At the age of over sixty, Theodor Rocholl ended his long career as a war artist taking part in the First World War. In his War Letters from the west front in Flanders, which were printed in 1916, he did not avoid describing fear and destruction. However, in the gouaches and watercolours of this propaganda publication, he conveyed the impression of belonging to the idyllists of a war who in the centres of confrontation knew nothing of green boy scout romanticism anymore. That this was not the case is revealed by a number of unpublished works in the collection of the Stadtmuseum Hofgeismar that with rare ruthlessness also depict the hardships of this war.
What sails here under the flag of caricature is nothing other than an early form of blunt and bleak social realism. The group makes a powerful and monumental impression, misery in the dimension of a history picture, and that’s exactly how it was meant to be. The publisher of La Caricature, Charles Philipon, like most […]
Many of Louis Sabattier´s soft focussed photo-paintings for the French magazine L Illustration conveyed a ambiguous cultural – critical content. Especially his popular scenes of colonial tourism could easily be read as a subversive comment on the Eurocentric perspective of the oriental painting tradition of his teachers Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger. Exoticism and alienness, […]
Not translated: 5) Die dritten Männer In Dorés Illustrationswerk wurde die gnostische Befindlichkeit der Entfremdung und Dislokalität erstmals als eine grundlegende Erfahrung des urbanen Lebens ins Bild gesetzt. Und die grafischen Mittel, die er dabei zum Einsatz brachte, waren ungleich komplexer und subtiler als die der Künstler des Expressionismus und Futurismus, die ihm in dieser […]