Mark Hobbs explores the Weimar-era paintings of Gustav Wunderwald…
July 2006, and I was in Berlin for eight weeks, studying at the city’s Goethe-Institut on an intensive language course. The weather was hot and dry, and Germany was hosting the Fifa World Cup. There was a carnival atmosphere on the streets, and the sphere of the Fernsehturm had been transformed into a pink football by the tournament’s sponsors.
I was about to embark on a PhD exploring the city’s Weimar-era art. I needed to learn German fast, and familiarise myself with the city’s artists. This was how I first encountered Gustav Wunderwald’s portraits of Berlin—in exhibition catalogues in the cool, air-conditioned library of the Berlinische Galerie, on a sweltering Friday afternoon after lessons.
Amongst the more familiar Weimar-era paintings of the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style of George Grosz, Otto Dix and Christian Schad, Wunderwald’s works stood out. Unlike some of those other artists, who were consciously following in the footsteps of the great German masters, or whose works channelled the decadence associated with Berlin at the time, Wunderwald’s works felt unpretentious and unassuming.
His paintings of the factory buildings and tenements of the north Berlin districts of Wedding and Moabit, with their colourful yet muted tones, exuded a sense of calm quite at odds with that devil-may-care dance at the edge of the volcano that Weimarian Berlin is usually depicted as.
Wunderwald gave me my way into my PhD thesis. What would I find, I asked myself, if I eschewed the glitz and the glamour at the heart of Weimar Berlin, with its cabarets and cafés along the Ku’damm and around Friedrichstraße, and instead headed out to the suburbs. What would I find there? What did Weimar Berlin look like, away from the glitz and the glamour? I spent much of the next three years in search of the answers to those questions, hunting down every book reference and every catalogue record, in search of Wunderwald’s paintings.
I discovered that we have the Weimar-era art critic Paul Westheim to thank for Wunderwald’s enduring legacy. Without Westheim—who championed the artist’s work in his own high-profile jour…