farmers and spends his afternoons pulling up weeds as therapy for his ‘burn-out’. Bernhard Kellermann writes the best-seller of the year:
The Tunnel,
a science fiction novel about an underground link between America and Europe. Frank Wedekind’s
Lulu
is banned. Oskar Kokoschka buys a canvas as big as the bed of his lover, Alma Mahler, and begins to paint a portrait of them both. When it becomes a masterpiece, Alma will want to marry him. But not before
.
( illustration credits 4.1 )
How long will Die Brücke remain standing? Ever since the artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Otto Mueller and Emil Nolde moved to Berlin from Dresden, arguments had been getting more and more frequent, Kirchner wrote about their ‘women issues and intrigues’, and by 1912 Max Pechstein had left the group. Each one of them is trying to make his own way, both artistically and financially. They all find lodgings in Berlin lofts, their styles grow apart, and so do they. The unsold paintings pile up in their studios, but they carry on bravely painting.
Like a pair of lovers on the brink, the Brücke painters try to remember the prelapsarian innocence and archaic force of their shared beginnings. They plan to release a chronicle of Die Brücke. It is to contain original wood-engravings and photographs of their paintings. Kirchner, their nimble, egocentric spokesman, is to write the accompanying text. In April 1913 he is working feverishly on it, this text that is to be a manifesto – or he would be if only his anxiety, his drugs, his women, his sketchpads and blasted Berlin would give him a few moments peace to do it in.
‘The old collapses, the times change.’ This quote from Schiller’s
William Tell
is printed in large type in the
Chemists’ Pocket Diary for the Year 1913
. Is a revolution looming? Have the German chemists had some kind of premonition of impending catastrophe?
No. They’re just announcing some pretty new labels for ointments and cough syrups. Or, as it says in the advert: ‘The new labels published by our company were all created by commissioned artists and, with regards to taste, are exemplary and unparalleled. They exceed all others in existence.’
Now that’s advertising without false modesty. Unfortunately, though, the name of the company is not quite as catchy and certainly doesn’t exceed all others in existence: ‘Label printer and publisher for the chemical, pharmaceutical and associated industries, Barmen.’
In 1913 Colonel Mervyn O’Gorman, leader of the British Royal Aircraft Company, is pursuing two technical developments which are also intended to exceed all others in existence. During the week the legendary aeronautical engineer works on the development of powerful fighter planes for use in conflicts. And on Sundays, if the sun is shining, he uses his camera and the autochrome procedure to produce needle-sharp colour images of his beautiful but dour daughter Christina. His aeroplanes go down in world history. And his photographs of the beach near Lulworth Cove in Dorset make art history. An innocent young girl pictured in colour, walking along the beach, leaning against a dinghy. Not a plane in the sky. Only red tones, blue tones, brown tones, waves lapping softly against the shore. Enchanting photographs, created in 1913, but the images look so close you could reach out and touch them.
Thomas Mann wakes up at eight. Not because he’s been woken by something or set an alarm. No, it’s just that he always wakes up at eight. Once, when he woke up at half-past seven, he lay there for half an hour, baffled as to how it could possibly have come about. It could not be permitted to happen again. His body obeyed him. We still know little about the cold front which was Thomas Mann and Katia Pringsheim’s marriage. But it’s striking that Katia, after her husband completed
Death in Venice
in 1912, spent almost a year and a half without a break in different health
The Tunnel,
a science fiction novel about an underground link between America and Europe. Frank Wedekind’s
Lulu
is banned. Oskar Kokoschka buys a canvas as big as the bed of his lover, Alma Mahler, and begins to paint a portrait of them both. When it becomes a masterpiece, Alma will want to marry him. But not before
.
( illustration credits 4.1 )
How long will Die Brücke remain standing? Ever since the artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Otto Mueller and Emil Nolde moved to Berlin from Dresden, arguments had been getting more and more frequent, Kirchner wrote about their ‘women issues and intrigues’, and by 1912 Max Pechstein had left the group. Each one of them is trying to make his own way, both artistically and financially. They all find lodgings in Berlin lofts, their styles grow apart, and so do they. The unsold paintings pile up in their studios, but they carry on bravely painting.
Like a pair of lovers on the brink, the Brücke painters try to remember the prelapsarian innocence and archaic force of their shared beginnings. They plan to release a chronicle of Die Brücke. It is to contain original wood-engravings and photographs of their paintings. Kirchner, their nimble, egocentric spokesman, is to write the accompanying text. In April 1913 he is working feverishly on it, this text that is to be a manifesto – or he would be if only his anxiety, his drugs, his women, his sketchpads and blasted Berlin would give him a few moments peace to do it in.
‘The old collapses, the times change.’ This quote from Schiller’s
William Tell
is printed in large type in the
Chemists’ Pocket Diary for the Year 1913
. Is a revolution looming? Have the German chemists had some kind of premonition of impending catastrophe?
No. They’re just announcing some pretty new labels for ointments and cough syrups. Or, as it says in the advert: ‘The new labels published by our company were all created by commissioned artists and, with regards to taste, are exemplary and unparalleled. They exceed all others in existence.’
Now that’s advertising without false modesty. Unfortunately, though, the name of the company is not quite as catchy and certainly doesn’t exceed all others in existence: ‘Label printer and publisher for the chemical, pharmaceutical and associated industries, Barmen.’
In 1913 Colonel Mervyn O’Gorman, leader of the British Royal Aircraft Company, is pursuing two technical developments which are also intended to exceed all others in existence. During the week the legendary aeronautical engineer works on the development of powerful fighter planes for use in conflicts. And on Sundays, if the sun is shining, he uses his camera and the autochrome procedure to produce needle-sharp colour images of his beautiful but dour daughter Christina. His aeroplanes go down in world history. And his photographs of the beach near Lulworth Cove in Dorset make art history. An innocent young girl pictured in colour, walking along the beach, leaning against a dinghy. Not a plane in the sky. Only red tones, blue tones, brown tones, waves lapping softly against the shore. Enchanting photographs, created in 1913, but the images look so close you could reach out and touch them.
Thomas Mann wakes up at eight. Not because he’s been woken by something or set an alarm. No, it’s just that he always wakes up at eight. Once, when he woke up at half-past seven, he lay there for half an hour, baffled as to how it could possibly have come about. It could not be permitted to happen again. His body obeyed him. We still know little about the cold front which was Thomas Mann and Katia Pringsheim’s marriage. But it’s striking that Katia, after her husband completed
Death in Venice
in 1912, spent almost a year and a half without a break in different health
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