Erich Buchholz
Encyclopedia
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...
. He was a central figure in the development of non-objective or concrete art in Berlin between 1918 and 1924. He interrupted his artistic activity in 1925, first because of economic hardship and, from 1933, as he was forbidden to paint by the National-Socialist authorities. He resumed artistic activity in 1945.
Biography
Erich Buchholz was born on January 31, 1891, in Bromberg, West PrussiaWest Prussia
West Prussia was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1773–1824 and 1878–1919/20 which was created out of the earlier Polish province of Royal Prussia...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
(now Bydgoszcz, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
). He started working as a teacher
Teacher
A teacher or schoolteacher is a person who provides education for pupils and students . The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education. In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional...
in a primary school in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, painting in his free time. In 1914 he decided to become a full-time artist and to study painting with Lovis Corinth
Lovis Corinth
Lovis Corinth was a German painter and printmaker whose mature work realized a synthesis of impressionism and expressionism....
, but managed to take only one lesson before being conscripted
Conscription
Conscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in some countries to the present day under various names...
.
At the end of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
he returned to Berlin and started working on abstract paintings. In 1918 he designed his first abstract stage sets for the Albert-Theater in Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
. His first solo exhibition was in 1921 at the Galerie Der Sturm
Der Sturm
Der Sturm was a magazine covering the expressionism movement founded in Berlin in 1910 by Herwarth Walden. It ran weekly until monthly in 1914, and became a quarterly in 1924 until it ceased publication in 1932....
in Berlin and included a series of sixteen woodblocks
Woodblock printing
Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper....
. The first of these, Orbits of the Planets (Planetenbahnen), was initially designed as a matrix for making woodcut
Woodcut
Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...
prints, but the artist gradually regarded it as a work of art
Work of art
A work of art, artwork, art piece, or art object is an aesthetic item or artistic creation.The term "a work of art" can apply to:*an example of fine art, such as a painting or sculpture*a fine work of architecture or landscape design...
of its own right and painted the surfaces.
Throughout the 1920s he participated in the annual jury-free art exhibitions in Berlin. At the exhibition Constructivism and Suprematism, organized in 1922 by the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin, he met Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.-Early life:...
, Laszlo Peri, Ernő Kállai, and El Lissitzky
El Lissitzky
, better known as El Lissitzky , was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works...
, people with whom he kept close contact in the following years. He also participated in international events such as the First Exhibition of Modern Art in Bucharest.
His studio at 15 Herkulesufer in Berlin was a meeting place for artists of the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
, including—besides painters such as Hannah Höch
Hannah Höch
Hannah Höch was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage.-Biography:...
and Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...
—Dadaists writers
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
Richard Huelsenbeck
Richard Huelsenbeck
Richard Huelsenbeck was a poet, writer and drummer born in Frankenau, Hessen-Nassau.Carl Wilhelm Richard Hülsenbeck was a medical student on the eve of World War I. He was invalided out of the army and emigrated to Zürich, Switzerland in February 1916, where he fell in with the Cabaret Voltaire...
and Raoul Hausmann
Raoul Hausmann
Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I.-Early biography:Raoul Hausmann was...
as well as the pioneers of abstract film Hans Richter
Hans Richter (artist)
Hans Richter was a painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, film-experimenter and producer. He was born in Berlin into a well-to-do family and died in Minusio, near Locarno, Switzerland.-Germany:...
and Viking Eggeling
Viking Eggeling
Viking Eggeling was a Swedish artist and filmmaker. His work is of significance in the area of experimental film, and has been described as absolute film and Visual Music....
. Art critic Heinz Ohff described this studio in Buchholz's obituary
Obituary
An obituary is a news article that reports the recent death of a person, typically along with an account of the person's life and information about the upcoming funeral. In large cities and larger newspapers, obituaries are written only for people considered significant...
, stating, "In 1922 he remodeled his studio flat at Herkulesufer 15 into the first 'environment,' the first abstractly designed three-dimensional space in art history." Original photographs of Buchholz’s studio-space design do exist from that period and furthermore he exhibited them in the Grosse Berliner of 1923. The photographs reveal that he had developed it into a coherent abstract space—right down to a model of its ceiling design. The colour of the room in particular was important. A light blue was painted over the smooth surfaces of a fussy wallpaper pattern; a similarly light blue-green covered the rougher surface where wallpaper had been stripped. Both colours tend to lighten and expand the visual impact of a small space. Various motifs on the walls were continuously re-arranged—sometimes the dominant sphere on the wall remains uncovered, sometimes it is in eclipse. This activation of its elements sought to reinforce the mobility experienced when encountering an artwork as a three-dimensional space. A reconstruction of his studio was built and presented in 1969 in the Kunstbibliothek of Berlin, organized and curated by Hans-Peter Heidrich, the director of the Daedulus gallery.
In 1923, Buchholz's interest drifted towards architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
and he started working on the use of shell forms in buildings, such as the design of an egg-form house.
