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Newsboy
Conrad
Felixmüller
Oil on Canvas 1928
Felixmüller's
painting, Zeitungsjunge (Newsboy), depicts a young
newspaper boy holding a copy of AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte
Zeitung - Workers Illustrated Paper), a left-wing newspaper
that was widely read by German workers. The amazing works
of the anti-fascist photomontage artist, John Heartfield,
regularly appeared in AIZ.
Felixmüller
painted the most remarkable portraits of regular working
people, and he believed it was impossible to separate
art from political struggle. Using extremely bright colors
and a near Cubist perspective, the works of Felixmüller
were some of the most joyous in Expressionism. The painting
at left is one of the artist's more stylistically subdued
works.
Felixmüller
lived and worked in Dresden, and belonged to the Dresdner
Sezession Gruppe (Dresden Secessionist Group), He also
was a member of the pro-democracy artist's organization,
Novembergruppe. In 1919 the artist joined the newly formed
German Communist Party (KDP) and often contributed works
to the popular worker's journal, Die Aktion (Action).
German playwright Carl Sternheim wrote about Felixmüller:
"Just
as Van Gogh ripped the aesthetic mask from every landscape
and revealed a nature - of tree, flower, water, sky, moon,
and earth - that had vanished from the bourgeois world,
so this Müller has unmasked the contemporary human face,
and in his pictures the proletarian whom the bourgeoisie
long smothered in a conspiracy of silence appears for
the first time."
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