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The Week in Germany: Culture January 5, 2007 Max Pechstein Redux: Remembering a Primitivist Painter of Stark Sensuality Colorful landscapes and nudes etched in bold black lines are the hallmarks of Max Pechstein's striking paintings and prints. The German expressionist artist would have turned 125 on New Year's Eve. Today his works can be found all over the world, including many American museums, from New York to Michigan to California. But much of his early work perished, destroyed at the hands of the Nazis, who branded Pechstein's paintings as "degenerate" in the 1930s. The artist, however, perservered in the face of this insidious adversity, repainting many of his lost canvases from memory after the war.
Max Hermann Pechstein (1881-1955) began his artistic career working as an apprentice to a decorator and attended art school in Dresden until 1906, when he joined the Die Brücke (The Bridge) group founded by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl-Schmidt Rottluff. Pechstein was inspired by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and the Fauves. Like Paul Gauguin, he also traveled to the South Seas and was impressed by a way of life unencumbered by European traditions. His paintings eventually became more primitive, incorporating thick black lines and angular figures. According to art historian Aya Soika, Pechstein proved invaluable in promoting Die Brücke and was later the group's "bridge" to Berlin. "His most important contribution was perhaps not so much his style of painting as his positioning of the group in the Berlin art scene," said Soika as reported by dpa. "Pechstein was perceived as the leader of Die Brücke. He is the most famous artist of the group and the only one with formal training," said Dresden-based art expert Birgit Dalbajewa. Yet from a stylistic perspective, he was not always as original as Kirchner in every phase, she added. "He was often described as a 'lucky star' of the Expressionists," said Soika. "His style is more decorative and more pleasing than that of Kirchner or Heckel. He was highly esteemed by his contemporaries precisely for this immediacy and ease." Somewhat more disparagingly, Emil Nolde called him a "darling of the press" and Franz Marc described him as "a little Napoleon of Berlin's artists". Pechstein was a professor at the Berlin Academy for 10 years before his dismissal by the Nazis in 1933. Suffering the same fate as many avant-garde artists at the time, 326 of his paintings were removed from German museums and several were later derided in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibitions. During this time, Pechstein went into seclusion in rural Pomerania. He was reinstated at the Berlin Academy in 1945, won numerous awards for his work and was named an honorary citizen of his native Zwickau in 1947. The Saxon city has routinely awarded a Max Pechstein Prize to support young artists ever since. (TWIG, dpa) This is how TIME magazine, in 1955, eulogized Pechstein in its obituaries
section: "Died. Max Pechstein, 73, leading German expressionist painter,
lecturer at the Berlin Academy of Plastic Arts; in Berlin. A leader of
pre-World War I German impressionists, Pechstein built an international
reputation in the 1920s, was denounced as "decadent" by the
Nazis, saw most of his canvases destroyed during the war, returned to
Berlin afterward to repaint many of his early works from memory." Links:
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