|
|
|
|
|
BACK
TO EXPRESSIONISTS
Workers
on Their Way Home
Conrad
Felixmuller
Oil on Canvas 1921
Workers
on Their Way Home is a typical example of the artist's
early expressionist style, skewed perspective, distorted
figures, and bright clashing colors.
Conrad
Felixmuller attended the Dresden Art Academy from 1911 to
1915. He provided artworks to the radical expressionist
magazines, Der Sturm (The Storm) and Die Aktion
(GGG) and in March 1919, founded the Dresden Secession Group
along with fellow artists Otto Dix, Will Heckrott, Lasar
Segall, Otto Schubert, and Constantin von Mitschke-Collande.
Felixmuller was an ardent communist who wanted to forge
a new, proletarian aesthetic.
|
|
| The
Dresden group issued a manifesto that stated in part: "The founding
of the group was a natural outgrowth of the re-awakened, innermost
yearnings to depart forever from the old means and ways and to find,
while preserving absolutely the freedom of personality, new expressions
for the new world surrounding us." Felixmuller's paintings were
shown in the National Gallery in Berlin in 1923, but by 1937 the
Nazis banned his art, designating him an entarteten Künstler ("degenerate
artist"). The fascists displayed Felixmuller's paintings in their
infamous 1937 exhibit, Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art").
In 1944 the artist was press-ganged into the fascist army, but was
almost immediately captured by the Soviet Red Army and sent to a
POW camp. After the liberation of Germany, Felixmuller taught art
at Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany from 1949 to 1962.
Conrad Felixmuller died in West Berlin, Germany in 1977. |
|
