Jankel Adler

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Jankel Adler in the 1930s

Jankel Adler (born July 26, 1895 in Tuszyn , Russian Empire , † April 25, 1949 in Aldbourne , Wiltshire, England; actually Jankiel Adler) was a Polish painter and engraver of the Jewish faith. He was one of the artists ostracized and persecuted by National Socialism.

Life

Adler was born the seventh of ten children in Tuszyn (near Lodz) and grew up in the world of Hasidic Judaism. In 1912 he began an apprenticeship as an engraver with his uncle in Belgrade . After traveling through the Balkans, he moved to Germany in 1914 and initially lived with his sister in Barmen . There he studied at the arts and crafts school in the painting class with Gustav Wiethüchter . From 1918 to 1919 he went back to Łódź . There he was co-founder of the avant-garde artist group Jung Jiddisch and exhibited at the Stowarzyszenie Artystów i Zwolenników Sztuk Pięknych . In 1920 he stayed in Berlin for a short time. In 1921 he returned to Barmen and was a member of the artist group Die Wupper .

In 1922 he moved to Düsseldorf for several years , where he taught at the art academy together with Paul Klee . As early as the early 1920s he took part in the activities of the Düsseldorf, Cologne and, for a time, Berlin avant-garde groups such as the Novembergruppe , Das Junge Rheinland or Union of progressive international artists . He was a co-founder of the group of progressive artists in Cologne. In 1928 he received the gold medal at the exhibition German Art Düsseldorf for his picture cats . In 1929 and 1930 he was on study trips to Mallorca and mainland Spain.

In 1931 Jankel Adler moved into a studio at the Düsseldorf Academy , which he gave up in 1933 and left Germany on the advice of friends. Together with artists and intellectuals on the left, Adler had previously published an “urgent appeal” against the policies of the National Socialists and for communism in Düsseldorf during the election campaign for the Reichstag election in March 1933 . Adler's political stance could rather be described as a kind of anarchist communism , from which nothing was further than submission to a Leninist party discipline that was already dominating the KPD .

Adler initially fled to Paris and saw his exile as a conscious fight against the fascist regime in Germany. Numerous trips took him over the next few years to Poland , Italy , Yugoslavia , Czechoslovakia , Romania and the Soviet Union .

In 1939, with the outbreak of World War II , he volunteered for the Polish armed forces that were set up in France, and came with them on the retreat to Scotland . In 1941 he had to be released for health reasons. He then lived in Kirkcudbright in Scotland. In 1943 he moved to London .

After the war, he learned that none of his nine siblings had survived the Holocaust . He died on April 25, 1949 at the age of 53.

Ostracism and confiscation

As early as 1933, two of Adler's pictures were shown as "degenerate" in the first feminine exhibition of the National Socialists' cultural Bolshevik pictures in the Mannheim Kunsthalle . In the “ Degenerate Art ” campaign in 1937, 25 of his works from public collections, including those in the National Gallery in Berlin and the Museum Folkwang Essen, were confiscated and four of them were shown in the exhibition of the same name in Munich. In the same year, two of his pictures were also used in the exhibition The Eternal Jew in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Fourteen of these confiscated works are listed in the database of the confiscated inventory “Degenerate Art” of the Free University of Berlin .

plant

Jankel Adler was strongly influenced by Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger . His image structure is usually strict. He was keen to experiment with colors and materials; he used, for example, admixtures of sand. The paint application was often pasty, the picture surfaces got something like sgraffito . The subjects of his pictures are often of Jewish origin. He also painted a few abstract compositions.

Venus of Kirkcudbright (1943)
  • Two girls / mother and daughter , 1927, oil on canvas, 150 × 100 cm; Bought in 1929 for the Kunsthalle Mannheim , confiscated there as “degenerate” in 1937, later sold, today private property.
  • Mandolin player , 1929, oil on canvas, 166 × 121 cm, was purchased by the Düsseldorf City Art Collection in 1931 under the title Musikanten and sent to Munich in 1937 as “degenerate”, location unknown today.
  • Sabbath , 1927–1928, oil and sand on canvas, 120 × 110 cm, Jewish Museum Berlin .
  • No Man's Land , 1943, oil on canvas, 86 × 111 cm, Tate Collection London, illustration
  • Venus of Kirkcudbright, 1943, oil on canvas 110 × 85 cm, Starak Family Foundation, Bobrowiecka Warszawa, Poland.

reception

  • In 1955, works by Jankel Adler were exhibited in the Von-der-Heydt Museum in Wuppertal for the first time in Germany .
  • In 1985 there was an eagle exhibition in the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf .
  • In 2018 the exhibition “Jankel Adler and the Avantgarde. Chagall / Dix / Klee / Picasso «in the Von-der-Heydt-Museum.

literature

  • Ulrich Krempel : Jankel Adler 1895–1949 . Catalog on the occasion of the traveling exhibition 1985: Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, The Tel Aviv Museum, Muzeum Sztuki w Lodzi. DuMont Verlag, Cologne 1985, ISBN 3-77011771-9
  • Claus Stephani : The image of the Jew in modern painting. An introduction. / Imaginea evreului în pictura modernă. Introductiv study. Bilingual edition (Romanian / German). Editura Hasefer: Bucharest, 2005. ISBN 973-630-091-9
  • Annemarie Heibel: Jankel Adler (1895-1949) . Volume I: Monograph, Volume II: catalog raisonné of paintings (=  Scientific writings of the University of Muenster, X series . Band 23 ). Publishing house Monsenstein and Vannerdat OHG, Münster 2016, ISBN 978-3-8405-0128-9 , urn : nbn: de: hbz: 6-88239662183 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kristina Hoge: Self-portraits in the face of the threat posed by National Socialism, reactions of defamed artists to National Socialist cultural policy. Dissertation. Heidelberg 2005, p. 154; also as a PDF file , accessed on July 26, 2010
  2. ^ Confiscation inventory “Degenerate Art” from the Free University of Berlin , accessed on August 8, 2011
  3. ↑ The City Art Collection of Düsseldorf bought the portrait of the cat breeder in 1926 for 800.00 marks.
  4. ↑ Figure Mr. Cleron, the cat breeder
  5. ↑ The Hebrew Rembrandt in: Der Weg, 31/1992, p. 11
  6. ↑ starakfoundation.org/en/kolekcja/f/57/204
  7. ↑ The artist Jankel Adler with a retrospective in the Von-der-Heydt-Museum Wuppertal
personal data
SURNAME Adler, Jankel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Adler, Jankiel (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish painter
DATE OF BIRTH July 26, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Tuszyn
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 1949
Place of death Aldbourne