Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) was the title of an art exhibition that was organized in 1913 by Herwarth Walden in Berlin.
Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) was the title of an art exhibition that was organized in 1913 by Herwarth Walden in Berlin.
The exhibition opened on 20 September 1913 in rented rooms ("Lepke-Räume") in the Potsdamer Straße 75, on the corner of the Pallasstraße on the third floor, on 1200 square metres, [1] not far from Walden's gallery Der Sturm on der Potsdamer Straße 134a, and closed on 1 December 1913. The title of the exhibition refers to the Salon d'Automne held in Paris since 1903. The exhibition formed a contrast to the Sonderbundausstellung that had taken place in 1912 in Cologne and was dedicated to Impressionism, the more established modernism. There were artists in the autumn salon that had also exhibited there, but not come to the fore, like the painters of Der Blaue Reiter, as well as Carlo Mense and Alexander Archipenko. The latter had already exhibited in the salon in Paris. The (unnamed) sponsor Bernhard Koehler provided financial backing with 4000 marks, without which the exhibition would not have come about. August Macke and Franz Marc curated the exhibition. The painters of Der Blaue Reiter formed the main part of the exhibition. Marc himself exhibited his programmatic painting The Tower of Blue Horses .
In Germany, there were precursors in exhibitions of Die Brücke beginning in 1906 in Dresden and in the two exhibitions of Der Blaue Reiter in 1911 and 1912 in Munich, which were subsequently shown in various German cities. Walden took over the artists from the Futurism exhibition he had opened in his gallery, Der Sturm on April 12, 1912. In the aftermath of the Futurist exhibition and in the run-up to the autumn salon, the Prussian House of Representatives had debated art on April 12, 1913. One representative declared: "because, gentlemen, we are dealing here with a direction that means a degeneration, [2] symptom of a sick time (lively cheers)." To be sure, the New York Times had also raised "suspicions of pathology" for the Armory Show, which brought modern painting to New York in the spring of 1913, at which Alfred Stieglitz had purchased Kandinsky's Improvisation No. 27 Improvisation 27 for $500. [3] [4]
Due to the outbreak of the First World War, the fall salon could not be continued in Berlin, so that no exhibition tradition was established under this name.
The exhibition catalogue had a preface by the gallerist Herwarth Walden and a foreword by the exhibitors, penned by Franz Marc.
Today, we do not live in a time when art is the helper of life. What real art is created today seems rather to be the precipitation of all the forces that life is not able to consume, to absorb; it is the equation that abstract-minded spirits draw from life, desireless, purposeless and without strife.
In other times, art is the yeast that leavened the dough of the world; such times are far away today. Until they are fulfilled, the artist must keep himself at an equal distance from official life.
This is the reason for our self-imposed seclusion from the proposals that the world makes to us; we do not want to mix with it. Among this "world" we also include the artists who are foreign to us, with whom it seems impossible for us to work together, not for 'art-political' reasons, of which there is so much talk today, but for purely artistic reasons.
Hans Richter was present at the opening: "That was it! The Fauves! Picasso, Braque, the Futurists. Marinetti read from the Futurist Manifesto" This is how Richter thinks he remembers it, only: Picasso and Braques were, probably because of a their business relation to Paul Cassirer, not represented by Walden. Because of their connection to Cassirer or Flechtheim or the Sonderbund, Macke, Marc und Walden, who corresponded intensively about this, could not get the Brücke painters, nor Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, André Derain, Max Liebermann, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Waldemar Rösler und Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who they had been considering.
The First German Autumn Salon brought together exhibits of an international avant-garde, artists from America, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, France, Italy, Russia and Switzerland. Walden wanted to provide an overview of the arts around the world. Among them, the Italian Futurists made a concentrated appearance with a total of fourteen works by Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini and Ardengo Soffici. Fernand Léger had fifteen works. Of the artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter, Paul Klee was represented with 22 watercolors and drawings, Wassily Kandinsky with seven paintings, Marianne von Werefkin with three, Alexej von Jawlensky with four, Alfred Kubin with 19, Gabriele Münter with six works. Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia Delaunay-Terk had painted a series of oil paintings of sunlight and moonlight in the summer of 1913 in Louveciennes, which made up a large part of his 21 works here, with which Orphism also influenced Macke and Marc, while Sonja also had book covers, lamps and textiles among her 26 objects, in addition to these paintings. Marc was able to lure Lyonel Feininger out of his self-imposed "obscurity"; Kubin had arranged the contact.
Adolf Behne made the first guided exhibition tour for the visitors.
A special attraction of the exhibition was the memorial exhibition for Henri Rousseau, with 21 works and a pen and ink drawing–only the drawing was for sale–in memory of the painter who died in 1910. These paintings came mainly from Wilhelm Uhde and from the collection of Robert Delaunay, who was something like the executor of Rousseau's estate. From Delaunay came twelve works, including the two portraits. For Paul Westheim in the Frankfurter Zeitung, this was the part of the exhibition "that could be enjoyed without footnotes.". [5]
When the First German Autumn Salon opened its doors in September 1913, it was met with a hail of vicious criticism. There was talk in the press that "the talentless were lined up here". Robert Breuer, in Vorwärts described the artists as "Hottentots in dress shirts, a horde of color-spraying howler monkeys. Herwarth Walden had to put up with being called an "incompetent academic, pretentious theoretician, colorful-skinned dolt and bastard talent." "In the new futurist-cubist-psychopathic-neopathological Berlin Autumn Salon", for the critic Emanuel of Simplicissimus there was not just "a Futurist portrait, whose main attraction was a glued-on mustache made from real hair", "made of futurist brushes", (this was the portrait of Gino Severini by Marinettti), [6] but also the "Excrement of a mad cow" by Signor l'Asino, [7] that was to be approached with the means of the excremental psychology. Karl Scheffler, apostrophized by Ludwig Justi as the "Pope of Art", also opposed Severini's hair collages. Walden countered with pointed remarks in his foreword for the catalogue with an Encyclopedia of German Art Criticism. Compiled from newspaper reports on the Autumn Salon, that he distributed as a pamphlet: He quoted from "boring the audience" through "negroes in tails" and "Malbotokuden" up to "art gallery of a madhouse", and ended with "and so on".
