Golden cloud

The Golden Cloud was an artists' association in Bremen that existed from 1903 to 1914.

On the initiative of Gustav Pauli , his wife Magdalene Pauli , Rudolf Alexander Schröder and Alfred Walter Heymel , a group of merchants, lawyers, artists and their wives was founded in order to “raise the intellectual level of society”.

At the suggestion of Rudolf Alexander Schröder, the group named itself "The Golden Cloud" after Goethe's Tasso .

The "Golden Cloud" organized reading evenings, in which the main focus was on the subsequent discussion and the value of reading. Foreign guests such as the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal , the philosophers Graf Keyserling and Rudolf Borchardt , the historian Erich Marcks and the director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle Alfred Lichtwark enriched the discussions.

The members put the merchants' “ venture and win ” into promoting the arts. They supported the acquisition of pictures such as van Gogh's poppy field and monuments such as Tuaillon's Rosslenker or Hildebrandt's Bismarck monument . Thus the group worked against the prevailing historicism and against the Wilhelmine style on the forms of conviviality, living style, furniture and clothing.

literature

• Marga Berck : The golden cloud - a faded Bremen melody . Carl Schünemann Verlag , Bremen 1954, ISBN 3-7961-1690-6 .

French translation: Le Nuage d'or - Autour d'un cercle littéraire et artistique de l'Allemagne à la Belle Epoque (1903-1913) , traduction et édition critique par Anne Struve-Debeaux, éditions Classiques Garnier, Paris, 2017 (French Translation and critical edition by Anne Struve-Debeaux, Classiques Garnier Verlag, Paris, 2017).