Frank Whitford

(from "Studio International" magazine, February 1972 pp 54-59)

This fulsome, early but accurate estimate of Ludwig Meidner appeared in 1920, and he remains the most typical Expressionist painter. He also played a central role in the literary and artistic movement, a fact indicated by the number of references to him in the catalogue of the great Expressionist exhibition held in Marbach in 1960.2 And yet all the studies of Expressionism pay scant attention to him and he is still little known in his native Germany.3 Even in America, where the appreciation of and enthusiasm for Expressionism has always been greater than elsewhere, there have been no exhibitions of his work and few collectors anxious to acquire it.

The reason Meidner has been given such short shrift has nothing to do with the quality of his drawing or painting. Although his most creative period was remarkably brief he must be rated among the best draughtsmen of his generation and his visionary paintings are unique, equalled perhaps only by those of Kokoschka, an artist with whom Meidner has much in common. It is difficult to explain why Meidner has failed to gain the recognition he so obviously merits. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Meidner was an independent, belonged to none of the groups in whose terms the history of Expressionism has come down to us, and associated more with writers than painters.4 Like Rohlfs and Morgner, two similarly underestimated talents, Meidner made his own way. It is probably, and ironically, for this reason that Meidner became the most typical Expressionist of all. In his work we can isolate the most striking characteristics of the style more certainly than in that of any other painter.

CITYSCAPE

One of the great discoveries of the Expressionists was the city. The Impressionists, it is true, were the first to take subjects from the city and city life but they treated them as though they were landscapes. The Expressionists loved the city for its own sake and at the same time loathed themselves for loving it. In taking subjects like the concrete apartment blocks of Berlin, the bars and railway stations, they evolved a new Romanticism which found magic in anonymity, asphalt and the urban sprawl. Broad streets with racing traffic, tall buildings, gasometers, airships trailing advertising slogans and dense crowds forming and reforming an endless variety of patterns were touched always with melancholy, as much the subject of Expressionist poetry as was the darker side of city-life: the brothels, the casualty wards, the morgues and doss-houses. Here, in a poem by Paul Zech, for example, we find a typical piece of imagery:

'The windows stand close together
Like the holes of a sieve and houses
Hug themselves so tightly that the streets
Look grey and swollen like a strangler's victims.'5

But the city was more the subject of Expressionist poetry than painting, and only became a major concern of painters after the First World War. The only pre-war paintings of cities to reflect something of the attitude to the subject which we find in the poetry are those Meidner and Kirchner. Kirchner's street scenes are of course much better known, but for all their obvious qualities they can only be related with difficulty to the concerns and imagery of the poems, whereas Meidner's pulsating and nocturnal cities come very close to the idea of threatening but exciting cage which often seem to vibrate with the passions of the people trapped in it.

The city was Meidner's most important subject during his Berlin years. Asked in 1913 to outline a programme for the future of painting he wrote an ecstatic, florid but impressive song of praise to the city and demanded that artists paint their 'true home' and not the flower beds and rural scenes of the Impressionists. 'A street does not consist of tonal values' he declared 'but is a bombardment of rows of windows, rushing balls of light between roads and alleys of all sorts and of thousands of vibrating spots, groups of people and threatening, formless masses of colour.'6 Such emphasis on energy, on violence even, clearly owes a great deal to the Futurist and indeed Meidner's enthusiasm for the city explained partly by the impact made on him, a small-town provincial from Silesia, by Berlin, was fired by the Italian Futurists who became rage of the German capital after showing there at Herwarth Walden's Sturm gallery in 1911 and 12.

Meidner's style, which matured during 1912, reveals his enthusiasm for the Italians. His nocturnal views of streets like canyons illuminated by street-lamps which seem to burst like star-shells and scatter their light like shrapnel are full of the dangerous excitement of city life and even suggest the powerful smell of crowds in confined spaces, the fetid air of subways, and pavements after a shower of rain. Meidner himself was obviously a creature of the night who only came alive in the Café des Westens after darkness had fallen and returned home just before the dawn.7

His writings are also full of ecstatic descriptions of the power the city had over him. Here, for example, is a passage from lm Nacken das Sternemeer:

'Sometimes when I feel a nocturnal need I venture forth into the city... and hurtle headlong along the pavements… the screams of clouds echo around me, burning bushes, a distant beating of wings, and people shadowy and spitting. The moon burns against my hot temples... The city nears. My body crackles. The giggles of the city ignite against my skin. I hear eruptions at the base of my skull. The houses near. Their catastrophes explode from their windows, stairways silently collapse. People laugh beneath the ruins... In beds incredible events take place…Office girls wait for their lovers. They masturbate out of boredom.'8

Here the city is more than menacing, does more than exert a strange hypnotic influence over its inhabitants. It is collapsing, going down, breaking up. The energies it generated have finally consumed it.

