Doris Kahane

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Doris Kahane (born on October 24, 1920 in Berlin as Doris Machol ; died on October 7, 1976 there ) was a German visual artist . She survived National Socialism in exile in France and was a member of the Resistance from 1940 . After the liberation she returned to East Berlin and worked as an artist in the GDR . In addition to graphics and illustrations, she created portraits of contemporaries . Her teacher at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee, Arno Mohr, was influential in her style .

Life

Doris Kahane was born as Doris Machol in a Jewish family in Berlin-Pankow . Her grandfather, Hermann Machol, was a school doctor from Pankow-Schönhausen. She is the great niece of Victor Klemperer , granddaughter of his sister Hedwig Machol, who died early.

She began her artistic training at the prestigious private school in Reimann . Her mother emigrated with her in 1933 (or 1936) from National Socialist Germany . They lived in Mallorca and Barcelona , where Doris Machol went to school before moving to Paris. In 1938 she began studying art at the Académie Julian , which was closed in 1939. At the beginning of the Second World War, she was considered to be “étranger indésirable” (undesirable foreigners) in France because she was German and was taken to an internment camp in southern France in 1940 , from where she managed to escape. From then on she lived illegally and was able to get by with small commissioned works for drawings and paintings. In Cassis and Marseille she found contact with a milieu of other visual artists through whom she came into contact with the Resistance . She joined the communist Travail allemand , whose successor organization from 1943 was the Comité "Allemagne libre" pour l'Ouest , and took part in anti-fascist propaganda against the German occupation army. She was one of the few German-speaking underground artists who went into the Resistance and, among other tasks, illustrated leaflets and contributed to the forging of documents. In 1944 she was arrested by the Nazi security police in Marseille and interned in the Drancy assembly camp until it was liberated on August 18, 1944.

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She returned to East Berlin in October 1945 as a staunch communist . In the GDR she was classified as “politically and racially” persecuted by the Nazi regime (VdN). She married the journalist Max Kahane . They had three children together: a son born in 1948, Peter Kahane and Anetta Kahane . In the first few years, they took care of the household and raising children. From 1951 to 1955 she studied at the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art . She worked as a freelance artist and had her own studio on Karl-Marx-Allee .

In 1957 the family moved to New Delhi for three years , where Max Kahane worked as a foreign correspondent for newspapers in the GDR. She traveled to Vietnam twice as an interpreter. In 1962/1963 she spent nine months with her husband and daughter in Brazil. As a representative of the “ cultural workers ” of the GDR, she stayed several times in other Latin American countries in the 1960s and 70s . She lived with her family in Berlin-Pankow until her death at the age of 55. She is buried in the cemetery of the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder communities in Berlin-Mitte.

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Doris Kahane painted, worked as a graphic artist and ceramist, illustrated books with woodcuts and designed posters

She recorded her impressions of all stages of emigrant life and in the Drancy camp in sketches that she later worked out. A series of drawings entitled People in the Camp and studies of children who were separated from their parents as soon as they arrived at the camp, such as the drawing Transporting Jewish Children to Auschwitz, Drancy 1944, were created . According to Rita Thalmann , her pictures related to this time testified to her intense suffering, which may have contributed to her early death.

Between 1960 and 1970 the GDR leadership promoted the exchange between artists and intellectuals of the GDR and those of Latin America, which in addition to cultural and cultural-political interests primarily served ideological objectives. Doris Kahane was one of those artists who were allowed to travel abroad and were given the opportunity to continue their education over a longer period in a Latin American country. Reports of these trips had to be submitted to the Ministry of Culture . She went on extensive study trips to Chile, Ecuador, Cuba and Argentina. During her 1966 trip to Cuba, she created the oil painting Cuban Student (Nancy) , a portrait of the Cuban artist Nancy Torres. The landscape of Cuba inspired East German artists such as Doris Kahane, Lea Grundig and Gerhard Kettner to create “sensual compositions”. Two years before her death, Kahane was painting the pastel Red Lake (Moa Moa) . In cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR , the Universidad de Chile organized a “representative graphic exhibition of the GDR” in its large exhibition hall in 1967 with a hundred sheets, which consisted mainly of works by Kahane. The exhibition was shown in Montevideo ( Uruguay ) and Rio de Janeiro ( Brazil ) until the end of the same year and was accompanied by lectures by Doris Kahane. Your task was to develop and consolidate relationships with the Latin American associations. Together with Wolfgang Frankenstein, she was one of the few artists who visited Chile on a cultural and political trip in 1971 under the presidency of Salvador Allende .

The contemporaries and companions she portrayed include a. Viktor Klemperer and his wife Eva , Anna Seghers , Ludwig Renn , Greta Kuckhoff , Wilhelmine Schirmer-Pröscher . Her portrait of Hermann Kant was praised in a publication by the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR in 1969 as a “successful mixture of representation and intimacy”.

Doris Kahane remained a GDR artist. A year after her death, a memorial exhibition was held in Berlin (GDR). It was also the last exhibition in which works by her were shown. Five of her pictures are in the Beeskow Art Archive, which is housed in Beeskow Castle, further works are in the archive of the Academy of Arts and in the private collection of her family.

Book illustrations (selection)

  • Satyanarayan Sinha: Munna and Munni. Alfred Holz Verlag, Berlin, 1966

Exhibitions

Holdings

  • 1964: Our contemporaries . Old National Gallery , Berlin
  • 1966: German Art 19./20. Century , Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Solo exhibitions

  • 1973: Doris Kahane: painting and graphics . Galerie Zentralbuchhandlung, Vienna
  • 1977: Doris Kahane. Watercolors - drawings - graphics . Small gallery Pankow
  • 1977: Doris Kahane. Painting, graphics . Memorial exhibition. Gallery in the tower in Frankfurter Tor , East Berlin

literature

  • Helmut Diehl: The painter Doris Kahane (with illustrations of the works Buffalo, Young Girl, Annettchen dreams (colored), From I to We, Vietnamese mother, Indian farmer ), in: Das Magazin , issue 07/1961 , pp. 54–56
  • Doris Kahane - an artist in the Drancy camp . Written down by her husband Max Kahane, 1993, in: Inge Lammel (Hrsg.): Jüdische Lebenswege. A cultural-historical foray through Pankow and Niederschönhausen , revised and expanded new edition, Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-938485-53-8 , pp. 48/49

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information. In: Art in the GDR. Center for Contemporary History Potsdam , accessed on October 31, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Max Kahane in: Birgit Lammel ibid. P. 48 (see literature)
  3. ↑ Peter Jacobs: Victor Klemperer. At its core a German plant. Eine Biographie , 3rd edition, Aufbau Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-7466-1655-1 , p. 343
  4. ↑ Doris Kahane: Portrait of Victor Klemperer . German photo library
  5. ↑ Helmut Diehl: The painter Doris Kahane , s. Literature, ibid. P. 54. Likewise Max Kahane, p. 40. According to another source, she emigrated in 1936: Painting in the GDR, 1945-1970 , ed. Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg , Halle 1987, ISBN 3-86105-016-1
  6. ↑ Helmut Diehl
  7. ^ A b Rita Thalmann: Jewish Women exiled in France After 1933 . In: Sibylle Quack (Ed.): Between Sorrow and Strength. Women Refugees of the Nazi Period , Cambridge University Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-521-52285-4 , pp. 55-56
  8. ↑ a b c Doris Kahane . Joint project Bildatlas Art in the GDR , accessed on July 23, 2016.
  9. ↑ Ulla Plener (ed.): Women from Germany in the French Resistance. A documentation . Edition Bodoni, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-929390-90-6 , p. 284
  10. ↑ Gottfried Hamacher : Against Hitler. Germans in the Resistance, in the armed forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and the "Free Germany" movement, short biographies. Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-320-02941-X , p. 92
  11. ^ Hélène Roussel: German-speaking Artists in Parisian Exile , in: Ines Rotermund-Reynard (Ed.): Echoes of Exile. Moscow Archives and the Arts in Paris 1933-1945 , de Gruyter, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-029058-5 , p. 25
  12. ^ Rita Thalmann: Jewish Women exiled in France After 1933 . In: Sibylle Quack (Ed.): Between Sorrow and Strength. Women Refugees of the Nazi Period , Cambridge University Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-521-52285-4 , p. 56
  13. ^ Jews in Berlin , Volume 2, p. 143 [1]
  14. ↑ Anetta Kahane: I see what you don't see , Berlin 2004, p. 36.
    Kahane, Doris geb. Machol. In: VdN supply list, Findbuch des Landesarchiv Berlin, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-0-19-927626-4 , p. 136
  15. ↑ Publications of the Historical Commission in Berlin, Volume 69, Historical Commission Berlin, West, Walter de Gruyter, 1987, p. 76 [2]
  16. ↑ Theresa Pfeifer: Happy rescue from the trash can . Mitteldeutsche Zeitung , May 31, 2006, accessed on August 13, 2016 (exhibition in the House of History in Wittenberg ).
  17. ↑ Alex Rühle: Abused Modernism, Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 18, 2019
  18. ↑ Kenzler ibid., P. 252
  19. ↑ in the private possession of Max Kahane, in: Kenzler ibid. P. 231
  20. ^ In the possession of Max Kahane, in: Kenzler, ibid., P. 226
  21. ↑ Marcus Kenzler: The view into the other world. Influences of Latin America on the fine arts of the GDR , Part 1, Lit Verlag, Berlin / Münster 2012, ISBN 978-3-643-11025-1 , pp. 140, 254
  22. ↑ Christian Borchert u. a. (Ed.): Victor Klemperer. A life in pictures , Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 978-3-351-02399-7 , pp. 173, 196
  23. ↑ Our art in the mirror of criticism , ed. from the Association of German Visual Artists, Henschel Verlag, Berlin 1969, p. 98
  24. ↑ Art facts
personal data
SURNAME Kahane, Doris
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Machol, Doris (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH October 24, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Pankow
DATE OF DEATH October 7, 1976
Place of death Berlin-Pankow