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Modernism

May 19, 2022

Ludwig and Else Meidner.
An Artist Couple Exiled in London
Lecture by Erik Riedel, Frankfurt/Main (Germany)

2022-08-03T14:52:23-04:00May 19th, 2022|, , |Comments Off on Ludwig and Else Meidner.
An Artist Couple Exiled in London
Lecture by Erik Riedel, Frankfurt/Main (Germany)

When Ludwig and Else Meidner met in 1925, he was already an established artist well-known for his so-called Apocalyptic Landscapes. Although Else started as Ludwig’s student, she developed a distinct independent style and he always praised her art as more refined than his own “coarse” works. As Else Meidner slowly gained recognition in Berlin art circles, her career was abruptly cut short by the Nazi-regime in 1933. She moved to Cologne with her husband in 1935; and they emigrated to England in 1939 only a few weeks before the war started. In London both lived largely unnoticed by the English art scene. But while Ludwig frustratedly returned to Germany, she decided to stay in England. Their complicated relationship developed from [...]

Apr 25, 2022

ART FOR NO ONE:
Artists in Germany between 1933 and 1945
Lecture by Ilka Voermann, Frankfurt/Main (Germany)

2022-05-19T05:21:58-04:00April 25th, 2022|, , |Comments Off on ART FOR NO ONE:
Artists in Germany between 1933 and 1945
Lecture by Ilka Voermann, Frankfurt/Main (Germany)

Between 1933 and 1945, the National Socialist regime controlled artistic work in Germany. Particularly artists who were persecuted based on their religion, race, or political views fled into exile due to threats from the government. But what happened to the artists who remained in the country? Isolation, lack of an audience, and limited exchange impacted the creativity of the individuals who were deprived of a basis for work and life under National Socialism. Their situation is often described in a generalized way as “ostracism” or “inner emigration.” In light of the multilayered and divergent personal circumstances, however, these terms fall short of the mark. Image above: Hans Grundig, Clash of the Bears and Wolves, 1938, Oil on plywood, 90,5 [...]

Apr 11, 2022

Prison Diaries by Hans Uhlmann, 1933-1935:
Drawing as Life Line
Featuring Dorothea Schöne, Berlin (Germany)

2022-05-04T15:26:49-04:00April 11th, 2022|, , |Comments Off on Prison Diaries by Hans Uhlmann, 1933-1935:
Drawing as Life Line
Featuring Dorothea Schöne, Berlin (Germany)

On October 26, 1933, Hans Uhlmann was arrested by the Gestapo on the street. In the notorious Columbia-Haus, he was interrogated for several weeks and then found guilty by the court of appeal of “preparations for a traitorous enterprise.” He spent a year and a half in prison—first in Moabit and then in Tegel Prison. The artist recorded his experiences of those years in diaries. In parallel with these diaries, he produced four books of sketches. In his diary entries Uhlmann describes his arrest as well as scenes from daily life in confinement but above all his artistic concerns and projects: “I think often of freedom; of my first works; I occupy myself here by imagining these figures” (May [...]

Mar 28, 2022

Behind the Bronze.
The Sculptor Maurice Blik (born 1939 Amsterdam)
Featuring Maurice Blik and Julian Freeman (both London, UK)

2022-09-07T15:52:51-04:00March 28th, 2022|, , |Comments Off on Behind the Bronze.
The Sculptor Maurice Blik (born 1939 Amsterdam)
Featuring Maurice Blik and Julian Freeman (both London, UK)

Maurice Blik has lived in England since being liberated from Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where he was taken as a small child from his birthplace, Amsterdam. The ability to come to terms with this experience and to confront the face of humanity that he has witnessed, stayed silent in his life for some 40 years. It finally found a voice in the passionate sculptures which began to emerge in the late 1970s when he created a series of horses’ heads. These noble and benevolent creatures posses an energy and a life force that seem just barely harnessed long enough to take their shape in the clay itself. Later he progressed to more figurative work in which the irrepressible joy [...]

Feb 13, 2022

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943):
A Life Before Auschwitz
Lecture by Monica Bohm-Duchen, London (UK)

2022-06-07T11:49:44-04:00February 13th, 2022|, , |Comments Off on Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943):
A Life Before Auschwitz
Lecture by Monica Bohm-Duchen, London (UK)

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943), was a hugely talented Berlin-born artist who was murdered at Auschwitz, four months pregnant, at the age of twenty-six. Her main body of work, a sequence of nearly 800 gouache images entitled Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?), and created while seeking refuge in the South of France, is an ambitious fictive autobiography which deploys both images and text, and a wide range of musical, literary and cinematic references. The narrative, informed by Salomon's experiences as a cultured, and assimilated German Jewish woman, depicts a life lived in the shadow of Nazi persecution and a family history of suicide, but also reveals moments of intense happiness and hope. Challenging the artistic conventions of Salomon’s time, it remains [...]

