150th anniversary of the birth of Heinrich Zille – Lively Eye on Old Berlin
Onstage and in various exhibitions Berlin this year has been celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Heinrich Zille.
“Women in the Pub,” by Heinrich Zille, 1909
Michael Kimmelman writes: “Onstage and in various exhibitions Berlin this year has been celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Heinrich Zille.”
Children posing in a courtyard in the Krogel neighborhood in Berlin, photograph by Heinrich Zille, 1896
“The other day a flood of Berliners lovingly pored over his sketches, prints, paintings, photographs and obscene drawings (did I mention he was a sometime pornographer?) on the last day of a large retrospective at the Academy of Arts. The show included a silent film based on a story he wrote, a melodrama of surpassing misery and tedium, ending with the murder-suicide of a young boy and an old woman. This seems to make Germans wax nostalgic the way Americans turn soft over old Saturday Evening Post covers and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’”
“Two Street Girls,” an etching by Heinrich Zille
“Europeans still cherish their local heroes. When earthquakes struck Umbria a decade or so ago, headlines around the world fretted about the basilica in Assisi and about frescoes by Cimabue and Giotto.”
“Ring Fight (at the Fair),” a 1903 drawing by Heinrich Zille
“Were he a Berliner, he might have been thinking of Zille, who was born near Dresden on Jan. 10 in 1858, but came to Berlin as a child and bound himself inextricably to the city.”
“Self-Portrait, 1892″
“Modesty spared him the lugubriousness that weighs down much other art from the era. In American terms, you could describe his subject as a German ‘Our Gang’ and his style as akin to John Sloan’s or George Bellows’s, but the comparison falls into the trap of cultural equivalency.”
“The Roses from the South”
“Partly the explanation can be found in his remarkable, almost offhand photographs of the city’s underbelly — its back alleys and wide avenues and its garbage blowing in the wind and piles of dirt and tent villages on the edges of town — literally views of the end of the road. These encapsulated a notion of a place, Berlin, forever unfinished and, as locals like to say, kaput.”
“Christmas at the Market,” by Heinrich Zille, 1912
“Zille intended his photographs to serve as inspiration for his drawings, in which he somehow added the smell of sweat and spilled beer and smoke and gaslight. Mobs jam his city scenes like circus clowns in a Volkswagen, and nothing takes place in private, least of all sex. Today, when much of Berlin feels empty and underpopulated, the ghosts of Zille’s pictures take up available space in the imagination.”
“The Changing Room in a Suburban Theater,” by Heinrich Zille, 1904
“Global culture, by its nature, focuses on big names and rankings, to our general impoverishment. Some years ago John Willett, a scholar of German culture wrote about the dangers of embracing ‘a national or parochial view of art — as even the most enlightened are sometimes tempted to do,’ because ‘as you narrow your horizon in this way you no longer judge by the highest standards.’ That’s right.”
The cover of the first edition of the book “Street Children,” Berlin 1908, with a drawing by Heinrich Zille
“But Zille reminds us of another lesson, that high standards are not the only standards that count. After all, the essence of his pictures was to show how monotonous life would be if we only cared about what’s great in the world and not about everything local and particular and even sometimes untranslatable that actually makes life rich. When Berliners celebrate Zille’s birthday, this is what they’re celebrating.” N.Y. Times
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