The catalogue listed altogether 90 artists, painters, sculptors and architects with 366 images, designs and sculptures. The catalogue contained only 50 reproductions of exhibited works, however.
[the catalog] gives no impression at all and is weak in many respects; a number of pictures that were reproduced in it were not hung by us at all. Walden compiled it in advance according to the photographs sent in; the exhibition itself was basically something completely different. In any case, these boring photographs!
— Franz Marc to Alfred Kubin, 27 September 1913, [8]
Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory, published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of German Expressionism. He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter, a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.
Robert Delaunay was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract. His key influence related to bold use of colour and a clear love of experimentation with both depth and tone.
Der Blaue Reiter is a designation by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc for their exhibition and publication activities, in which both artists acted as sole editors in the almanac of the same name, first published in mid-May 1912. The editorial team organized two exhibitions in Munich in 1911 and 1912 to demonstrate their art-theoretical ideas based on the works of art exhibited. Traveling exhibitions in German and other European cities followed. The Blue Rider disbanded at the start of World War I in 1914.
August Robert Ludwig Macke was a German Expressionist painter. He was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter. He lived during a particularly active time for German art: he saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde movements which were forming in the rest of Europe. As an artist of his time, Macke knew how to integrate into his painting the elements of the avant-garde which most interested him. Like his friend Franz Marc and Otto Soltau, he was one of the young German artists who died in the First World War.
Orphism or Orphic Cubism, a term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912, was an offshoot of Cubism that focused on pure abstraction and bright colors, influenced by Fauvism, the theoretical writings of Paul Signac, Charles Henry and the dye chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. This movement, perceived as key in the transition from Cubism to Abstract art, was pioneered by František Kupka, Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, who relaunched the use of color during the monochromatic phase of Cubism. The meaning of the term Orphism was elusive when it first appeared and remains to some extent vague.
The Lenbachhaus is a building housing an art museum in Munich's Kunstareal.
Der Sturm was a German avant-garde art and literary magazine founded by Herwarth Walden, covering Expressionism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, among other artistic movements. It was published between 1910 and 1932.
Herwarth Walden was a German expressionist artist and art expert in many disciplines. He is broadly acknowledged as one of the most important discoverers and promoters of German avant-garde art in the early twentieth century. He was best known as the founder of the Expressionist magazine Der Sturm and its offshoots.
The Neue Künstlervereinigung München (N.K.V.M.), was an Expressionism art group based in Munich. The registered association was formed in 1909 and prefigured Der Blaue Reiter, the first modernist secession which is regarded as a forerunner and pathfinder for Modern art in 20th-century Germany.
Béla Kádár (1877–1956) was a Hungarian painter influenced by Der Blaue Reiter, Cubism, Futurism, Neo-Primitivism, Constructivism, and Metaphysical painting.
The Street Enters the House is an oil on canvas painting by Italian artist Umberto Boccioni. Painted in the Futurist style, the work centres on a woman on a balcony in front of a busy street, with the sounds of the activity below portrayed as a riot of shapes and colours.
Georg Muche was a German painter, printmaker, architect, author, and teacher.
En Canot is a Cubist oil painting created by Jean Metzinger in 1913. The work is referred to in various publications as Femme à l'ombrelle, Im Boot, Le Canot, En Bâteau, In the Canoe, The Boat, On the Beach, Am Strand, Im Schiff, V Člunu and Im Kanu. The painting was exhibited in Paris at the 1913 Salon d'Automne. The following year it was shown at Moderní umění, 45th Exhibition of SVU Mánes in Prague, February–March 1914. This "Survey of Modern Art" was one of the last prewar exhibitions in Prague. En Canot was exhibited again, in July of the same year, at the Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin. The painting was acquired from Herwarth Walden in 1916 by Georg Muche at Galerie Der Sturm.
Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke was a German writer who focused on memoirs of her time as the wife of the expressionist painter August Macke, who had portrayed her more than 200 times. He died in World War I. Later, she lived in Berlin with her second husband, Lothar Erdmann, who died in a concentration camp during World War II. She saved Macke's paintings and copies of his letters by moving them from her house in Berlin before it was bombed in 1943.
Composition VI is a 1913 oil painting on canvas by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, now in the Hermitage Museum.
Bernhard Koehler was a German industrialist and art collector.
Nelly Anna Charlotta Walden was a Swedish painter, art collector, and writer. A key figure in the activities of Berlin-based avant-garde magazine Der Sturm, Walden was a pioneer of abstract art and was married to German writer Herwarth Walden.
Girls in Green, also known as Girls under Trees, is an oil on canvas painting by the German painter August Macke, executed in 1914. It depicts a number of girls among the trees on the edge of a lake, where the color areas of the figures and the environment seem to merge. The painting is in the collection of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.
Large Bright Showcase is an oil on canvas painting by the German artist August Macke, executed in 1912. It is held at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover.
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