New Objectivity - 911

Narrator (f):

Not a single woman artist was represented in the exhibition in 1925. On the one hand, that was because women seldom managed to get recognition from the art world at the time; on the other hand, the work of several women artists painting in the New Objective style was only just being developed around 1925 and so escaped Hartlaub’s attention. It would be decades before the female representatives of New Objectivity got the appreciation they deserved, and even today it is still possible to make new discoveries, such as the work of Ilona Singer.

Narrator (m):

She received her artistic education from 1923 to 1925 at the United State Schools for Fine and Applied Art in Berlin. After her studies, she had her first successes and participated in various exhibitions. But the year 1933 was a caesura in her life. She herself and nearly her entire Jewish family were murdered in the Holocaust. Only a few of her works have survived, including the portrait Robert von Mendelssohn, which first turned up on the art market in 20098. After an amicable agreement with the heirs of her sister, Margit Hahn, who had also been murdered, the painting could be restituted.

Narrator (f):

The sitter, Robert von Mendelssohn, who was from a well-established German-Jewish banking family, was a colorful figure in the public life of Berlin. When his father died in 1935, thirty-four-year-old Robert became the head of the family. Just three years later, however, the Deutsche Bank began liquidating the Jewish bank.

Narrator (m):

Ilona Singer captured the young man in 1928 in an apt psychological characterization: Smoking, with his left hand casually in the pocket of his fashionable suit, with an ironically distanced and casually cool gaze, he presents himself in the manner of a dandy. Robert von Mendelssohn survived the Nazi era unharmed and died in Worpswede at an advanced age in 1996.