Ludwig Meidner

Ludwig Meidner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker born in Bernstadt, Silesia. Meidner is best known for his painted, drawn, and printed portraits and landscapes, but is especially noted for his "apocalyptic" series of work featuring his stylized visions of a pending transformation of Germany before World War I.

Ludwig Meidner was apprenticed to a stonemason, but his apprenticeship was not completed. He studied at the Royal School of Art in Breslau and, from 1906 to 1907 he studied painting at the Académie Julian and Cormon Academies in Paris where he met and became friends with Amedeo Modigliani. He returned to Berlin to work as a fashion illustrator and produced views of Berlin.

In 1912 he began a series of paintings that marked a radical departure in style and would make his reputation."Apocalyptic Landscapes," such as the 1914 graphite drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago, are interesting because Meidner executed them before any of the devastation of the First World War. During the same time, Ludwig co-founded the German expressionist group, "Die Pathetiker" with Jacob Steirnhardt and Richard Janthur. Their focus is on the use of pathos in art to get an emotional response, which can be seen in the apocalyptic landscapes. However his art group disbanded after their first art show in 1912.

During WWI Ludwig served in the German military as a French interpreter and an infantry soldier.

After the First World War Meidner turned to Orthodox Judaism and began producing more baroque-like religious paintings including a long and repetitive series of portraits of "prophets." He was an habitual self portraitist producing a series of Rembrandt-inspired self-portraits. His portraits from 1915 to the end of the 1920s are a gallery of the leading expressionist and Dada writers and poets. Meidner himself increasingly turned to writing-he produced several books of dense expressionist prose and contributed to many newspaper articles.

In order to escape antisemitic repressions he moved to Cologne where he became an art teacher at Yawneh Jewish School in 1935. In 1939 he fled with his family to England (his wife Else Meidner was also an artist) where he was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. He stayed in England, unrecognised, hovering on the brink of poverty until 1953 when he returned to Germany. Although the years in exile were a period of hardship and disappointment, he created an extensive oeuvre of very original works during this time. Among those are drawings and watercolors on religious subjects, humoristic scenes and a cycle on the holocaust.

In 1963 he had his first major exhibition since 1918 in Recklinghausen and Berlin. He died on 14 May 1966 in Darmstadt, aged 82.

Meidner's artistic bequest is now part of the collections of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024