MENSCHHEITSDÄMMERUNG

Meidner's cityscapes do in fact often depict the end of cities, describe by extension the end of the world, and the Futurist faceting, the angular imbalance to the point of chaos were the perfect tools for such descriptions. In drawings and paintings like Factory Landscape they even make innocent objects like sheds, gasometers, barges and steam-hammers seem like the backdrop for some holy vision or parts of a landscape heaving during some earth-tremor. During 1912, a year in which not only Meidner was plagued by premonitions of some terrible disaster, he produced a large number of apocalyptic scenes.9 In this respect, too, his work is typically Expressionist for the apocalypse was as common an image in Expressionist poetry as were subjects taken from city life. One of the most influential poems at this time, for example, was Weltende, (The End of the World), by Jakob van Hoddis, which, according to Johannes R. Becher changed a generation and 'made us feel like new men'.10 Poems on the same or similar subjects were numerous enough for Kurt Pinthus, editor of the most famous of all collections of Expressionist poetry, significantly entitled Menschheitsdämmerung, (Twilight of Mankind), to be able to devote a large section to them which he called Sturz und Schrei, (roughly, Collapse and Scream.)11 In this section appear, for example, Weltende, Heym's Krieg, (War), (A great city went down in yellow smoke/threw itself silently into the belly of the abyss) and, also by Heym, Umbra Vitae, which begins:

'People stand on the street
Surveying the great auguries in the sky,
Where the comets with snouts of fire
Threaten and sniff around the jagged towers'.

The apocalypse, as the ultimate event, represents of course the fulfilment of the Expressionist craving for extremes in everything and must be regarded as one of the most important Expressionist subjects. But it seldom appears in paintings by artists other than Meidner. Kandinsky's versions of The Flood and The Last Judgement have nothing of the urgency of Meidner's apocalyptic landscapes, none of their violence and terror. Entire cities collapse, disappear into jagged craters in the ground into which streets pour as though of lava. Explosions shatter the sky. Shells burst among the rooftops and people run in panic or are swallowed up by the sudden subsidence of the ground. If it were not for their dates these pictures could be taken for descriptions of Warsaw, Dresden or Hiroshima. The energy and obvious speed with which they were painted suggest that they were the result of an irresistible need, or even of terrifying visions: '...day and night I painted my afflictions out of my system, The Last Judgement, The End of The World and mountains of skulls. For in those days the great storm of the worlds threw with gnashing of teeth a glaring shadow on my whimpering brush-hand."12 And Meidner does indeed seem to have had genuine visions, to have experienced paintings progressing as though they were being produced by someone else.

In spite of the extreme horror of most of these paintings they are, strangely, not all horrifying. One of them, derived from a view of the Spree harbour in Berlin, has an exultant energy and verve and another, in which a naked man is dead or sleeping while various natural disasters overtake a coastal town in the distance seems to describe a purifying dream.13 A related drawing, Apocalyptic Scene, is, in spite of its title, even calm. A reclining man, probably Meidner himself, is watching while a comet falls on a walled town in the distance and a balloon floats upwards toward the clouds. Some of these apocalypses were purely imaginative; others were based on views of real cities, although always, as in the drawing of the Blasewitz suburb of Dresden, the Futuristic splintering has gone so far that the motif is no longer identifiable.

It is important to recognize that, for all their frightening aspects, both the calm and violent apocalyptic scenes are closely connected. For Meidner, in common with many of his contemporaries, believed that the world had become so rotten that only a bloody war or a revolution would improve it. The apocalypse was therefore above all a great purifying or regenerative event, and was something to be awaited with impatience.

