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How they made an impact. A short selection of significant prints from the “History of Press Graphics. 1819-1921”
What sails here under the flag of caricature is nothing other than an early form of blunt and bleak social realism. The group makes a powerful and monumental impression, misery in the dimension of a history picture, and that’s exactly how it was meant to be. The publisher of La Caricature, Charles Philipon, like most […]
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George Montbard I: A communard´s career in London
George Montbard (real name: Charles Auguste Loye) was one of the most brillant and versatile illustrators of the 19th century. The staunch republican started his career as a political caricaturist during the imperial rule of Napoleon III. He worked for “La Rue”, the legendary antiautorical magazin of his friend Jules Valles. The anarchist author assembled […]
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Hazem Alhamwi´s “From my Syrian Room” — from his German room
The Essay is based on Hazem Alhamwi´s latest documentary “From my Syrian Room”, Syria, France, Germany, Lebanon and Qatar, 2014 , 70 minutes. All images are stills taken from this film. Prima facie, there is no obvious close connection between the satirical black humour of Syrian artist Hazem Alhamwi, which is found in his cartoons, […]
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Conflicts and Flames (Masters of Faits Divers – Painting VI)
The depiction of social conflicts, of strikes, riots and mobs was one of the main subjects of special artists and faits divers-painters at the turn of the century. Some of them became masters of pictorial mass choreography and cataclysmic sceneries.
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“Esprit Montmartre” – The perpetuation of the cliché
Not translated: Zur Ausstellung “Esprit Montmartre. Die Bohème in Paris um 1900” in der Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Das geballte Medienecho zur Ausstellung in der Schirn Kunsthalle klingt verheißungsvoll. Die Pariser Bohemekultur um die Jahrhundertwende erscheine hier in einem völlig neuen Licht, nicht länger in der realitätsfernen Weichzeichnung touristischer Projektion, vielmehr zeige sich der Montmartre hier, […]
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Graphic Journalism and the Avant-garde – The ROSTA Windows of the Bolshevik Art Army.
In a situation in which museums, put under pressure by the market, are increasingly withdrawing from their core business of basic historical research on the state of present-day art, it can happen that precisely in this regard they are overtaken by extraordinary initiatives of the market itself, by galleries, for instance, which are now taking […]
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Drawing Protest, 1525 – 1970. How protest was visualized through the centuries. A commented picture spread
A picture spread with material from the archive of the Melton Prior Institute, Düsseldorf, in cooperation with the exhibition “Im Zeichen des Protests / Drawing Protest”, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, 19.10.2013 – 09.01.2014, curated by Olga Vostretsova 01) Barthel Beham, “Der Welt Lauf” (The course of the world), copper engraving, Nuremberg 1525 The artist […]
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Portraying Protest
Beginning with elections to the Russian State Duma, in December 2011, and ending with the third so-called March of the Millions, in September 2012, I kept a graphical Chronicle of Resistance, meaning that I sketched all the major opposition rallies and protest events in Moscow. —————————————————————————— Excerpts of Victoria Lomasko´s Chronicle of Resistance: December 10, […]
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Thomas Nast & Theodor Kaufmann: Higher Forms of Hieroglyph
I Thomas Nast The pictorial journalism of Thomas Nast marked the peak of graphic art as far as its influence and popularity in the 19th century is concerned. No artist was ever more successful in regard to the intensity, scope and lastingness of his political impact than this North American draughtsman – not Dürer, not […]
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From Marx to Ensor: The Revolution Artist Wilhelm Kleinenbroich (1812 – 95)
It really cannot be said that the Kölnische Stadtmuseum is concerned too little with one of its most significant artistic treasures, the oeuvre of the Rhenish historical painter and graphic artist Wilhelm Kleinebroich, quite to the contrary. In 1999 the brilliant monograph “Die Revolution des Malers Kleinenbroich” by Bonn-based historian Horst Heidermann was published there. […]