Herwarth Walden (Georg Lewin)
German Expressionist Artist, Founder of
Der Sturm Magazine and Gallery, Berlin.
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Herwarth Walden (Georg Lewin)
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Herwarth Walden (1879-1941)Contents • Biography For more about the evolution of painting
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The German artist, art critic and gallery owner Herwarth Walden (Georg Lewin) is famous for promoting avant-garde art in Germany during the first three decades of the 20th century. Associated with the Expressionist Movement in general and German Expressionism in particular, Walden also championed a number of other styles of modern art, including Picasso's Cubism, Italian Futurism, Delaunay's Orphism and later Dadaism. But he was best known for being the founder of the expressionist Der Sturm gallery and magazine in Berlin. The gallery hosted more than 200 art exhibitions, whose participants included Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters and many others. Despite his entrepreneurial activities, Walden was an active member of the Berlin left-wing intelligentsia and a Communist. Although his influence declined after the First World War, he made an important contribution to the history of expressionist painting in Germany, and sponsored a number of expressionist painters who later became famous, such as the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), the graphic artist Maria Uhden (1892-1918), the painters Georg Schrimpf (1889-1938) and Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966), the American modernist Albert Bloch (1882-1961) and the woodcut artist Jakob Steinhardt (1887–1968), among others. His interest in the avant-garde encompassed several different types of art including music, poetry and literature (He went on to write three novels and eight plays). He died in a Stalinist prison at the age of 62. Born Georg Lewin, in Berlin, he studied composition and piano at the academies of music in Berlin and Florence. In 1907 he founded the Verein fuer Kunst (society for the cultivation of the arts), which became a forum for avant-garde artists and scientists. At the same time he wrote literary and theatrical reviews for several German periodicals. In 1901 he married the bohemian German poet Else Lasker-Schuler (1869-1945). They divorced in 1911. It was Lasker-Schuler who invented his pseudonym "Herwarth Walden" - a name inspired by Henry Thoreau's 1854 novel "Walden" (Life in the Woods). Der Sturm Magazine and Gallery In 1910 - inspired by the Florentine literary magazine La Voce - he founded the weekly Der Sturm magazine (1910–32) which he used as a vehicle to champion his theories of expressionism in art, music, and literature. (It went monthly in 1914.) He published articles by a variety of artists and art critics, like Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), while he himself contributed theoretical articles on abstract art and on the main modern art movements of the day. In 1912, he celebrated the magazine's 100th edition by setting up Der Sturm Gallery (1912–24) - an alternative exhibition venue for young artists - which became the focus for Berlin's modern artists for over a decade. The gallery opened by hosting the first exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), followed by shows devoted to Fauvism, Die Brucke (The Bridge), and others. Over time, the gallery exhibited works by a huge range of 20th century painters, including: Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Alexei von Jawlensky (1864-1941), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Paul Klee (1879-1940), Franz Marc (1880-1916), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), Picasso (1881-1973), Albert Gleizes (1881-1953), Georges Braque (1882-1963), Jean Metzinger (1883-1957), Erich Heckel (1883-1970), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976), Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), Egon Schiele (1890-1918), and others. During its heyday, the gallery attracted many of the top art dealers including Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler (1884-1979) and Paul Guillaume (1891-1934), as well as overseas art collectors like Solomon Guggenheim (1861-1949) and Albert C Barnes (1872-1951). In 1912 Walden married Swedish painter Nell Roslund (1887-1975). (They divorced in 1924). In 1919 he joined the Communist Party. After the war, Walden joined the Communist Party but continued to expand his business - into art books (Sturmbucher), portfolios of illustration, lectures and workshops on modern art (Sturmabende) - even an expressionist theatre (Sturmbuhne). But the gallery declined and eventually closed in 1924, while the magazine continued as a quarterly until its closure in 1932. In 1932, fearful of a Nazi takeover, he fled to Moscow, where he found work teaching German. He also wrote articles in German-speaking publications like Das Wort (The Word) and Internationale Literatur (International Literature). In 1938 he fell victim to one of Stalin's pre-war purges of foreign nationals, and was imprisoned in Saratov, where he died in October 1941. • Greatest Expressionist Paintings (c.1880-1950) • Expressionist Portraits (20th Century) • Die Neue Sachlichkeit (c.1925-35) • Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) (1933-45) |
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