REVIEW

[Translate to Englisch:] Eine Künstlerpaar der Moderne
ARTIST COUPLE IN THE MODERN MOVEMENT

Emil Maetzel & Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen
23 November 2018 to 24 March 2019

Emil Maetzel (1877–1955) and Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen (1886–1930) were important  representatives of the artistic  avant-garde in Hamburg in the first years of the Weimar Republic when the spirit of  renewal resounded through Secession in 1919, the city experienced a second important phase of Expressionism, one in which the Maetzels played a decisive role.

Emil Maetzel studied architecture and was a self-taught painter. Although Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen attended drawing school, she too was not professionally trained as an artist. In Berlin, where Emil Maetzel was stationed during the First World War, the couple benefited from opportunities to visit important exhibitions such as the Berlin Secession and Herwarth Walden‘s “Der Sturm” Gallery. A decisive event for the artists was their discovery of African art, which they began to collect and whose figures they integrated into their works. 

1919 to 1923 were the years of Hamburg‘s first artist festivals, which ignited a veritable firework of racy performances by dancers, singers, and actors und provided the outlet for a more permissive societal cohesion. The festivities helped bring staid citizens together with members of the artistic Bohème. The ever exotic settings and costumes were the results of the fantasy of artists, among whom Emil Maetzel played a prominent role as painter. Artistic freedom found its intellectual expression in the emancipation of living styles from conventional ideas of morality.  

The Maetzels followed diverging artistic paths in the 1920s. With visits to Paris (1925) and Gotland (1929) Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen underlined her increasing independence before she died of heart problems in 1930 at the age of only 44. Emil survived her by 25 years. In 1933 he was dismissed from the civil service by the National Socialists. In his house in Volksdorf he then spent lonely years, although taking advantage of the opportunity for painting excursions in northern Germany. After 1945 he started out on a new and voluminous productive phase.

With more than 150 paintings, sculptures, print graphics, and photos, the Exhibition, which was prepared and shown for the first time in 2017 by the Kunsthaus Stade, gives visitors the most comprehensive look to date at both the work of this artist couple and a momentous chapter in Hamburg‘s Expressionism. The show is based on the holdings of Hamburg collector Tim Tobeler who has explored the work of Emil Maetzel and Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen for many years. Besides the artistic estate of the Maetzel family, the Tobeler collection boasts the largest holding of works by the artist couple. The show in the Museum August Macke House has been supplemented by additional important loans from public and private collections, as well as from the artistic estate of the Maetzel family. 

Curator: Dr. Klara Drenker-Nagels