#weimar art

[jareckiworld]

Conrad Felixmüller (1897-1977)—The Children's Carnival Bustle [oil on canvas, 1926]

[weimarhaus]

Fritz Lang makes himself a drink at the bar of his flat in Berlin, 1932. Photo by Martin Munkacsi.

[victusinveritas]

Wassily Kandinsky's drawings of dancer Gret Palucca, Berlin 1926

Photographed by Hugo Erfurth

[canvasmirror]

Lotte Laserstein (German/Swedish, 1898 - 1993) • Self-Portrait with a Cat • 1928

[dogandcatcomics]

Credit: George Grosz (Berlin, Germany, later USA, 1893-1959). Costume design for the play Methusalem, 1922, watercolor, ink, and pencil on paper. Thanks to @mepaintsme for the tip.

[vintagecontinuum]

"Berlin was in a state of civil war," Christopher Isherwood writes in his Berlin Stories. "Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere." The failing Weimar government teetered on the verge of collapse, and along with it, the hopes of millions of Germans. Yet within the tumultuous early 1930s, high fashion nevertheless prevailed in Berlin.

Yva, a pioneering German-Jewish photographer, was a leading figure in the vibrant queer community of pre-Nazi Berlin. Her innovative work embodies the subtle elegance and boundary-pushing expressions of early 1930s aesthetics before the Nazi rise to power. Her evocative multiple exposure techniques and deliberately ungendered emphasis on the female figure offer a nuanced counterpoint to the artistic norms of the day, capturing glimpses of gender non-conformity and artistic sexual liberation that would soon be brutally suppressed.

Unfortunately, Yva was tragically unable to escape Germany before she and her husband were deported and murdered at the Majdanek concentration camp in 1942. Most of her negatives were destroyed, but in the years following the war, her surviving works were displayed at her last home in the Hotel Bogota at Schlüterstraße 45. Currently, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin website maintains a digitalized collection of her work.

[the-cricket-chirps]

Jeanne Mammen

Romanisches Café

1930

[bloodybosom]

[artdecoandmodernist]

1920s Dodo (Dörte Clara Wolff), The Proposal. Watercolour on paper. 

Dodo aka Dodo Burgner, Dörte Clara Wolff, Dörte Burgner, Dörte Clara Burgner, Dörte Wolff and Dorte Clara Wolff.    

[jareckiworld]

Conrad Felixmüller (1897-1977) — Death of the Poet Walter Rheiner [oil on canvas, 1925]

[weimarhaus]

Unknown photographer. Police photo of Liddy Bacroff, 1933. Gelatin silver print. Staatsarchiv, Hamburg.

Police photo of Liddy Bacroff (1908-1943) taken after an arrest, 1933. Barcoff described themself as a “homosexual transvestite”, lived from sex work, and was convicted several times. In 1943, they was murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Liddy Bacroff, a transgender woman initially from Ludwigshafen, who moved to Hamburg and lived for the majority of her life publicly presenting herself as a woman. She did not perceive herself to be a man (and, indeed, in papers she left after having been imprisoned, she determined what her name would be while also conspicuously referring to herself as “Liddy Bacroff, Transvestit”).

[weimarhaus]

A beautiful dancer posing in front of a mirror for the September 1926 issue of UHU Magazine. Image courtesy of Fotografisches Atelier Ullstein.

[weimarhaus]

Otto Dix (1891–1969), Preparatory Drawing for Three Wenches painting, 1926, Charcoal,pencil,and white gouache and was on paper.

[weimarhaus]

LYONEL FEININGER : "Houses at Night , Dessau" , 1929 . Gelatin silver print ; 17,8 x 23,5 cm / Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin.

[weimarhaus]

'Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen' (Germany, a Winter's Fairy Tale) George Grosz, 1918

[weimarhaus]

Marlene Dietrich

Freiherr (Baron) Wolff von Gudenberg (1890-1961 or 1964) was a photographer who was noted and fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s in Berlin. Wolff von Gudenberg is the name of an old Hessian noble family that was raised to the rank of baron in 1873. He photographed actors like Marlene Dietrich and Fritzi Massary, dancers like Marianne Winkelstern and La Jana, and international celebrities such as Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong. His photos appeared in magazines such as Die Dame, newspapers like Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ), and on countless postcards by Ross Verlag and other publishers.