Besides painting, Erich Buchholz wrote several booklets
Book
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
and articles
Article (publishing)
An article is a written work published in a print or electronic medium. It may be for the purpose of propagating the news, research results, academic analysis or debate.-News articles:...
in which he investigated in depth the relationship between world view
World view
A comprehensive world view is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the entirety of the individual or society's knowledge and point-of-view, including natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and...
and the constructivist principles. Thus, in one of his articles he stated:
The eternal law of recurrence – as in the spiral – is opposed to the law of the eternal non-return – as in the parabola which is a distorted spiral. The former is relative, the latter is absolute. Nothing ever returns.
Due to economic hardship, Buchholz was forced to move from Berlin to the countryside. In 1925, he settled in Germendorf
Germendorf
Germendorf is a part of Oranienburg, a town in the district Oberhavel .In 2008, Germendorf had 1,818 inhabitants.-Geography:...
near Berlin where he supported his family through market gardening
Market gardening
A market garden is the relatively small-scale production of fruits, vegetables and flowers as cash crops, frequently sold directly to consumers and restaurants. It is distinguishable from other types of farming by the diversity of crops grown on a small area of land, typically, from under one acre ...
and by raising poultry
Poultry
Poultry are domesticated birds kept by humans for the purpose of producing eggs, meat, and/or feathers. These most typically are members of the superorder Galloanserae , especially the order Galliformes and the family Anatidae , commonly known as "waterfowl"...
. For some time he also opened a sand
Sand
Sand is a naturally occurring granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles.The composition of sand is highly variable, depending on the local rock sources and conditions, but the most common constituent of sand in inland continental settings and non-tropical coastal...
quarry
Quarry
A quarry is a type of open-pit mine from which rock or minerals are extracted. Quarries are generally used for extracting building materials, such as dimension stone, construction aggregate, riprap, sand, and gravel. They are often collocated with concrete and asphalt plants due to the requirement...
.
He continued to paint until 1933 when the National Socialists
National Socialist German Workers Party
The National Socialist German Workers' Party , commonly known in English as the Nazi Party, was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945. Its predecessor, the German Workers' Party , existed from 1919 to 1920...
labelled his work "degenerate". He was arrested several times and received an interdiction to paint and participate in exhibitions
Art exhibition
Art exhibitions are traditionally the space in which art objects meet an audience. The exhibit is universally understood to be for some temporary period unless, as is rarely true, it is stated to be a "permanent exhibition". In American English, they may be called "exhibit", "exposition" or...
.
West Berlin
West Berlin was a political exclave that existed between 1949 and 1990. It comprised the western regions of Berlin, which were bordered by East Berlin and parts of East Germany. West Berlin consisted of the American, British, and French occupation sectors, which had been established in 1945...
.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Buchholz held a number of solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States. In 1955, eighteen of his paintings from 1918 to 1922 were purchased by the Berlin Gallery of the 20th Century. In 1969 the Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
Museum organized a retrospective of his work, which travelled to Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
and Stuttgart
Stuttgart
Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....
. Another retrospective was organized in 1971 by the Art Library (Kunstbibliothek) of Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. He also participated in various art exhibitions such as the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris.
In 1964, Buchholz presented a sequence of screen-prints, "Constant-Variables," in which he explores the idea of a work of art as permeable in time and space. The series shows a close link with his earlier works of the 1920s. The sequence using just red
Red
Red is any of a number of similar colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye, in the wavelength range of roughly 630–740 nm. Longer wavelengths than this are called infrared , and cannot be seen by the naked eye...
, white
White
White is a color, the perception of which is evoked by light that stimulates all three types of color sensitive cone cells in the human eye in nearly equal amounts and with high brightness compared to the surroundings. A white visual stimulation will be void of hue and grayness.White light can be...
, black
Black
Black is the color of objects that do not emit or reflect light in any part of the visible spectrum; they absorb all such frequencies of light...
is prompted by a simple framework: two oblong
Rectangle
In Euclidean plane geometry, a rectangle is any quadrilateral with four right angles. The term "oblong" is occasionally used to refer to a non-square rectangle...
s that shift and alternate on a diagonal axis, a fixed sequence of three lines and one central block shape. Such minimal criteria set up a wider range of permutation
Permutation
In mathematics, the notion of permutation is used with several slightly different meanings, all related to the act of permuting objects or values. Informally, a permutation of a set of objects is an arrangement of those objects into a particular order...
s in the course of the six variations, which transpose further shifts in the colour of the ground in relation to the fixed elements as well as in the alternation of the oblongs from a diagonal axis to a horizontal-vertical alignment
Erich Buchholz died in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
on December 29, 1972.
Publications
- Die Idee ist der Todfeind des Lebens, 1922 (In: Erich Buchholz - Katalog Deutsche Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin 1965
- Das rote Heft, Berlin 1927
- Die große Zäsur, Berlin 1953
- Das Buchholz-Ei, Flensburg 1963
- Untersuchungen über das Lichtkabinett, Berlin 1967
- An meinem Fall scheitert die offizielle Kunstgeschichte, Frankfurt 1969
- Seuche gebannt – zur Historie einiger Begriffe, Berlin.