Wunderwald

          Not many people remembered him as a painter. In 1934, the Nazi party declared his art as “degenerate”. His paintings were removed from museums, galleries, and public places. He was forbidden to paint or create any form of art. He made a living hand-coloring advertising films for German film companies: Ufa and Mars Film, and looked after his wife, Amalie Minna Gerull who was a seamstress. They spent their life together since their marriage in 1908 until 1941, when Amalie died. By 1945, Wunderwald the painter was forgotten.

          But once, not too long ago, the art journals called him “the Berlin’s Utrillo” , he was the innovator with his “New Objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit) style of painting that left a mark not only to German and world art, but also on public life of pre-Nazi Germany, its architecture, music and film.

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          Berlin 1926. The city that is constantly innovating in art, is ready for the next innovation. The audience is getting tired of decades of the dominance of Expressionism, where the painters were expressing subjective view of the world.  The audience was looking for the opposite – to strip down the artistic expression to the bare minimal objective elements.

          Critics of expressionism came from many circles. From the left, a strong critique began with Dadaism. The Dada painters wanted to use their art as a form of moral and cultural protest often aimed to express political outrage and encourage political action. Conservative critics on the right gained force particularly in their critique of the style of expressionism. Throughout Europe a return to order in the arts resulted in neoclassical works by modernists such as Picasso and Stravinsky, and a turn away from abstraction by many artists, for example Matisse and Metzinger.

          Wunderwald painting style was essential in the new artistic movement called “New Objectivity”. Wunderwald was a stage designer for the theaters and operas in Charlottenburg, Stockholm Dusseldorf, Innsbruck, Freiburg, and Berlin. His style developed through the years working in theaters was structured and lean. In Berlin, he was painting bridges, factories, industrial districts, and working-class areas in bare minimalistic and rough manner. In 1926, his art gained the attention of the most influential art critics and galleries. The Berlin art gallery of Karl Nierendorf included 7 of his paintings on exhibition entitled Das Gesicht von Berlin (The Face of Berlin), while the leading art critics Paul Westheim wrote a lead article on Wunderwald in his own art journal Das Kunstblatt. His paintings were capturing the irreversible process of industrialization of Berlin, where people were minimized to single figures in the urban landscape. His glory continued to grow in the coming years. Wunderwald’s urban landscapes attracted attention in high places, for example Gustav Böß, then mayor of Berlin, and the screenwriter Hans Kyser, writer of the script for F. W. Murnau’s 1926 filmic adaptation of Faust.