history the paintings

++INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXHIBITION++

LION FEUCHTWANGER: SUCCESS - A Three Year History of a Province
Published 1930, the novel is set around 1922/23

TREATMENT

The framework of the novel’s plot is the story of a Munich art historian, Dr Martin Krueger, who in his capacity as the director of the State collection of paintings comes into conflict with the political arena because he acquires modern and controversial art works and exhibits them in the museum.

In the novel ‘Success’, there are three controversial paintings, representing programmatically bare life, state power and morality.

--1-- female nude

a picture by the artist Anna Elisabeth Haider, who battled her way out of impoverished circumstances (model for this figure is Marie Luise Fleisser, 1901-1974). This nude became so scandalous as a result of the fact that it is alleged to be a self-portrait by the artist. After the artist’s suicide, it was insinuated that Krueger had had an intimate relationship with her, which he denied under oath. With the assistance of false witness reports, Krueger is condemned to three years imprisonment for perjury.

>> the picture, as it is described in the novel, recalls the nude on a blue background by Ludwig Kirchner (1911, Buchheim Collection). In the exhibition in the Nagel Gallery, a free translation by SD – bearing identifiable traits of this artist.

--2--degenerate crucifix

the painter Andreas Greiderer achieved a rapid success by dint of his degenerate Christ. He socialises with notabilities from literature (Ludwig Ganghofer, Ludwig Thoma) and politics. Real-life model for this character in the novel is Ludwig Gies (1887-1966). On the occasion of the German trade fair in Munich (1922), he showed his two metre high ‘Luebeckian Crucifix’, carved out of oak. However, this sculpture, with its strongly expressionistic formal language, met with deep disapproval on the part of the Munich press and a section of the public and had eventually to be removed. The National Socialist propaganda exhibition of 1937, ‘Degenerate Art’, opened its show with this wooden sculpture. Gies, though, at the same time received several public commissions from the Nazis. Thus he designed, for example, a national emblem, an eagle in the form of a wall drawing in the town hall of the town of Kornwestheim. The eagle is looking towards the east.
However, another eagle was probably to become more famous – the eagle designed for the German Bundestag (Lower House of Parliament) is – in contrast to the Nazi period – depicted looking towards the west. The eagle, the heraldic beast used by the Parliament today, was decided upon in Bonn in the time of Konrad Adenauer without consulting the people. It wasn’t long before the population came to describe the national symbol as ‘the fat hen’.
>> here in the exhibition, a painting depicting the ‘degenerate Christ’.

--3-- Joseph and his brothers, or: Justice

In the novel, a painting by Franz Landholzer. The picture immediately disappears from the painting gallery. The painter Landholzer is nowhere to be found. Later, Kaspar Proeckl (Bertolt Brecht) ‘discovers’ him in a psychiatric hospital. There, he is calling himself Fritz Eugene Brendel, engineer for the National Railway, inventor of the apparatus for measuring air, creator of the unassuming animal, Lazarus of Nazareth, God’s governor of the waters and of the land and of all the forces of the air.
The picture of Joseph and his brothers is painted ‘with a leftover bit of dilettantism, of non-routine’. It shows the part of the Biblical story where Joseph, in his capacity as food minister to the empire of Egypt, smuggles a silver goblet into his brothers’ bags, in order to have them later arrested – already a favourite trick in those days! In the picture, behind the group of brothers, several policemen are also depicted.

>> here in the exhibition, you can see one of them.

In the novel, the museum director Martin Krueger dies in the penitentiary as a result of a lack of medical supplies. This corresponds to the death behind bars of the soviet republican and member of the local state parliament, August Hagemeister, (*1879) in Niederschoenenfeld on 16th January 1923.

The Dr. Martin Krueger of the novel is modelled on Dr. August Liebmann-Mayer, 1885-1944. (Between 1920 and 1931, he was the chief conservator of the state painting collection and a specialist on Spanish painting – publications on El Greco and Velázquez.) As a result of National Socialist machinations informing on job related issues, he was arrested in the Third Reich and murdered in the concentration camp Auschwitz in 1944.