Dear Friends,
This month, we have two very special online programs for you before we take a short summer break in August. But first of all, we are excited to share with you our 2023 program report (please click on the image):
Still hurting from the aftermath of COVID, we are proud of the exhibitions and programs we were able to organize in 2023, and your feedback proves that we are doing something right.
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.
This month, we celebrate the discovery of Curt Bloch’s “Underwater Cabaret,” which he created in hiding in the Netherlands, and George Grosz’ “Stick Men” series, which he created after fleeing Nazi persecution to New York. Both found a safe home in the US:
WEDNESDAY, JULY 10, ONLINE
“My verses are like dynamite”
Curt Bloch’s Het Onderwater Cabaret
Presentation by Aubrey Pomerance, Berlin (Germany)
Curt Bloch, Het Onderwater Cabaret 30 Aug 1943; Jewish Museum Berlin, Convolute/816, Curt Bloch collection, loaned by the Charities Aid Foundation America thanks to the generous support of Curt Blochʼs family
Under threat from Nazi antisemitism, the young Jewish lawyer Curt Bloch (1908–1975) fled Dortmund for the Netherlands in 1933. He went into hiding there in 1942 and emigrated to the United States after the war. In his hiding place, from August 1943 to April 1945 Bloch produced a magazine with the telling title Het Onderwater Cabaret – “The Underwater Cabaret.”
Aubrey Pomerance, Head of Archives at the Jewish Museum Berlin, will present this unique work of small-format booklets with artfully designed covers, containing a total of 483 handwritten poems in German and Dutch, embellished with artistic collages and photo montages.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 24 ONLINE
GEORGE GROSZ (1893-1959):
THE STICK MEN
Presentation by Karli Wurzelbacher, PhD, Huntington (New York)
George Grosz (American, b. Germany, 1893–1959), The Grey Man Dances, 1949. Oil on canvas. George Grosz Estate © Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
George Grosz (American, b. Germany, 1893–1959) created the “Stick Men” series in Huntington, where he lived from 1947 until shortly before his death. Featuring hollow figures in an apocalyptic landscape, this group of watercolors offers a searing indictment of humanity following World War II, the Holocaust, and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Grosz was an internationally renowned German-born artist who remained invested in political art following his immigration to the United States in 1933. In the “Stick Men” series, he wrestles with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and reaffirms the ability of painting to impact society.
This presentation by Karli Wurzelbacher, PhD, is presented on the occasion of the exhibition George Grosz: The Stick Men, on view at The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, from May 11 through September 1, 2024. It is a collaboration with The Heckscher Museum of Art.
And off they go! November 8 seems far away, but the preparations for the exhibition “Love and Betrayal – the Expressionist Fritz Ascher from New York Private Collections” at Haus der Graphischen Sammlung in Freiburg, Germany (November 8, 2024 – March 2, 2025) are in full swing! Drawn from private collections in the US, this exhibition focuses on works on paper created between 1910 and 1933, which provide an intimate insight into the artist’s thought process and innermost feelings. Many new works have been discovered and much new research has happened since the 2016 retrospective, which will be presented in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.
Thank you, Jutta Götzmann, for your invitation. I love working together again!
If you missed our June events, you can watch the recordings here:
