Mosaics by Puhl & Wagner

Since their formation in 1889, the Berlin company Puhl & Wagner was one of the most important companies for glass mosaics and glass windows in Germany. By manufacturing their own mosaic pieces in their glass factory and by developing a new technique of laying the small mosaic pieces they were able to reduce the manufacturing costs considerably and, in consequence, to establish their market leadership.

Signet of Puhl & Wagner, mosaic of Fritz Dernburg

In 1914, they merged with the stained glass company of Gottfried Heinersdorff, whose involvement in the Art Nouveau movement (especially the Deutsche Werkbund) promised to have a positive impact on the artistic quality of the company's production. But, due to unresolved differences between August Wagner and Gottfried Heinersdorff, these efforts of reforming the company's production artistically were short lived. During the Third Reich, the company was commissioned to decorate a number of buildings for the National socialists and was even able to survive the years after the Second World War. But, due to a diminished interest in glass mosaics and stained glass works, the company had to close its doors in 1969. (For further information check the comprehensive article at Wikipedia).

Tomb of Fritz Dernburg

Quite fortunately, some of the mosaics P&W executed in the late 19th and early 20th century survived the destruction of the war. One of them can be found at the cemetery Grunewald on Bornstedter Street 11/12, Berlin. It commemorates the death of Fritz Dernburg who died in infancy, in 1895. The large mosaic that even nowadays has lost nothing of its colourful vibrancy was designed by the artist Max Seliger (1865-1920), the brother of Fritz's mother, who designed a number of mosaics and murals throughout his career.

Mosaic, tomb of Fritz Dernberg

It depicts two women next to an altar which is inscribed with a quote from the Bible: "Love never ends" ("Die Liebe höret nimmer auf, Corinthians 13,8). One of the woman places a vase with red tulips on the altar, the other plucks the strings of a harp which a sad looking cherub clutches in his chubby fingers.

Detail of the mosaic, tomb of Fritz Dernberg

Detail of the mosaic, tomb of Fritz Dernberg

Detail of the mosaic, tomb of Fritz Dernberg

Detail of the mosaic, tomb of Fritz Dernberg

Both women, though dressed in stylised white robes, are more portraits than allegories, and contemporary sources identify them as Fritz's mother, Emma Dernburg, and her sister. The decorative flowers in the background, especially the lilies, are most probably influenced by William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement which was widely known in Germany at the time.

Detail of the mosaic, tomb of Fritz Dernberg

The second mural, nowadays on the facade of the building in Königsallee 15, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Berlin, shows a historical scene: a hunting party with Elector Joachim II and the hunting château of Grunewald in the background (inscribed "Aufbruch zur Jagd unter Kurfürst Joachim II vom Jagdschloss Grunewald").

Mosaic, Königsallee 15

The design was made by the artist Max Koch for the railroad bridge at Hohenzollerndamm in 1910 and executed by P&W in the same year.

Mosaic as it originally was at the Hohenzollern bridge

When the bridge was demolished in 1950, only one of the former two mosaics was rescued and re-done - with an alteration to the upper part of the image - on the aforementioned facade in 1963. The mosaic depicting the surrender of Teltow was lost. There is little known about the artist Max Koch, but his design shows some similarity to the works of Maximilian Liebenwein and other Art Nouveau illustrators that might have been of some influence.

Detail of the mosaic, Königsallee 15

Detail of the mosaic, Königsallee 15

Detail of the mosaic, Königsallee 15

As with the mosaic for Fritz Dernburg, Koch's hunting scene is a compelling work of art that profits widely from P&W's execution and the quality of their laying technique as well as their glass mosaic pieces.

Detail of the mosaic, Königsallee 15

Collector Cards: the saga of Gudrun and Ackermanns Schlüsselgarn

In Germany, collector cards were quite popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. Liebig, Stollwerck, Reemtsma and many other companies issued their goods together with collectible cards hoping to generate a collector's passion and thusly increase their sales.
Later on they even started to sell albums in order to help the enthusiastic collectors to store the precious cards for later pleasure. Although Liebig never attempted to issue cards of great artistic value, companies like Stollwerck actually strifed for a modern and qualitative art that represented their future oriented company policy. Same goes for the collector cards of "Ackermanns Schlüsselgarn", a company specialised on sewing cotton .

In the first decade of the 20th century they issued a series of cards telling the German saga of Gudrun, depicted in twelve Art-Nouveau-images by Fritz Schoen, a Berlin illustrater born in 1871.
Gudrun, a Middle High German epic, tells the tragic romance of Herwig, king of Seeland, and Gudrun, the daughter of Hettel and Hilde. Gudrun is carried off by Hartmuth, king of Normandy, and her kinsfolk are defeated in a great battle on the island of Wulpensand off the Dutch coast. Gudrun, now prisoner in the Norman castle, refuses to become the wife of her captor, and is condemned to do the most menial work of the household. Thirteen years later, Herwig and her brother Ortwin find her washing clothes by the sea; on the following day they attack and besiege the Norman castle with their army and, finally, Herwig marries Gudrun.

Karl Mühlmeister

Karl Mühlmeister was certainly one of the most productive and talented illustrators of children's literature in Germany in the early 20th century. There are designs and watercolours to fairy tales, sagas, and adventure stories such as The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper, or other children's literature like Johanna Spyri's Heidi.
About the artist himself is unfortunately very little known. He was born in Hamburg in 1876, lived and worked in Munich until around 1942 and was a member of the "Süddeutsche Illustratorenbund". Where he studied and who his teachers were, is as unknown as the date of his death. What remains is his work, and especially his watercolours are of an intriguing delicate beauty. I am rather convinced that there might have been an influence by the work of Willy Pogány (1882-1955) whose watercolours show a similar concept of landscape and understanding for colours.
Mühlmeister's luminously coloured landscapes conjure up the atmosphere of the whole picture, they are "Stimmungslandschaften" in which the protagonists act, the stories take place. Even though, the depicted persons are often rather small in contrast to their surroundings, they are not for accessory purpose only (as known from the landscape painting tradition) but are as important as the landscape itself: they form a unified whole that gives insight into the magical-fictive world of the illustrated story.

Fairy Tales: Mohr, Herbert and Lotte: Von Prinzessinnen und Königsöhnen. Leipzig: Feuer, ca. 1920.





Arabian Nights: Die schönsten Märchen aus 1001 Nacht. Stuttgart: Thienemann, ca. 1925.





The Leatherstocking Tales: Cooper, James Fenimore: Der Lederstrumpf. Reutlingen: Enßlin & Laiblin, ca. 1920.



Grimms' Fairy Tales: Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm: Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Reutlingen: Enßlin & Laiblin, 1927.

Book Art: designing end papers

At the turn of the 20th century artists tried to reform the making of books. Books shouldn't only be printed on good paper, with the right type and illustrations fitting to the text, but also with an according book cover and beautiful end papers. This over all development in the book arts is mostly attributed to the Art Nouveau, but, on closer look, interest in the book as a "Gesamtkunstwerk" started much earlier and is to be found for example in the editions de luxe that were published in the "epoch" of Historism.
True is, that the specific design of end papers increased during the Art Nouveau, but even then it was not a common feature. Through my researches on illustrated fairy tales and sagas, that are often categorized as children's literature (which is only half true), end papers were rarely designed at all. Nonetheless there are a few examples of not only decoratively patterned endpapers but such that are illustrated with motifs that fit to the contents of the book.
Intent and approach differ from end paper to end paper and range from a rather decorative, to motifs that create a certain atmosphere according to the text, or belong to the telling of the story.

In 1921, Maximilian Liebenwein designed the end paper for an edition of Gottfried Kellers Spiegel, das Kätzchen (Zürich / Leipzig / Wien: Amalthea, 1921), the story of a cat with a repeating pattern of cats moving over rose garlands. The topic of the book is thus mirrored and transformed into a decorative pattern.



The same can be said for Gertrud Caspari's fairy tale figurines (Mein Märchen-Bilderbuch von Gertrud Caspari. Leipzig: Alfred Hahn, [1921]): showing central standard characters of the fairy tales the book contains, such as the king and queen and the old witch.



On the contrary, Willy Planck (it's not completely sure, that he designed the end paper, sometimes different artists were commissioned to do this, especially when the end papers were needed for later editions) designed a dark wood:



The books title Ins Zauberland (Into Wonderland, Sttutgart: Loewe, 1913) alludes to the content of the book: fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, including Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and other fairy tales in which the forest - dark, mysterious, dangerous - plays a significant role. By picturing an equally dark, mysterious and dangerous wood, the end paper creates a certain atmosphere that introduces the reader to the fairy wood.
This can be compared to the end paper of Wilhelm Roegge, designed for a collection of German folk and hero tales (Deutsche Volks- und Heldensagen. Stuttgart: Levy & Müller, ca. 1910), such as Barbarossa and Roland. The end paper depicts a medieval landscape: mountains, castles, and a river zig-zagging through the country. Rhine-Romantic is activated here, putting the reader into the right mind for the saga-material.



Anne Anderson's end paper (Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten und andere Märchen von Brüder Grimm. Leipzig: A. Anton & Co., [1930].) takes the possibilities of the end paper even further: she shows a fairy tale scene, that - though it has nothing to do with the Grimm fairy tales, but illustrates the story of the magical horse from the Arabian Nights - indicates clearly that the book contains a collection of fairy tales.



Walter Crane's Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves from 1904 actually shows a scene from the fairy tale contained in the book: or two, to be more precise, the opening of the secret hide-out of the thieves and a long caravan transporting treasures through the desert.



Ruth and Martin Koser-Michaels end paper (Zwei Märchen der Brüder Grimm. Nürnberg: Seebaldus, 1948) do the same: the narrative of the illustrations is continued - or even commenced - in the end papers. Here, the boy from the The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was sets out for his search. To his left, there is the gallows where he stayed overnight, and at the end of the road, there is the haunted castle with the giant ghost with the white hair waiting and watching.

Considered the many possibilities the end papers presented the artists with, it is a shame, that end papers were (and still are) only rarely illustrated or specially designed.

Marie Hohneck, illustrator

Puss in Boots, 1905

At the turn of the 20th century, women illustrators, especially for children books, became more common. Be it Kate Greenaway, Rie Cramer, Anne Anderson, Marie Hohneck, Norbertine Breßlern-Roth, etc. more and more women found a job as illustrators.
The academic training still was problematic and not equal for female and male students, and in most cases illustrating alone couldn't provide the livelihood. But nonetheless there were woman artists that became as popular as their male colleagues. Marie Hohneck certainly was one of them. Today mostly forgotten, she trained under Wilhelm Claudius, lived in Dresden and worked between 1885 and 1915.
Her popularity is shown very clearly by a simple fact: the fairy tale picture books she illustrated by order of the Stuttgart publisher Weise in 1905 were published with the serial title: "Hohnecks Märchenbilderbuch". To include the artist's name in the title of the publication was a rare practice at the time. It meant, that the name of the artist was popular enough to promote the book and ensure its saleability.
Hohneck's fairy tale illustrations strike a balance between conventional and modern. The chosen scenes are for example very traditional, as is the way Hohneck orchestrates the different scenes. Whereas the influence of the "Jugendstil" is shown in the lineament of the drawings, or the costumes of the heroines.


Little Red Riding Hood, 1905


Sleeping Beauty, 1905


Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1905.


Cinderella, 1905

Illustrations from:
Goldenes Märchenbuch. Eine Sammlung der Beliebtesten Märchen mit 96 farbigen Illustrationen von Maria Hohneck. Stuttgart: Weise, [1905].
Collective edition of twelfve picture-books to single fairy tales.

Albin Egger-Lienz Ausstellung, Museum Leopold, Wien

Albin Egger-Lienz, Die Bergmäher (I. Fassung), 1907
Öl/Lw., 94,3 x 149,7 cm
Wien, Leopold Museum, Inv. Nr. 716

Im April zu Besuch in Wien, hatte ich die Möglichkeit die Sonderausstellung über AlbinEgger-Lienz (1868-1926) im Museum Leopold zu besuchen.

Diese Ausstellung war schon deshalb so spannend, weil sie, wie es im Pressetext lautet, ganz bewusst versucht, die "Einbindung des Werks von Albin Egger-Lienz in den internationalen Kontext, vor allem die Anknüpfungspunkte seines Oeuvres an die europäische Malerei und Plastik in einigen exemplarischen Beispielen" zu beleuchten.
Dies ist meisterhaft gelungen: schon allein wie der junge Künstler in seinem Frühwerk noch von seinem Lehrmeister an der Akademie, Franz von Defregger (1835-1921) beeinflusst war, wird in der Gegenüberstellung einzelner Arbeiten beider Künstler in der Gattung des Bauerngenres mehr als deutlich. Albin Egger-Lienzs Gemälde, Das Kreuz (1901/02), wäre ohne Defreggers Das letzte Aufgebot (1872) schlicht undenkbar. Dies wurde mir noch um ein weiteres Mal deutlich, als ich vor ein paar Tagen die Genremalerei-Ausstellung in der Neuen Pinakothek sah, in der auch einige Bilder von Defregger ausgestellt waren. Defregger hat mit seinem historischen Bauerngenre Albin Egger-Lienz mehr als nur den Weg bereitet.

Albin Egger-Lienz, Das Kreuz, 1901/02.
Öl/Lw., 143 x 171,5 cm.
Wien Museum, Inv.-Nr. 27.091.
(Leihgabe im Museum Schloss Bruck, Lienz, Inv.-Nr. AEL 23)


Franz von Defregger, Das letzte Aufgebot, 1872.
Öl/Lw., 53.4 x 70.2 cm
Neue Pinakothek, München, Inv.-Nr. 9030

Von mindestens genauso großem Einfluss waren später dann die realistischen Franzosen: im Besonderen Jean-François Millet (1814-11875) mit seinem Sämann (1850) und der Bildhauer Constantin Meunier (1831-1905) mit seinen Arbeiter-Plastiken, wie dem Dockarbeiter (s. Abb.). So zeichnen sich Egger-Lienzs spätere Genrebilder durch einen gleichfalls gesteigerten Realismus aus, gröberen Pinselduktus und einem Millet und Meunier vergleichbaren Menschenbild. Egger-Lienzs Bauern sind nun ähnlich kantig, muskulös, wie die der französischen Realisten (s. Abb. oben Die Bergmäher).

Die kunsthistorische Tradition der Totentänze mit Albin Egger-Lienzs faszinierend beklemmenden Totentanz-Bildern lasse ich jetzt mal weg. Das wäre ein eigener Post.
Spannend sind im Oeuvre des Künstlers aber noch die vielen Kriegsbilder, die in erschreckender Deutlichkeit die Greuel des Krieges zu Tage führen. Den Krieg zu bebildern, hat Egger-Lienz dabei mit vielen seiner zeitgenössischen Künstler gemeinsam. Seine "Leichenhaufen" und ausgezehrten Kriegsopfer sind dennoch ungewohnt kritisch und verstörend.