Here too Meidner's paintings reflect an attitude typical of the Expressionist generation. Not only did many writers and artists believe that war was coming, they actually looked forward to it. Thus Heym wrote in his diary in 1911 that he was 'suffocating... in these banal times and that he hoped at least for a war!'14 And Thomas Mann felt similarly. 'How might the artist, the soldier in the artist, not praise God for the collapse of a peaceful world of which he was so tired, so thoroughly tired. War!'15

I, ALWAYS A STORM

Meidner frequently portrayed himself in his apocalyptic landscapes. Such personal involvement, as though the world's centre of gravity were situated within the artist or, reversed, as though the world only existed as the reflection of the artist's feelings, is also a typical Expressionist characteristic if not the style's most obvious trait. The same diary entry by Heym continues in a way which perfectly emphasizes the belief in extreme subjectivity which the Expressionists brought to their work:

'I, a torn ocean; I, always a storm; I, the mirror of the external, as wild and chaotic as the world'.

And of course the poetic form most used by Expressionist writers was the monologue, the agonized anatomizing of the self, the always frustrated attempt to become two people so that each could watch the other all the time.

Meidner was no different, and a short text he wrote beside a self-portrait of 1917 can be directly compared with Heym's outburst above;

'I, Ludwig Meidner, clod of earth cut into little pieces, outlawed, apocalyptic, my skull blown into oblivion in the winter wind!'

For some reason passages like this escape mawkishness by a hair's breadth and do say something about the unusually subjective way Meidner seems to have experienced everything. For him, even prosaic, dead objects take on human characteristics: 'My last picture bleeds on its easel. It is like open wounds and ulcers. You can still see how the wet paint shines ardently. And there is work's slaughter-house, bloody and drenched in sweat, and the paint rags scream and stink of turpentine and the palette lies like an open body and my hands shake when I see it all."16

Expressionism was above all the style in which such subjectivity might be given full rein. It is therefore curious that the self-portrait is not the subject used most often by Expressionist painters; indeed, by most of them it was hardly used at all. In Meidner's work, however, it plays a role second only to that played by the city and often the two are combined. Meidner never ceased to draw and paint his own likeness. No other modem painter produced so many self-portraits and towards the end of his life when it became increasingly clear that he had long since given up the struggle to emulate Rembrandt, he produced nothing else. From works of every period he stares out ugly, questioning, exulting, wry, melancholic, waiting for inspiration. The emotion is never the same and the emotion is expressed, as in caricature, by an exaggerated use of line, by bold contrasts, and by special emphasis on eyes, mouths and hands.

Meidner not only drew and painted himself. An habitual frequenter of the literary and intellectual cafés, friend of many writers and with an ability to capture a likeness economically, he became the informal recorder of the artists and writers of his time, the unofficial Hofmaler at the court of Expressionism, and virtually everyone sat for him at some time or another: Becher, Neisse, Lotz, Werfel, Wolfenstein, van Hoddis. No other artist compiled such a complete record of the prominent artists of that time and when Menschheitsdämmerung appeared it was mostly illustrated with portrait drawings by Meidner.

Meidner seems to have produced most of the early self-portraits in a kind of ecstasy, close to a fit in its intensity and, like a fit, punctuated by visions. Meidner habitually worked on a painting until he dropped, forgetting to eat or sleep until he had finished, and totally uninterested in his surroundings. He produced his greatest paintings in 1912 and 13 in an attic studio in the Friedenau district of Berlin which was incredibly filthy, piled with the ashes and slag of years, and, especially in the hot Berlin summers, was filled with an almost unbearable stench, the source of which was amusingly revealed by George Grosz in his autobiography. Grosz, who visited Meidner to have his portrait painted, wanted to go to the lavatory on one occasion:

'What a calamity! It was impossible to get relief. The toilet bowl was full to the top and practically overflowing. It looked as if it had been stopped up for months and perhaps even for years. Damn it, what to do? All that beer and all that tea demanded an outlet... 'Ludwig, where can I...?' 'Big or little?' asked Meidner. 'Little, thank God,' I replied. 'Good, good', said Meidner. 'Use the bathtub'. The tub stood in a small cubicle. It was never used, of course... The candle that I had brought with me revealed a filthy tub which had obviously served for both 'big' and 'little'.'17

Such repulsive conditions were clearly less the result of a studied Bohemianism than of an incurable itch to work, to capture the essence of the vision before it faded. Indeed, Meidner worked with the determination of someone with a terminal disease, afraid that time would run out before things got done, and nothing was as important to him as painting and drawing. His writing reveals that he hankered after paints and brushes with an almost sexual lust:

'Yes, colours, colours without numbers! I will marry into an oil-paint factory. As dowry, my wife will bring me a thousand tubes each of umber, ochre, cobalt, white and madder. My wife will be angular, frenetic and hot. She shall have arms a mile long to wrap me close to her. We shall fold ourselves into the narrow bed and dream of burnt umber. I will bite your head off and play ball in my glaring, uninhibited nights!"18

Reference has already frequently been made to the fact that Meidner fervently believed in the reality of his own visions. After years of having been an atheist it was such visions which persuaded Meidner once again to take up religion. Much later he explained that he had become convinced that his visions came from the Holy Ghost:

'In December 1912 I experienced a thoroughgoing religious feeling for the first time. Suddenly one evening while I was painting I noticed that nothing I was doing came off. I simply could not paint. Then, suddenly, everything succeeded and to such a degree that I watched myself painting as though I were a spectator. My arm moved of itself and I was very surprised. Then something came over me: The Holy Ghost. The strangest thing was that I didn't believe in God… I noticed that the feeling was what is usually described as ecstasy… I only painted my inward state!'19

Expressionism, based as it was on a transcendental view of the world and on a belief in non-material reality, was the style of a generation which rediscovered religion. At the height of a materialistic epoch during which the Bible lost out to life insurance and the Church to the dance-hall and bar, the young generation turned to spiritual things as though they themselves had just discovered them. It was not orthodoxy which benefited but a variety of exotic, newly-founded and often cranky religions which enjoyed an enormous, if brief, vogue during the years before the First World War. Peripatetic priests, their hair grown long in emulation of the Hebrew prophets, toured the country preaching the benefits of nudism, all rice diets and meditation. Theosophy, Mazdaism, Spiritualism and Zoroastrianisim were at the height of their influence.

It is significant that so many of the Expressionist writers and painters were attracted to one or more of these faiths, that Kandinsky turned to Rudolf Steiner, that the Bauhaus had on its premises a vegetarian kitchen and that Meidner, in this instance at least more conventional than the others, returned to the Jewish faith and, like Schoenberg later began to base works on Old Testament stories and figures.

But religion does not find expression in Meidner's work until the last years of the war and only becomes a major theme after it, although from around 1916 onwards drawings of Old Testament prophets appear in their hundreds. They show old, grey-bearded men in billowing robes declaiming in the desert or striking attitudes of despair, joy or wisdom. They are nowhere near as satisfactory as earlier work. The visions had gone and the orthodox beliefs which had taken their place never again produced the irresistible pressures necessary for the creation of work like that Meidner produced before the war.

Even in this respect Meidner was a typical Expressionist, for most artists and writers of his generation were, like him, burned out early, or else did not survive the war. None of the Brücke artists produced anything after 1919 which could compare with earlier work. Kokoschka's painting declined soon after, and it was the same with the poets. It was as though the constant search for extremes, the continual exaggeration of feeling for the sake of more convincing expression had to be paid for by a shortening of the creative life. Meidner, too, was a dragonfly. His best work dates from 1912 to 1916, four years into which he packed a group of visionary cityscapes, penetrating portraits and searching likenesses of himself, and after which he plunged into self-parody, into the cultivation of mannerisms and the adoption of subject matter so obscure that his images and symbols become meaningless.

AFTER THE APOCALYPSE

Most of those Expressionists who had welcomed the war were less enthusiastic when, after it had begun and had become as horrifying as the most horrifying of their visions, they realized that even a total collapse of the political system would not necessarily lead to the establishment of a new order. They had longed for war partly as the precursor of revolution and had written of the new spirit of brotherhood which would replace the hatred, the exploitation and the crass materialism which had prevailed for so long. Once again Kurt Pinthus's Menschheitsdämmerung makes it clear what the Expressionists thought important to emphasize in 1919, at a time when the November Revolution had already failed and Germany was beginning slowly to slip into the mediocrity of the Weimar Republic. One section of the anthology is called Aufruf und Empörung (Exhortation and Rebellion) and another Love of Man. The most obvious thing about the poems in this section is their political engagement, typical of the work of that group of Expressionists centred on Franz Pfemfert's journal Die Aktion, and usually known therefore as Activists. Hasenclever's The Political Poet includes the stanza:

'Stand up and kill; storm-attacks rage.
High from the vaults the chains fall down.
On river-banks parliaments brood silently
…already songs of freedom ring.'

and reminds its readers that the poet no longer spends his time dreaming but 'His foot descends upon the corpses of villains, his head is raised to accompany peoples.'

These writers allied themselves after the war either with the Independent Socialists or with the newly-founded Communist party, and many of them took an active part in the Revolution of 1918.

Meidner seems always to have been a Socialist, and to have regarded the artist as the lap dog of the aristocracy and the middle-class and in his way as exploited as the manual labourer. As early as 1913 he had even painted picture of revolution, of a bloody fight at the barricades with himself at the centre, a red rag around his forehead, holding the red flag high surrounded by gun-fire, exploding shells and burned out buildings.20

When the real revolution came, the tragic fiasco of November 1918, Meidner did not take part in it. After his demob he returned for several months to his native Bernstadt in Silesia. But his views had not changed. In 1919 he wrote: 'We must choose Socialism, choose the general and complete socialization of the means of production which afford every person work, spirit, bread, a home and the sense of a higher objective in life. . .we painters and poets are joined together with the poor in a holy alliance.'21 In this respect, too, Meidner was a typical Expressionist.

WRITING

Most of the Expressionists set great store by versatility, did their best to excel in areas other than in their chosen field. Kokoschka and Barlach wrote plays now regarded as literary landmarks; Klee and Feininger were musicians of professional standard. Schoenberg and Strindberg were painters, the latter of no mean achievement. Like Kokoschka, Meidner took his writing seriously, and although his two major literary works, Im Nacken das Sternemeer and Septemberschrei are fragmentary and little-known, for their original use of language alone they deserve to rate among the most interesting pieces of Expressionist prose.

Meidner would have liked to become a poet ('I always loved poetry but I couldn't rhyme. It was only enough for prose, be it said for poetic prose.') and his writing has the often oppressive energy of his painting and appears to have been set down in a way which suggests that he wrote, as he painted, in a kind of visionary state. Here, for example, is a typical piece from Im Nacken das Sternemeer, describing the joys of drawing:

'We have loved drawing from way back, we stupid, playful, laughing humans. From the first charming stammerings of primitive people to Kokoschka and Hermann Huber; from Raphael's disciplined style to the pornographic doodles on our piss-house walls. Drawing makes you happy, healthy, and a believer. I'm always alone. No girl loves me. No woman wants to sleep with me. No friend wants to be with me. I have no home, no country, am poor, outlawed and much hated.. . but I can draw, freely swing here and there.., and I rejoice with the pencil, sing, pray and praise the Great Almighty'.

All the drawings which accompany this article are from the collection of Mr and Mrs D. Thomas Bergen, London, and are on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago. I am especially grateful to Mr D. T. Bergen for helpful discussions concerning Meidner.

Brief bibliography:
Thomas Grochowiak, Ludwig Meidner, Recklinghausen, 1966. Essays in catalogues for Meidner exhibitions in Recklinghausen, Berlin and Darmstadt, 1963 and 1964 (travelling show), Darmstadt 1970, and Frankfurt 1970 (Frankfurt Kunstkabinett). The Meidner Estate is to be found in Darmstadt and is administered by the city.

Brief chronology:
Born 1884 in Bernstadt, Silesia and from 1903 to 05 studied at the art school in Breslau (Wroclaw). From 1905 to 1906 earned enough to keep himself alive by making fashion drawings for an advertising agency in Berlin. 1906-7 at the Academies Cormon and Julian in Paris, where he became friendly with Modigliani. Returned to Berlin in 1907, living at first in great poverty. 1912 founded the artists' group Die Pathetiker and exhibited at Herwarth Walden's Gallery Der Sturm. In 1914 he went to Dresden his closest friend, the writer Ernst Wilhelm Lotz. From 1915 until 1916 he was once again in Berlin and was eventually called up. From 1916 until 1918 he acted for part of the time as a French interpreter. During this period he also wrote Im Nacken das Sternemeer and Septemberschrei. From 1919 until 1935 he was in Berlin, and in 1935 was declared a decadent artist by the Nazis. In 1939 he fled with his family to England where he was interned on the Isle of Man and then lived and worked in a studio on the Finchley Road in London. In 1953 he returned Germany and died in Darmstadt in 1966.

1. Willi Wolfradt, Ludwig Meidner in Das Junge Deutschland, 1920.
2. Expressionismus, Literatur und Kunst, 1910-1923, exhibition in the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach a.N., 1960. The catalogue, edited by P. Raabe and H. L. Greve, makes almost forty references to Meidner as against, for example, less than fifteen to Kirchner.
3. Since the war there have been four small exhibitions of Meidner's work in Germany, two of them in private galleries. The first, and so far only monograph on the artist, that by Grochowiak, appeared in 1966.
4. Meidner did belong to a group, however. Together with the now forgotten painters Janthur and Steinhardt he founded 'Die Pathetiker' in the Spring of 1912, a group dedicated to opposing the lack of emotion of the Impressionists and to making the German medieval masters better known. The group exhibited with other painters at Walden's Sturm gallery.
5. Paul Zech, Fabrikstrasse Tags, 1911, printed in Menschheitsdämmerung, ed. Pinthus, Berlin 1920
6. In 1913/14 the Berlin art journal Kunst und Künstler asked a number of 'younger' artists for their views on the most recent art and on the future of art. Meidner's contribution has been reprinted frequently, most recently in Kunst und Künstler, aus 32 Jahrgängen einer deutschen Zeitschrift, edited by Günter Feist, Berlin (East) 1971.
7. It was therefore most appropriate that Meidner was asked in 1923 to design the sets for the Ufa-film Die Strasse, which tells the story of a man living in comfortable middle-class surroundings who nevertheless feels the call of the nocturnal city. Meidner's sets for the street at night, closely relate to the drawings which illustrate this article, contrast strongly with the Victorian interiors of the apartment, which the man eventually leaves, unable to resist the promised excitement of the street outside.
8. Ludwig Meidner, lm Nacken das Sternemeer, Leipzig and Munich, 1918.
9. According to Grochowiak, Meidner later though that his visions in 1912 might have been partly induced by the unusually hot summer and by the awful conditions he was living in. Meidner visited Heckel and Kirchner that summer and found them suffering equally from premonitions of some awful disaster.
10. Johannes R Becher, Ein Mensch unserer Zeit, Berlin, 1929.
11. Menschheitsdämmerung, edited by Kurt Pinthus first published by Rowohlt in 1920 and althought the first was the most important anthology of Expressionist poetry. The sections were called Sturz und Srhrei, Erweckung des Herzens, Aufruft und Empörung and Liebe den Menschen. The anthology was reprinted as a paperback in 1959.
12. Ludwig Meidner, 'Mein Leben', autobiographical fragment published in: Lothar Brieger Ludwig Meidner Junge Kunst, volume 4, Leipzig 1919.
13. Apokalvptische Landschaft (Spreehafen Berlin) reproduced, plate X in Grohowiak, is in the Saarland-Museum, Saarbrucken. The second picture mentioned here, also called Apokalyptische Landschaft, is plate VII in Grohowiak and is in if Neue Nationalgalerie, West Berlin.
14. Heym's diary entry printed in the Marbach Expressionismus catalogue, p. 31.
15. Thomas Mann Friedrich und die Grosse Koalition quoted in Grochowiak
16. Ludwig Meidner, In Nacken das Sternemeer
17. George Grosz, Ein Kleines Ja und ein Grosses Nein, Sein Leben von ihm selbst erzählt, Hamburg 1955.
18. Meidner op. cit
19. As told to Grohowiak.
20. Revolution (Barrikadenkampf), plate XIII in Grohowiak, is in the Neue Nationalgalerie, West Berlin.
21. Ludwig Meidner in Das Kunstblatt 1919.