Jan 21, 2022

Ben-Zion (1897-1987):
Man of Many Faces
Featuring Tabita Shalem and Ori Z Soltes

2022-04-06T15:57:51-04:00January 21st, 2022|, , |Comments Off on Ben-Zion (1897-1987):
Man of Many Faces
Featuring Tabita Shalem and Ori Z Soltes

Born in the Russian Empire, Ben-Zion (Benzion Weinman, 1897-1987) immigrated to New York City between the wars, arriving as a craftsman of words whose cultural Zionist convictions led him to write his poetry in Hebrew. By the early 1930s, the rise of fascism and its particularized manipulations of language drove him to despair of the power of words and to turn to visual art as a medium of expression. Endlessly creative, across the next six decades he produced a flood of drawings and oil paintings and sculptures often made by re-visioning found objects of wood, stone, and iron. As a founding member of the expressionist group, "The Ten"--that included among others a young Mark Rothko--Ben-Zion addressed social, political, and cultural [...]

Dec 31, 2021

Jussuf Prince of Thebes –
Re-constructing the life and work of a forgotten talent from Safed
Featuring Dorothea Schöne, Berlin (Germany)

2022-03-02T19:19:46-05:00December 31st, 2021|, , |Comments Off on Jussuf Prince of Thebes –
Re-constructing the life and work of a forgotten talent from Safed
Featuring Dorothea Schöne, Berlin (Germany)

In the late nineteenth century, the sculptor Joseph M. Abbo (1888–1953) – who later renamed himself Jussuf Abbo – was born in Safed, in the province of Beirut of the Ottoman Empire. As a young man, he began working as a labourer on the restoration site being led by an architect, Hoffmann, on behalf of the German government. Abbo was noticed and was rapidly promoted to the drawing-office and to stone-carving. He was offered a scholarship at the Berlin School of Art. Jussuf Abbo arrived in Germany in 1911 and began studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin in 1913. By 1919 he had a master studio in the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. Throughout the [...]

Oct 14, 2021

From Sea to Shining Sea:
Anni Albers in America (1899–1994)
Featuring Laura Muir and Ori Z. Soltes, PhD

2022-08-26T05:17:58-04:00October 14th, 2021|, , |Comments Off on From Sea to Shining Sea:
Anni Albers in America (1899–1994)
Featuring Laura Muir and Ori Z. Soltes, PhD

Anni Albers (Berlin 1899 – 1994 Orange, CT) found her artistic identity at the renowned Bauhaus--but not where she expected to. The gender-restrictive conditions at the school pushed her to textile work. As the Nazis forced the Bauhaus closure, Anni and her already well-known husband, Joseph Albers, immigrated to the United States, where Joseph and later Anni were invited to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. From there to New York and Yale University, while her husband gained renown as a teacher and practitioner of painting, Anni expanded her presence as an innovator in diverse textile media and styles, shaping a far-flung, influential career that resonates to this day. The United States presented Albers with new [...]

Oct 14, 2021

CONFERENCE: Identity and the Arts
FEATURING Libby Copeland, Ori Z Soltes
Deborah Tannen and Oksana Yakushko

2022-08-26T05:12:16-04:00October 14th, 2021|, , |Comments Off on CONFERENCE: Identity and the Arts
FEATURING Libby Copeland, Ori Z Soltes
Deborah Tannen and Oksana Yakushko

What is it that defines human identity? DNA? Language? Culture? Landscape? Polity? Or is it a combination of all of these factors? How do the sources of identity make it easy or difficult for individuals who migrate from one location to another—by choice or under duress—not merely to adapt but to become fully comfortable within their new home? In this brief Zoom Conference, an interdisciplinary panel of experts considers how identity is shaped by our genomic make-up; how it is affected by the migration from home to new and different dwelling places; and how, in particular, migrational shifts can affect artists and their creative process. Expert Panel: Libby Copeland, Award-winning journalist and author Ori Z Soltes, Teaching Professor at Georgetown [...]

Oct 8, 2021

Remembering Friedel:
An Intimate View of Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994)
Featuring Karen Wilkin and Sandi Slone

2022-08-26T05:20:00-04:00October 8th, 2021|, , |Comments Off on Remembering Friedel:
An Intimate View of Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994)
Featuring Karen Wilkin and Sandi Slone

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 [...]

Oct 7, 2021

CONFERENCE
Artists Migrating to the United States, In and Beyond the Nazi Period
FEATURING Rebecca Erbelding, PhD,
Katya Grokhovsky, and Ori Z Soltes, PhD

2022-08-26T05:07:57-04:00October 7th, 2021|, , |Comments Off on CONFERENCE
Artists Migrating to the United States, In and Beyond the Nazi Period
FEATURING Rebecca Erbelding, PhD,
Katya Grokhovsky, and Ori Z Soltes, PhD

Shaped in accordance with the theme of the current Fritz Ascher Society online project, "Identity, Art and Migration," this brief conference focusses on psychological, historical and art historical aspects of migration—broadly and in particular within the context of artists seeking refuge in the United States during the Holocaust. Expert Panel: Rebecca Erbelding, PhD, USHMM historian in Washington DC Katya Grokhovsky, artist and founder of The Immigrant Artist Biennal in New York NY and Ori Z Soltes, PhD, Teaching Professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC These diverse experts will address the specifics of American immigration policies in the first half of the twentieth century and how they particularly affected those seeking refuge from the ravages [...]

Oct 6, 2021

Fritz Ascher (1893-1970):
Coming back to Life
Featuring Karen Wilkin and Elizabeth Berkowitz, PhD

2022-08-26T05:10:27-04:00October 6th, 2021|, , |Comments Off on Fritz Ascher (1893-1970):
Coming back to Life
Featuring Karen Wilkin and Elizabeth Berkowitz, PhD

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 [...]

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