Max Gebhard (graphic designer)

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Max Gebhard (born April 12, 1906 in Triberg ; † April 23, 1990 in Berlin ) was a German graphic artist.

Max Gebhard / Max Keilson : Come to us. Antifascist action , poster cutout (1932)

Life

After attending elementary school in Hagen , Max Gebhard initially did an apprenticeship as a window dresser and then attended the painting school. From 1926 to 1928 he was a student at the Bauhaus Dessau with a focus on typography and poster design. Erna Mayweg , August Agatz , Albert Buske , Heinrich Brocksieper and Reinhard Hilker also came from Hagen, and Lord Mayor Alfred Finke arranged for them to receive a grant from the private sector in Hagen. Thanks to his previous knowledge, Gebhard was able to quickly work with form master Herbert Bayer in the advertising workshop on commissioned work. He designed Bauhaus printed matter with Kurt Stolp and Walter Funkat . In the summer semester of 1928 Gebhard was enrolled in Joost Schmidt's plastic workshop , where his classmates were August Agatz, also from Hagen, Klaus Meumann, Franz Ehrlich and Heinz Loew. From 1927 he was a member of the KPD .

From 1929 Gebhard was a freelance graphic artist in Berlin and worked for László Moholy-Nagy on stage sets for the Kroll Opera and productions by Erwin Piscator . He became a member of the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists (ASSO) and worked for the agitprop department of the central committee of the KPD, which provided him with job opportunities in the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus . At the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) he came into contact with John Heartfield .

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , he worked politically in the illegality, he designed prints and participated in their distribution, after 1939 he belonged to a circle around the architect Selman Selmanagić . He was able to work with Herbert Bayer in Studio Dorland , which was now carrying out party orders for Nazi propaganda , until Bayer emigrated in 1938. In 1939 Gebhard was assigned to work as a technical draftsman in a design office. His oeuvre was destroyed by the effects of the war.

After the end of the war, Max Keilson brought him in 1946 as head of department and press illustrator for the daily newspaper of the organizing committee for Greater Berlin of the SPD and KPD Vorwärts , the predecessor of the newspaper Neues Deutschland . After an interlude as a designer with Mart Stam at the Institute for Industrial Design , he worked for ten years from 1950 until his retirement as a graphic designer and studio manager at Dietz-Verlag in East Berlin . There he designed book covers, their typography and frontispiece for the publishing program in the spectrum between Louis Aragon , Martin Andersen Nexö , Ernst Thälmann , Mao Zedong and other greats of communism in the political boom of Stalinism and the de-Stalinization of the fifties.

In old age Gebhard was able to devote himself again to his artistic interests.

Private

Gebhard was married three times. His first wife was the photo technician Margret Battré, from whom he was divorced in 1935. In 1937 he married Margarete Krebs, a Bauhaus member. In the same year his daughter Susanne was born. One son died of malnutrition in 1945 after three days. The second marriage ended in divorce in 1951. Since 1953 he was married to the illustrator Regina Gebhard.

literature

  • Volker Frank: Gebhard, Max . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 50, Saur, Munich a. a. 2006, ISBN 3-598-22790-6 , p. 473.
  • Eckhard Neumann (ed.): Bauhaus and Bauhäusler: Memories and Confessions . New edition 1985, 5th edition, Cologne: DuMont, 1996 ISBN 3-7701-1673-9 , pp. 196-201
  • Jörn Grabowski : Vote left! : the political poster in Germany 1918–1933 . State museums in Berlin, capital of the GDR: Exhibition in the Otto-Nagel-Haus, July 10, 1985 to September 19, 1985
  • Richard Frick: 2 Bauhaus members, 2 poster designers, 2 anti-fascists: [Theo Ballmer and Max Gebhard] , Typographische Monatsblätter , vol. 69 (2001), No. 3, pp. 1–16
  • Hellmut Rademacher: Artistic achievement and practical party work: on the 70th birthday of Max Gebhard , in: Bildende Kunst , 1976, pp. 190–192.
  • Schroeter and Berger: Max Gebhard - Bauhaus Concepts and Antifascist Actions. In: Bernd Hüttner (Ed.), Georg Leidenberger (Ed.): 100 Years of Bauhaus - Diversity, Conflict and Effect. Berlin, Metropol, 2019, ISBN 978-3-86331-458-3 , pp. 23–37.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ From Hagen to the Bauhaus , exhibition at the Hagen University Library 2009
  2. ↑ a b c Volker Frank: Gebhard, Max . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 50, Saur, Munich a. a. 2006, ISBN 3-598-22790-6 , p. 473.
  3. ↑ Literature by and about Regina Gebhard in the bibliographic database WorldCat
  4. ↑ The inventor of the Antifa: In the footsteps of the Bauhaus graphic artist Max Gebhard , new Germany , December 14, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Gebhard, Max
ALTERNATIVE NAMES gebs (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH April 12, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Triberg
DATE OF DEATH April 23, 1990
Place of death Berlin