There are only a few artists of the first half of the twentieth century, whose life and work embody so radical to the extreme possibilities of their time. Otto Freundlich, and this is the light side, belongs to, in the decades of the creative, all the conventions of live-art work of the pioneers of abstraction. He was essential to the search for the spiritual expression in art and saw his work in the service of his humanistic Beliefs which he strove for a peaceful, Communist community company. But his life’s destiny leads at the same time, in the darkest depths of this time.
As a Jewish and chosen by modern artists, his work was outlawed in Nazi Germany, from the museums, ripped, partially destroyed, and in the pillory of the “degenerate art” exhibition put. The now lost sculpture “Big head” had to act the dubious honour of being on the front page of the catalogue booklet and to give the staid Häme pictorial example.
Denounced unddeportiert
As a German Emigrant in Paris, to his final home in 1924, was Otto Freundlich, with the outbreak of the war for the French to “nationals of enemy forces”. He was interned in 1939 in French Camps, and a year later released. As the attempt failed, to flee to the United States, he hid with his also from Germany emigrated companion Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss in the case of farmers in a village in the Pyrenees. In 1943, Otto was denounced in a Friendly and deported to Poland, where he died on may 9. March was murdered in the death camp Sobibor.
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in 2017, the Ludwig Museum, Cologne showed a comprehensive Friendly retrospective. But compared to other artist Otto Freundlich’s work is given to companions on the way in the abstraction, such as Kandinsky, Mondrian or Klee consistently less attention. The last Paris exhibition goes back even to the year 1969, and now it is a relatively small Museum, where the retrospective of Show with more than eighty works and archive documents will be shown.
Ecstatic softness
The Museum of Montmartre, however, is precisely where Otto Freundlich’s has taken the most important place of artistic development. The 1878 in Pomerania-born artist comes from a sculptural training, and a longer stay in Florence in 1908 for the first Time to Paris. In the Bateau-Lavoir, on the Butte Montmartre, he finds a Studio space, next to Picasso. It is the place where a Chapter of European art history is written. Otto Freundlich is immediately integrated, became acquainted with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, is friends with Georges Braque, and Robert Delaunay.
The art critic Maurice Raynal writes: “We were all stubborn as charmed by the dreams, almost ecstatic gentleness of his facial expression, testified to a natural generosity and kindness.” Cubism is emerging, and probably Otto could consider Friendly, the “Demoiselles d’avignon” in Picasso’s Atelier.
