after 1945, the artist radically departed from the figural compositions he created during the Weimar years. At the same time, he built on his Expressionist visual language of vigorous brushstrokes and expressive colors. Born 1893 in Berlin, Ascher showed talent early. At the age of 16, he studied with Max Liebermann, who recommended him to the Königsberg Art Academy. Soon after, he studied with Lovis Corinth in Berlin. In contact with such artists as Emil Nolde and Edvard Munch, Ascher developed an expressionist pictorial language and created powerful figural compositions. After 1933, the Jewish-born Ascher [...]
Panel Discussion: Expressionism for Our Time
New York Studio School
New York Studio School
8 W 8th St, New York, NY, United States
Panel Discussion: Expressionism for Our Time New York Studio School, 8 West 8th Street Wednesday, March 6, 6:30–7:30 pm Expressionism for Our Time features a brief history of Western Expressionism by art critic and curator Karen Wilkin, followed by a conversation between contemporary artists Rochelle Feinstein, Judy Glantzman, and Adrianne Rubenstein with art historian Robert Slifkin. Watch the video of the event here. Karen Wilkin is an independent curator and critic, a regular contributor to New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and Hudson Review. She teaches the New York Studio School’s MFA art history seminars. Robert Slifkin is Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His book Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of [...]
Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression
Hans Hofmann:
Coming to America
Lecture by Karen Wilkin, NY
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
Watch the video of this zoom event HERE Lecture featuring Karen Wilkin, Independent Curator and Critic Moderated by Rachel Stern, Director of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) first arrived in the US from Munich in 1930, to teach a summer art course at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned twice more, extending his 1932 visit to pursue teaching opportunities. In 1933, he decided to remain in the US, opening the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in 1934. He did not return to Europe until 1949, for an exhibition in France, and to Germany until 1962, for a touring retrospective. Before coming to America, Hofmann had only drawn for 15 years, because of the [...]
Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression
Jewish Identity and Communist Belief.
Lea Grundig’s Path from Dresden to Palestine and back to Dresden
Lecture by Eckhart Gillen, Berlin
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
Watch the video of this event HERE Lecture featuring Eckhart Gillen, Independent Curator based in Berlin, Germany Moderated by Rachel Stern, Executive Director of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York The lecture tells how the daughter of the Jewish clothing and furniture retailer Moritz Langer leaves her family's Orthodox milieu to study at the Dresden Art Academy. There she meets art student Hans Grundig. With him she joined the German Communist Party in 1926. From now on she wanted to put her art at the service of the working class. After returning from exile in Palestine, she used her art for the newly founded GDR. There she had a career as a professor and as president of the Association [...]
Remembering Friedel:
An Intimate View of Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994)
Featuring Karen Wilkin and Sandi Slone
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
In a prolific career that spanned nearly five decades, Friedel Dzubas (b. Berlin, 1915–d. 1994, Newton, Mass.) articulated his mature style by the 1970s, creating a striking visual language from counterpoised abstract shapes of brushed color that he juxtaposed, overlapped, and opened to reveal his gessoed grounds. Yet, in prior years, Dzubas’s early work in Berlin were influenced by Expressionist artist of the two primary groups known as Die Brücke and Die Blaue Reiter. As Dzubas told curator Charles Millard in 1982, “Their unheard-of brashness of color; that was really brave. That was very exciting. Color’s an emotional thing. These people not only spoke directly; they felt deeply. There was passion.” His early pen and ink watercolors embed the [...]
Fritz Ascher (1893-1970):
Coming back to Life
Featuring Karen Wilkin and Elizabeth Berkowitz, PhD
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
Fritz Ascher (Berlin 1893 - 1970 Berlin) almost made it out of Germany as the persecution of the Jews was developing. SINCE HE HAD been arrested and released from concentration camp and prison after several months, friends managed to book passage on a ship to Shanghai, but the German Nazi bureaucracy refused to let him leave the country. Ascher found refuge in the basement of his deceased mother's friend, Martha Grassmann--in a house located in the Grunewald, the heart of the Nazi brass residential neighborhood in Berlin. In hiding--an interior migration--he shifted from vibrantly expressionist paintings and drawings to dense poetry. AFTER the war he emerged to a Germany very different from the one he had known before and [...]
