MH Maxy

From left: Tristan Tzara with MH Maxy , Ion Vinea & Jacques G. Costin

MH Maxy (actually Max Herman ; born October 26, 1895 in Brăila / Romania , † July 19, 1971 in Bucharest ) was a Romanian painter and university professor of German-Jewish descent. He is considered one of the leading representatives of avant-garde art from Romania in the first half of the 20th century.

Life

Maxy studied from 1913 to 1916 in Bucharest with Camil Ressu , Iosif Iser and Frederic Storck . He took part in the First World War and in the following years initially devoted himself to the subject of war in his works . Between 1922 and 1923 he studied with Arthur Segal in Berlin and became a member of the November Group, exhibiting together with Paul Klee and Louis Marcoussis , among others . At that time, his works were considered late cubist with flowing transitions to abstract art.

After his return to Romania he became one of the leading exponents of avant-garde art. He worked on the leading Romanian avant-garde magazines Contimporanul , Punct , 75 HP and Unu . The magazine Integral was founded by him in 1925, illustrated and co-edited until 1928. Here published, among other ilarie voronca , Benjamin Fondane , Filip Brunea-Fox , Stephan Roll , Ion Călugăru , Tristan Tzara and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti . In particular in connection with the artist group Contimporanul , he had exhibitions with Marcel Janco , Victor Brauner and Corneliu Michailescu in the 1920s and 1930s . He also illustrates books, for example by Sașa Pană and Ilarie Voronca .

In 1939 he began working as a set designer at the Baraşeum Jewish Theater in Bucharest. In 1941 he becomes its co-director. During the time of the persecution of the Jews in Romania, he worked as a lecturer at the Jewish art school. After the war he organized the exhibition Work and Art . In 1949 he became director of the Romanian Art Museum and professor of the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts , where he taught until 1951.

While Maxy's early work was still shaped by the current of constructivism , later influences of a moderate modern age increasingly became visible. In his late work he made thematic and stylistic concessions to socialist realism , the art concept of the communist regime in Romania.

Web links

• Măriuca Stanciu: Maxy, Max Hermann , at Yivo
• Biography

literature

• Michael Ilk (ed.): MH Maxy (1895-1975): The integral artist / artist integralist. Lincke: Berlin, 2003. (Exhibition catalog for an exhibition in Berlin 2003; texts in German and Romanian).
• Claus Stephani : The image of the Jew in modern painting . An introduction. / Imaginea evreului în pictura modernă. Introductiv study. Traducere in limba română de Ion Peleanu. (Bilingual edition, German-Romanian. Ediţie bilingvă, româno-germană.) Editura Hasefer: Bucureşti, 2005. ISBN 973-630-091-9
• Roland Prügel: Under the Sign of the City - Avant-garde in Romania 1920–1938 , Böhlau Verlag Cologne, 2008