Raoul Hausmann: An Artist’s Art Critic

Raoul Hausmann - The Art Critic (Der Kunstkritiker) - 1919-20 - Lithograph and printed paper on paper - 318 x 254 mm - Tate Gallery, London (click photo for larger image)Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971) was an Austrian artist, who was a founder and central figure of the Dada movement in Berlin. He was known especially for his satirical photomontages and his provocative writings on art that decried the art establishment. He wrote for journals such as Die Aktion and Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm.  Dada artists and writers created provocative works that questioned capitalism and conformity, which they believed to be the fundamental motivations for the war that had just ended, and which had left chaos and destruction in its wake.

By 1918 Hausmann had already begun to work primarily in photomontage—composite collaged images made by juxtaposing and superimposing fragments of photos and text found in mass-media sources. It is commonly held that Hausmann and fellow artist Hannah Höch discovered photomontage while vacationing on the Baltic Sea, in the summer of 1918. 

In the work featured here, the 'art critic' is identified by a stamp as George Grosz, another member of the Dada group. But the image was probably an anonymous figure cut from a magazine. The fragment of a German banknote behind the critic’s neck suggests that he is controlled by capitalist forces. The words in the background are part of a poem poster made by Hausmann to be pasted on the walls of Berlin.

Wayne Thiebaud: Nostalgia for the Commonplace

Wayne Thiebaud - Cut Meringues - 1961 - Oil on canvas - 16 x 20" (40.6 x 50.6 cm) - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York (click photo for larger image)Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) is an American painter and printmaker who is perhaps best known for his thickly painted still-lifes of such items as foods and cosmetics. Although he is often associated with Pop Art—this designation isn’t wholly accurate. Unlike Pop artists, Thiebaud worked from life, not from media images. In addition, his renderings are characterized by loose, highly visible, brushstrokes, as opposed to the hard-edged, mechanical style of Pop Art. 

As a painter and a teacher, Thiebaud has always been interested in Realism, though his subject matter is not typically associated with that approach. By 1960, Thiebaud had developed a distinctive visual vocabulary centered on food. His work incorporates “familiar items that are often regarded, and sometimes disdained, as popular symbols of mass consumption in American society.” Unlike the works of many Pop artists, however, whose works sometimes suggest a condescension for the symbols of popular culture—Thiebaud insists that his subjects are born of nostalgia—not contempt. In addition, his oeuvre also includes landscapes and figurative art.

Heinrich Campendonk: Folk Infused Imagery

Heinrich Campendonk - Mystical Crucifixion - 1926-28 - Oil on glass - 17 1/2 x 15" (44.5 x 38.1 cm) - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (click photo for larger image)Heinrich Campendonk (1889-1957) is best known as a German Expressionist painter. However he was also an accomplished designer, stained glass artist, and printmaker.

Campendonk was invited by artists Franz Marc (1880-1916) and Wassily Kandinsky to become a member of the Munich artist’s group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1911. Later that year he took part in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition, and his paintings were illustrated in the Blaue Reiter almanac. His first prints were published in Herwarth Walden’s magazine Der Sturm in 1912. Campendonk was an admirer of primitive art and folklore, and animals often figure in his work. His paintings of animals in nature, often mystical in tone, were influenced by the example of Marc, although, unlike Marc, Campendonk often included figures in his compositions. 

After the First World War and the deaths of Marc and August Macke (1887-1914), Campendonk’s style changed. He destroyed much of his earlier work, and began to paint in a manner indebted to the dreamlike and folk-infused imagery of Marc Chagall, whom he had met in 1914. In the early 1920s, he took up the practice of stained glass design, and in 1925 had his first one-man show in New York. He received numerous commissions for large-scale stained glass decorations, and this public form of art was to occupy him for much of his later career.

Aaron Douglas: Depicting A Social Narrative

Aaron Douglas - In an African Setting, 1934, gouache on board, The Art Institute of Chicago. (click photo for larger image)The flowering of African-American social thought that was expressed through the visual arts, as well as through music (Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, Fats Waller and Billie Holiday), literature (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and W.E.B. DuBois), theater (Paul Robeson) and dance (Josephine Baker) was known as the Harlem Renaissance. While this movement—and some of its practitioners—have been previously discussed elsewhere on this site, we haven’t yet looked at American painter and graphic artist Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), who played a leading role in the Harlem Renaissance.

“Douglas incorporated synthetic cubist forms with stylized and geometric shapes drawn from African art. He used the rhythm of circles, diagonals, and wavy lines to energize his illustrations, which are widely known for their tonal gradations and Art Deco-style silhouettes. Through these techniques, he addressed the aspirations of the “New Negro” and depicted the realities of the black struggle for political and creative freedom.”

From the time he returned to New York City from Kansas, in 1925, Douglas was busy creating paintings, illustrations, murals through numerous commissions. The WPA asked him to paint four murals for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. “Collectively titled Aspects of Negro Life, these murals represent the pinnacle of his artistic achievement, depicting a social narrative that places progressive African American experience squarely within the scope of the American dream.”

By 1939, with the depletion of the Harlem Renaissance, Douglas left New York City to teach at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, where he remained for the next 27 years.

August Macke: Feelings and Moods

August Macke - Lady in a Park - 1914 - Oil on canvas - 38 1/2 x 23 1/4" (97.8 x 58.9 cm) - MoMA, New York (click photo for larger image)German Expressionist painter August Macke (1887-1914) was a member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) organization of artists, based in Germany, that contributed greatly to the development of abstract art. He lived most of his creative life in Bonn, with the exception of a few periods spent in Switzerland and various trips to Paris, Italy, the Netherlands and Tunisia. His style was formed within the mode of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and he later went through a Fauve period, which greatly influenced him throughout his life. In 1909, through fellow artist Franz Marc, he met Wassily Kandinsky—both featured elsewhere on this site. For a time, Macke shared the non-objective aesthetic and the mystical and symbolic interests of Der Blaue Reiter.

Macke's meeting with Robert Delaunay (also discussed on this site) in Paris in 1912 was something of an epiphany for him. Delaunay's chromatic Cubism (labeled Orphism) influenced Macke's art from that point forward. The exotic atmosphere of Tunisia, where Macke traveled in April 1914 was also fundamental to the luminist approach of Macke’s final period, during which he produced a series of works now considered masterpieces. His later works focus primarily on representing emotions and moods, in part through a distortion of color and form. The influence of Fauvism remains evident throughout his oeuvre—as you will observe in the work featured here. 

Sadly, Macke died at the front during WWI—an artist lost far too soon.