Adolph Friedländer
Adolph Friedlander (* 17th April 1851 in Hamburg , † 7. July 1904 ibid) was one of the most famous German poster - lithographers of the late 19th century; the printing company he founded produced over 9,000 different posters between 1872 and 1935 advertising artists , magicians , circuses and variety shows .
Live and act
Adolph Friedländer was the third and last son of Raphael Israel Friedländer and his wife Betty, nee Wagner. The father had been a “trader” before he took up the guild-free profession of lithographer in Hamburg. He taught his son the first steps in the lithography trade in his small business. In the summer of 1865 Adolph Friedländer went to Berlin for further training and in 1868 went on a tour of the best German lithographic printing houses. In 1872 he returned to Hamburg and began working as a freelance printer. On April 1, 1875, he married Sarah Berling from Hamburg, who was the same age, according to the Jewish rite.
With an old lithography press inherited after the death of his father, Friedländer settled in Thalstrasse 22 in Hamburg-St. Pauli and began printing labels for colonial and delicatessen stores. Because of the immediate vicinity of his printing works, which included variety theaters, music halls and beer houses, but especially because of the exhibitions on Spielbudenplatz , he decided to give up label printing and switch to the elaborate four-color lithographed printing process that had been developed in France in the 1870s Specialize in posters. Friedländer's print shop experienced its breakthrough with a large order from Carl Hagenbeck in 1883 and 1884, with posters for his Sinhalese and Kalmyks caravan, an animal show, to advertise.
In 1884 Friedländer moved to a larger printing room at Thalstrasse 57 and acquired a first high-speed lithographic press with which he could print around 600 posters an hour. In the following years he expanded his machine park and incorporated a publishing house into his printing company, which in turn required new premises, which he found in 1887 at Thalstrasse 83 to 85, where he now worked as Adolph Friedländer Buchdruckerei und Lithogr. Kunstanstalt Hamburg operated. In 1890 the first issue of a journal founded by Friedländer appeared in his publishing house, Der Kurier. General gazette for the interests of all showmen and traders, circuses, variety and specialties theaters, as well as related professions . From 1891 the courier was published full-time by Adolf Fischl, from 1901 by Max Cohn; In 1901 the magazine ceased to appear, followed by Der Anker in 1902, which was published by Friedländer as an international specialist organ for showmen and artists; the anchor appeared until 1928.
Adolph Friedländer and later his sons did not design and lithograph themselves, but rather used excellent draftsmen, lithographers and printers who, with their great craftsmanship, guaranteed the high quality of the posters. The designers specialized in heads, bodies, dresses, landscapes, letters and ornaments. Christian Bettels, who had started as a lithographer at Friedländer around 1880, was the chief draftsman until 1928. He shaped the style and designed all animals himself, "which are so convincing because the animalistic has been taken away from them in favor of the numerical and they have melted into an anthropomorphic group dynamic". Henry Schulz is known as a draftsman of human figures, and portraits, especially for foreign clients, were mostly based on photographs. Occasionally, especially in the twenties, artists outside the Friedländer family were also active, such as Friedrich Ludwig Sonns, C. Wartusch or Heinrich Zille . Christian Bettels was replaced as chief draftsman by the animal painter Wilhelm Eigener . Not all posters were commissioned; in the courier numerous motifs were offered as stock items, from animal dressers to acrobats and magicians.
From the mid-1890s Friedländer also printed picture postcards , a new medium that was used in particular by circus people and artists. His main business remained the printing of posters. Since the beginning of the 1890s, around 100 different posters have been printed each year, and the frequency has doubled by the turn of the century. In 1904 one or two posters were produced and sent out every day. On July 7th, 1904, Adolph Friedländer died “after a long and severe suffering”, according to the obituary notice in the Hamburg Generalanzeiger No. 159 of July 9th, 1904.
The Friedländer printing company from 1904 to 1935
After Adolph Friedländer's death, his sons Ludwig and Max-Otto took over the company. During the First World War , the production of posters also came to a standstill when entertainment life largely ceased. The printing volume initially increased again in the 1920s, but as a result of the global economic crisis in 1928 it reached around 100 posters a year.
After running the Flora Theater , Max-Otto Friedländer (1880–1953) went to the Sarrasani circus in South America in 1934 . Since he found no possibility of existence there, he returned to Germany in 1935, where he was briefly interned in a concentration camp and then emigrated. Ludwig Friedländer (1877–1953) had switched production to modern offset printing and was able to continue the printing business with chief draftsman Wilhelm Eigener (1904–1982), particularly in the cover and animal illustration. After 1933, the printing company was tolerated by the National Socialist government for almost two years as a “foreign exchange broker”; the traditional Friedländer printer's signet , a heart-shaped leaf with a jagged edge, was now called the “Jewish cherry”. In 1935 the last Friedländer poster appeared with the number 9078; In 1938 the company was finally closed.
reception
Adolph Friedländer's posters can be found in antiquarian bookstores, in private collections and in museums, such as the Museum of Art and Industry Hamburg , whose director Justus Brinckmann Friedländer had given around 1,000 posters, the Munich City Museum and the Lübeck Theater Figure Museum . Since the late 1970s, the posters have attracted increasing attention in exhibitions and publications. In 1979 Ruth Malhotra published around 200 posters with a contemporary and art-historical appraisal of the individual copies and the printer. Following the directory created by the printing company, Stephan Oettermann and Jan J. Seffinga began collecting the posters in 2002 with detailed descriptions of the works and an extensive bibliography, which was revised for a fourth time in 2004.
The Dutch circus enthusiast Jaap Best (1912–2002) had compiled a collection of almost 3,500 Friedlander's posters, which were initially given to the Teylers Museum in Haarlem after his death and have been part of the special collections of the Universiteit van Amsterdam as a circus museum since 2016 - by its own account the largest circus collection in the world. Almost all posters in the collection have been digitized and can be accessed online in the Theatercollectie .
Posters from Adolph Friedländer's production are reprinted and offered in many places without their provenance being recognizable. Not all posters had the printer's signature and the note Lith Adolph Friedländer Hamburg , so that some products still have to be considered lost.
literature
- Ruth Malhotra: Clear the ring. Artist and circus posters by Adolph Friedländer . Dortmund 1979
- Stephan Oettermann , Jan. J. Seffinga: Adolph Friedländer Lithos . Gerolzhofen 2002
Web links
- Friedländer posters from the Jaap Best online collection
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stephan Oettermann, Jan. J. Seinga: Adolph Friedländer Lithos . Gerolzhofen 2002, page 9
- ↑ Ruth Malhotra: Clear the ring. Artist and circus posters by Adolph Friedländer . Dortmund 1979, page 7
- ^ Günter Metken , Kunstreiter und Salonlöwen , in: Die Zeit , January 27, 1978 online
- ↑ Malhotra, page 8 f.
- ↑ Malhotra, page 17 f.
- ↑ Oettermann / Seffinga (2002), page 15
- ↑ Oettermann / Seffinga (2002), pp. 29–34
- ↑ Malhotra, page 20 f.
- ^ The Friedländers - a treasure within the Circus collection
- ↑ See under web links
- ↑ See catalog . In: Oettermann / Seffinga (2002/2004)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Friedländer, Adolph |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German lithographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 17, 1851 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hamburg |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 7, 1904 |
| Place of death | Hamburg |