ArtistGermanb.1897–d.1977
Conrad Felixmüller
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Conrad Felixmüller grew up in Dresden as Conrad Felix Müller, the son of a factory worker, and by his early teens was already studying at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. He adopted his compressed surname as a kind of artistic declaration - compact, assertive, unmistakable. By 1916, still a teenager, he was exhibiting alongside Lyonel Feininger at Herwarth Walden's Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin, the most important platform for avant-garde art in Germany at the time.
His wartime service as a medical orderly rather than a soldier suited the ideological direction he was heading. In 1917 he co-founded the Expressionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dresden and joined the Communist Party of Germany the following year. He published woodcuts and drawings in left-wing journals and became president of the Dresden Neue Sezession Gruppe 19, which he had co-founded with Otto Dix - a younger artist he would also teach etching. Politics and aesthetics were, for Felixmüller, the same conversation.
The bulk of his graphic output is staggering in its discipline: 461 woodcuts, 150 etchings, and 88 lithographs. Alongside Heckel and Kirchner, he helped restore printmaking to the status of a primary rather than secondary art form. His subjects ranged from working-class couples and factory workers to tender portraits of his wife and children. The expressionist distortions that defined his early career began softening in the mid-1920s as he moved toward the cooler, observational register of the New Objectivity - his final fully expressionist painting, "The Death of the Poet Walter Rheiner", dates from 1925.
The Nazi seizure of power undid decades of museum presence. More than 150 of his works were confiscated from German public collections, 40 appearing in the Dresden installment of the "Degenerate Art" exhibition in 1933, and further works in the infamous 1937 Munich show. His studio in Berlin was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1944. After the war, he settled in rural Saxony before accepting a professorship in drawing and painting at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle, where he taught from 1949 to 1961. He spent his final years in Berlin, turning toward urban motifs.
Felixmüller's prints and works on paper appear regularly on the international market, with major German houses playing a central role. On Auctionist, all 18 of his catalogued lots have sold - primarily prints and drawings through Ketterer Kunst (12 lots) and Grisebach (5 lots), with top results including "Helgoland" at 6,096 EUR. His record at auction internationally reached 1,136,000 USD for the painting "Clemens Braun" at Sotheby's New York in 2005, underscoring the broad spectrum of values across his graphic and painted output.