DHe looks at a woman in a black skirt. She lies on her back, her head tilted back, her bent legs spread, a blood stain shining on her white blouse. Standing in front of her from behind – still half tilted over her, but already turning to the side to escape – is a man wearing black trousers and a blue jacket, his head pulled low on his shoulders in a red hat. In his 1930 painting “Murder,” Werner Scholz uses this scene to fill the square image format to the edges, creating a nightmarish close-up view of the victim and perpetrator, both of whom remain faceless.
The brutality of crime appears in this artist's visual world as just one, albeit extreme, form of expression of the power and violence relationships that shape the society of the Weimar Republic. This world of images, which is primarily populated by the needy, orphans and the disabled, but also by rough proletarians and demimondes, can now be viewed in an exhibition at the Ernst Barlach House in Hamburg that is well worth seeing.
Thematically and stylistically, Berlin-born Werner Scholz (1898–1982) has a lot in common with his contemporaries Otto Dix and George Grosz, who were several years older. But while they have inscribed themselves in the memory of posterity as portraitists of the Weimar Republic, Werner Scholz has so far been denied this public reputation. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he was one of the rising stars in the artistic sky of the Weimar Republic with many successful exhibitions.
He saw the misery of National Socialism looming early on
But with the rise to power of the National Socialists, who had early on targeted him as an avowed leftist, his artistic existence became increasingly endangered. When the brown rulers vilified his pictures as “degenerate” in 1937, Scholz retreated to Alpach in the Austrian Tyrol – an area he had visited regularly since his childhood. A bomb destroyed his Berlin studio in 1944 and destroyed the pictures hidden there.
The Hamburg exhibition focuses on the production of the decade from 1927 to 1937. With good reason: these are the artistically outstanding years of Scholz's long creative period, which extended into the last years of his life. In contrast to his Federal Republic oeuvre, this early work has so far only been documented in fragments and has little presence in the consciousness of the art-interested public.
With around forty paintings and pastels, the show in the Barlach House now demonstrates why the art critic Kurt Kusenberg judged in 1932 that Scholz was “essential because he presents the content of our time that concerns us all, and because he really risks something formally.” The curator Karsten Müller has commendably filled many gaps in the tradition of the work through historical work and exhibition photographs from the artist's estate, at least in a documentary manner. Contemporary newspaper reports also give an impression of the response that his work triggered.
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