Page 30 - Studio International - February 1972

5 Factory landscape 1913 7 Self-portrait with landscape 1914 revolution would improve it. The apocalypse
Pencil, rubbed Reed pen, pen, brush over thin pencil outline, with was therefore above all a great purifying or
x 23- in. scratched pencil corrections
14 1/4 x 14 3/4 in. regenerative event, and was something to be
6 Apocalyptic Scene 1912 awaited with impatience.
Carpenter's pencil 8 Dresden-Blasewitz 1913
14 3/4 x 15 1/2 in. Brush and reed pen over thin charcoal Here too Meidner's paintings reflect an
17 x 241 in. attitude typical of the Expressionist generation.
Not only did many writers and artists believe
that war was coming, they actually looked
forward to it. Thus Heym wrote in his diary
in 1911 that he was 'suffocating ... in these banal
times and that he hoped at least for a war !'14
And Thomas Mann felt similarly. 'How might
the artist, the soldier in the artist, not praise God
for the collapse of a peaceful world of which he
was so tired, so thoroughly tired. War !15

I, ALWAYS A STORM
Meidner frequently portrayed himself in his
apocalyptic landscapes. Such personal
involvement, as though the world's centre of
gravity were situated within the artist or,
reversed, as though the world only existed as the
reflection of the artist's feelings, is also a typical
Expressionist characteristic if not the style's
most obvious trait. The same diary entry by
Heym continues in a way which perfectly
emphasizes the belief in extreme subjectivity
which the Expressionists brought to their work :
`I, a torn ocean; I, always a storm; I, the mirror
of the external, as wild and chaotic as the world'.
And of course the poetic form most used by
Expressionist writers was the monologue, the
agonized anatomizing of the self, the always
frustrated attempt to become two people so that
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each could watch the other all the time.
Meidner was no different, and a short text
he wrote beside a self-portrait of 1917 can be
directly compared with Heym's outburst above :
`I, Ludwig Meidner, clod of earth cut into little
pieces, outlawed, apocalyptic, my skull blown
into oblivion in the winter wind!' For some
reason passages like this escape mawkishness by
a hair's breadth and do say something about the
unusually subjective way Meidner seems to have
experienced everything. For him, even prosaic,
dead objects take on human characteristics : 'My
last picture bleeds on its easel. It is like open
wounds and ulcers. You can still see how the wet
paint shines ardently. And there is work's
slaughter-house, bloody and drenched in sweat,
and the paint rags scream and stink of turpentine
and the palette lies like an open body and my
hands shake when I see it
Expressionism was above all the style in
which such subjectivity might be given full
rein. It is therefore curious that the self-portrait
is not the subject used most often by
Expressionist painters; indeed, by most of them
it was hardly used at all. In Meidner's work,
however, it plays a role second only to that
played by the city and often the two are
combined. Meidner never ceased to draw and
paint his own likeness. No other modern painter
produced so many self-portraits and towards
the end of his life when it became increasingly
clear that he had long since given up the struggle
to emulate Rembrandt, he produced nothing
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