New Objectivity - 910

Narrator (f):

In addition to portraits showing famous personalities in their social role, there were also portraits mercilessly depicting the dark sides of life with all its adversities and ugliness, whether sickness and physical or psychological impairments, decline from aging, or precarious living conditions.

Narrator (m):

Fritz Burmann, an artist who has been forgotten today, was represented by four paintings in the Mannheim exhibition in 1925. After studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he became professor at the Academy of Art in Königsberg in 1926 and then taught at the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin from 1936 until his death in 1945. It is all the more astonishing, then, that several of his early Expressionist paintings were confiscated from public collections by those in power as “degenerate.” In the 1930s, Burmann’s changed his painting to a style accepted by the regime. In 1939, he was characterized by Bruno Kroll in an article in Die Kunst für alle as a “painter of the East Prussian lagoon” with strong ties to his homeland.

Narrator (f):

Only a few of his works have been preserved in public collections, such as The Old Woman with Her Dog in the Kunsthalle Mannheim. Because her characteristics emphasize her age more than her sex, she was long wrongly described as an “old man.”

Narrator (m):

Burmann often addressed social themes such as poverty, illness, and old age and had recourse to traditional artistic patterns and the painting techniques of fifteenth-century Italian painting. The figures have individual features, but they also represent social phenomena. Burmann thus addressed with sympathy but in an unsparingly realistic, also exaggerated way the injustices of his time, without displaying a sharp social critique like, for example, George Grosz. One is struck rather by the melancholy observed throughout his oeuvre, manifested in gazes and gestures but also in spatial situations and colors.