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BACK
TO EXPRESSIONISTS
Newsboy
Conrad
Felixmüller
Oil on Canvas 1928
Felixmüller's
painting, Zeitungsjunge (Newsboy), depicts
a young newspaper boy holding a copy of AIZ
(Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung - Workers Illustrated
Paper), a left-wing newspaper that was widely read
by German workers. The amazing works of the anti-fascist
photomontage artist, John Heartfield, regularly
appeared in AIZ. Felixmüller
painted the most remarkable portraits of regular working
people, and he believed it was impossible to separate
art from political struggle. Using extremely bright
colors and a near Cubist perspective, the works of
Felixmüller were some of the most joyous in Expressionism.
The painting at left is one of the artist's more stylistically
subdued works.
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Felixmüller
lived and worked in Dresden, and belonged to the
Dresdner Sezession Gruppe (Dresden Secessionist
Group), He also was a member of the pro-democracy
artist's organization, Novembergruppe.
In 1919 the artist joined the newly formed German
Communist Party (KDP) and often contributed
works to the popular worker's journal, Die
Aktion (Action). German
playwright Carl Sternheim wrote about Felixmüller;
"Just as Van Gogh ripped the aesthetic
mask from every landscape and revealed a nature
- of tree, flower, water, sky, moon, and earth
- that had vanished from the bourgeois world,
so this Müller has unmasked the contemporary human
face, and in his pictures the proletarian whom
the bourgeoisie long smothered in a conspiracy
of silence appears for the first time."
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