'If things are to go well for you on this Earth, you must become a master tightrope walker." Such was the rather grim message on a 1934 New Year's card commissioned by the Berlin couple Siegbert and Hilde Feldberg, the bourgeois patrons of the painter, engraver and lithographer Michel Fingesten, who had been contracted to make the greeting card for them.
As it turned out, it was the Feldbergs, who, despite their prosperity, would be needing the luck; their fall from the tightrope was close at hand. Hitler had one year earlier announced the boycott of Jewish businesses, doctors, lawyers and banks. Having read Mein Kampf and absorbed its implications, Siegbert Feldberg would leave for India in 1934, with plans for his wife and two sons to follow.
Follow they did, in 1939, and thanks to Hilde's ingenuity (and strategically directed charm), they did not leave Germany empty-handed. In their trunks were more than 70 sheaves of paper: self-portraits by contemporary Berlin artists (including one of Fingensten, holding his palette and paintbrush -- a sardonic, bow-tied figure with dark pouches under his eyes, pictured against a backdrop of nudes). That collection, now on show at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto, had been amassed over more than a decade of barter exchange in recession-plagued Berlin.
Siegbert Feldberg's family business had been clothing manufacture; the artists, all friends of his pianist wife, needed clothes. It was a match made in heaven: suits and overcoats for self-portraits.
The resulting collection offers a glimpse of Berlin between the wars, augmented by a few purchased pieces by such established artists as Kathe Kollwitz and Oskar Kokoschka. The challenge is to resist overloading the works with the burden of hindsight. While many of these artists would be killed in the camps, exiled as degenerates or hounded into obscurity and physical collapse, the bulk of these pictures portray the pinch of poverty as much as they do the dark threat of fascism that would blossom from these economic constraints.
Still, haunting works such as the 1930 self-portrait of Ines Wetzel (an artist and social activist who later died at Dachau) with her fathomlessly sorrowful gaze, or the sombre and darkly luminous self-portrait of Willy Jaeckel, from the year before, seem veiled in impending doom. A beloved teacher at the State Art School in Berlin, Jaeckel was repeatedly threatened by the Nazis, who made several attempts to oust him from his teaching position. (These efforts were stymied by student protest.) Many of his works were confiscated from public collections. In the end, he and most of his works were destroyed in Allied bombing raids. All of this still lay before him when this self-portrait was made. As we look at his sensitive and intelligent features, we calculate what was to come, and shudder to think of his -- and by extension, our own -- naiveté about the future.
While the quality of the works in the collection is uneven, poignancy is a constant. What Hilde Feldberg smuggled out of Germany in 1939 was not just a group of paintings but, in a sense, a group of people, most of them Jewish. As a group of works, it stands as a testimonial to the creativity and sophistication of the culture they were forced to leave behind.
The cast of characters is intriguing. In a 1929 self-portrait, we meet Conrad Felixmuller, an effeminate, even dainty man in his spectacles, who, we learn, was consigned to a sanitorium for his pacifist beliefs. His art was later denounced and destroyed by the Nazis as degenerate, and he would serve time in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp. Here, his waxy skin, crimson ears and sleep-deprived, allergy-swollen eyes betray him as a classic, clammy-palmed aesthete, all nerve ends and exquisite sensibility.
We meet Otto Schoff, known in Berlin for his erotic print cyles on such subjects as orgies and pedophilia. His girlfriend, a pretty thing with her scarlet cloche and and pouty lips, rests her head on his shoulder, while he turns to look at us, the very image of sly depravity, a cigarette dangling from his downturned mouth.
And we meet Ludwig Meidner, a founder of the November Group (which aimed to fuse expressionism, cubism and futurism into one artistic movement) and a contributor to the revolutionary magazine Die Aktion, known principally for his post-First World War "apocalytic landscapes." In Meidner's self-portrait, we meet his fierce gaze, rendered in loose, melting strokes of paint, conjuring form out of gesture and a rich range of colours: terra cotta, salmon, grey and sepia. In his black cap and dishevelled jacket and shirt, he is the epitome of the artist as witness to the world's idiocies and perils. Intelligence is a quality you encounter again and again in these faces.
One of the mysterious things about this show is the question of Siegbert Feldberg's intention. The couple's sons (who now live in Edmonton and Florida) and their granddaughter, Gina Feldberg -- who teaches medical history at York University in Toronto -- recall no family discussion about why self-portaiture became his idée fixe.
During their many years in India and Pakistan (where he ran a variety of businesses, and she worked in music programming for Indian and Pakistani public radio), the paintings were kept squirrelled away in boxes under their sons' beds. When offers to purchase the pictures were made, following their return to Berlin and subsequent move to Switzerland after 1963, they resolved not to break up the collection, despite their financial needs. In the end, the collection was bought by the Berlinische Galeries from Hilde Feldberg, after her husband's death, in 1976. (She later joined her son in Edmonton, where she died in 1996.)
What was it that drove Feldberg's compulsion? A hint resides in the frontispiece for the portfolio, designed, again, by Michel Fingesten, in 1933. Beneath the title Selbstbildnisser Deutscher Maler (Self-portraits by German Artists), we see the figure of the artist, his palette and paintbrush in hand, hanging broken-necked from a nail like a mangled marionette. Red blood drips from the tip of his paintbrush.
It's hard to imagine that the sense of dread that this image conveys was not shared by artist and patron. After all, it's the contextualizing grace note that sets the frame for the collection as a whole: the artist and the Jew -- doomed figures both -- finding safe harbour in the leaves of Feldberg's portfolio.
But the title, again, is revealing. The artist and patron are at pains to define the subjects as "German artists." In the face of the rising tide that would strip the German Jews of their way of life, despite the mounting betrayal of his fellow countrymen, Siegbert Feldberg insisted on the German-ness of these men and women, and defiantly asserted his right to be a patriot -- whatever the future held. The Feldberg Collection: Self-Portraits from 1920s Berlin, continues at Hart House, University of Toronto, until June 20. For more information, call 416-978-8398.