Dear Friends,
With the Olympic Games going on, I can’t resist to share with you Fritz Ascher’s drawing of two muscular male nudes wrestling. The drawing will be on view for the first time in the exhibition “Love and Betrayal. The Expressionist Fritz Ascher in New York Private Collections,” which will open on November 8th at Haus der Graphischen Sammlung in Freiburg (Germany).
Fritz Ascher, Two Male Nudes Wrestling, ca. 1916. Graphite and charcoal on paper, 29 x 22,8 cm. Private Collection
This sheet is one of several works in which the artist depicts fighters around 1916. As a sport, wrestling experienced its Golden Age in Germany and Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. This was abruptly ended by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. In the interwar period, wrestling was overshadowed by boxing in terms of popularity.
We have featured this beautiful film when it was in theaters:
Until August 3rd, you can stream CALL ME DANCER and join director Leslie Shampaine and dancer Manish Chauhan online on August 4th at 11:30am ET for a Q&A.
CALL ME DANCER is an uplifting film about an artist’s journey told through the eyes of a street dancer from Mumbai, and the unlikely bond with a curmudgeonly Israeli ballet master, Yehuda Ma’or, who gives him the determination to follow his dream. Ma’or was born to Holocaust refugee parents from Germany and grew up in Kibbutz Yagur, near Haifa.
This August, we pause our programming and our offices will be closed.
If you are looking for stimulating summer reading, please check out the recordings of book talks on our YouTube channel @fritzaschersociety1130.
And if you read a book or hear about an artist who you think should be featured by us, please let us know by sending an email to info@fritzaschersociety.org. Your recommendations and feedback are important to us.
But we need your help. This summer, we aim to raise $6,000.00 to support our virtual fall programming.
This year is the 10th anniversary of The Fritz Ascher Society. If you want to honor this momentous occasion with a special anniversary gift, please contact me at stern@fritzaschersociety.org. You can also commemorate loved ones by making a contribution to a specific virtual event. Let’s talk!
The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art fills a critical gap in knowledge of artists whose lives and work were marginalized, persecuted, or murdered during the Nazi regime (1933-45) and remain largely unknown or under-appreciated. FAS works with historians, university-affiliated scholars, and museum experts to document and share through online and in-person public lectures, seminars and exhibitions, an ever-growing number of stories, and information about these artists and their influences on our culture.
By rescuing Nazi-victimized artists from obscurity, FAS makes their work public, something denied them by the Nazi regime. And by so doing, we ensure that the narrative history of art – as taught in classrooms, documented by mass media and in publications, distilled into museum exhibitions – becomes inclusive of these historically-significant unknown, and under-known cultural changemakers.
If you missed our July events, you can watch the recordings here:
