(b Calw, Baden-W?rttemberg, 6 Dec 1890; d Munich, 3 May 1955). German painter, printmaker and writer. He served an apprenticeship as an enamel painter in Pforzheim and then attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Stuttgart (1907-10) and the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden K?nste, Karlsruhe (1910-16). Guided by a longing to rebel against bourgeois morality, he made paintings and lithographs inspired by scenes from novels and films on the Wild West and oriental fairy tales, themes from which he continued to derive his subject-matter while also developing an increasingly critical stance towards society. In Karlsruhe in 1919 he co-founded the Gruppe Rih, one of the many artists' groups formed in Germany after World War I in an attempt to democratize culture, to tear down social barriers and to proclaim freedom for the individual. That year he moved to Berlin, becoming a member of both the Novembergruppe and the Dada movement. Having also joined the Communist Party in 1919, he became increasingly politicized. The watercolour Studio Roof (c. 1920; Berlin, Gal. Nierendorf), which shows a woman in laced boots posing on a pedestal and surrounded by a group of people, several of them either crippled or masked, is a cynical comment on the dehumanization of society. However he still produced such works as Wild West (1922-3; Munich, Gal. Hasenclever), which embodies his fantasies of adventure, aggression and ecstasy. Other topics that concerned him were sexual desire and shoe fetishism. His paintings of the Artist with Two Hanged Women (c. 1920) and Sex Murder (1924; both priv. col., see 1984 exh. cat., pls 49 and 51) illustrate not only his personal obsession with sadistic sexual violence but a more general patriarchal attitude whereby women are either idolized and de-sexualized as mother figures or turned into dangerous, demonic forces that have to be destroyed.
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