Erich Mercker and “Technical Subjects”: Industrial Painting in the Eras of Weimar and Nazi Germany

H-Labor-Arts Erich Mercker and “Technical Subjects”: Industrial Painting in the Eras of Weimar and Nazi Germany Discussion published by Patrick Jung on Saturday, October 7, 2017 (Copyright 2008, Society of Industrial Archeology and reprinted with permission) From the author: This article was published earlier in Industrial Archaeology: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology, vol. 34, nos. 1 & 2. It is reproduced here on H-Labor Arts to make it available to a wider audience. I wrote this article while I was in the midst of finishing a book-length manuscript on Erich Mercker, who was, undoubtedly, one of the top industrial artists in Germany from 1919 to 1945. He and his contemporaries (e.g., Fritz Gärtner, Franz Gerwin, Ria Picco-Rückert, Leonhard Sandrock, and Richard Gessner) constituted a school of artists who I have provisionally labeled the “Heroic School” of German industrial art from 1919 to 1945. The Grohmann Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin has paintings produced by virtually all of these artists. It also has more than 90 paintings by Erich Mercker, more than any other art museum in the world. Thus, it is fitting this article should appear on the H-Labor Arts site titled “From the Grohmann….” I also hope this essay will spur more research into Mercker and his “Heroic School” contemporaries, all of whom produced some of the most stunning examples of industrial art during the course of the early twentieth century. Those interested in reading the full-length biography on Erich Mercker (for which this article paved the way) should contact the Grohmann Museum at [email protected]. The Industrial Revolution spawned a sense of amazement as mammoth industrial plants and new technologies dazzled the Western mind with their scope and complexity. However, these same smoke- belching factories also created a sense of anxiety as they radically transformed both the landscape and the social relations that had defined labor for many centuries. Artistic representations of industry, not surprisingly, reflected these contrary sentiments. Early visual depictions of the Industrial Revolution initially continued traditions that had emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and focused upon industrial processes, particularly mechanization, rationalization, and organization. The period from 1870 to 1945 (often called the Second Industrial Revolution) was a time of great industrial expansion that witnessed a shift as artists began to focus upon industrial workers and working-class society. These decades also saw the rise of the labor movement and the bitter and often violent disputes that accompanied it. Thus, while many artists represented the new factories and other industrial facilities as secular temples that glorified mankind’s great technological and commercial achievements, others employed a style of social realism that depicted the often exploitive relationship that industry (and the capital that created it) had with the working masses. The political implications of these two positions were enormous, for the growth of industry increased the power of the increasingly centralized state, particularly for nations such as Germany, Great Britain, and France, that had long-standing rivalries, which ultimately found their expression during the Citation: Patrick Jung. Erich Mercker and “Technical Subjects”: Industrial Painting in the Eras of Weimar and Nazi Germany. H-Labor- Arts. 10-07-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/25767/discussions/406738/erich-mercker-and-%E2%80%9Ctechnical-subjects%E2%80%9D-industrial-p ainting-eras Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Labor-Arts catastrophe of World War I. The social and economic situation of the workers, on the other hand, often was expressed in the militant political movements based upon internationalist socialism and communism that sought to undermine nationalist aspirations. Artists, not surprisingly, often produced works that fell squarely onto one side or the other of this ideological divide.1 This brief survey does not do complete justice to the broad spectrum of artistic representations of these new realities extant in industrializing nations, but it allows for the examination of one painter, Erich Mercker (1891–1973), who believed that the great factories in his native Germany were sources of strength and pride (figure 1). Mercker lived in the industrial city of Metz as a youth, and later studied for a short time as a civil engineer; these experiences instilled in him the notion that the great industrial complexes of the age, as well as other technological wonders, had their own innate beauty. He believed that artists had to understand the technical details of the work process (Arbeitsgang) to render industrial scenes accurately; they also had to possess an aesthetic engagement with their subjects so that the result was not simply a cold, photographic reproduction. merckerfigure1.jpg Citation: Patrick Jung. Erich Mercker and “Technical Subjects”: Industrial Painting in the Eras of Weimar and Nazi Germany. H-Labor- Arts. 10-07-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/25767/discussions/406738/erich-mercker-and-%E2%80%9Ctechnical-subjects%E2%80%9D-industrial-p ainting-eras Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Labor-Arts Figure 1. Erich Mercker, c. 1950. Erich Mercker Manuscript and Image Collection, Grohmann Museum, Milwaukee School of Citation: Patrick Jung. Erich Mercker and “Technical Subjects”: Industrial Painting in the Eras of Weimar and Nazi Germany. H-Labor- Arts. 10-07-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/25767/discussions/406738/erich-mercker-and-%E2%80%9Ctechnical-subjects%E2%80%9D-industrial-p ainting-eras Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Labor-Arts Engineering, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mercker began producing paintings of industrial scenes shortly after World War I. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Mercker’s paintings caught the eye of the Nazi art establishment. Indeed, he became one of the best-known painters of industrial scenes in Germany during the Weimar period (1919–1933), and particularly during the Nazi regime (1933–1945). Not surprisingly, this rapid ascendance was followed by an equally rapid decline after 1945, although Mercker continued to work as a painter until his death in 1973. Very little has been written about Mercker, even in his native Germany; indeed, only two substantive works exist, although their recent publication indicates that scholars are beginning to gain a greater appreciation for his art.2 Mercker is virtually unknown in the United States and other English- speaking countries. Currently, the largest collection of Mercker’s paintings in the world (and one of the major repositories of Mercker documents) is in the Grohmann Museum at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, an institution that also possesses one of the largest collections of industrial landscapes and artistic representations of labor in the world. These resources make it possible to bring Erich Mercker’s artistic depictions of industry to the Anglophone world. Mercker produced about 3,000 paintings during his lifetime. The exact number is not known, for while he kept logbooks of the paintings he produced, he did not initiate this practice until 1945. Still, the extant logbooks record a total 2,488 paintings, all of them oils. The logbooks also clearly indicate that Mercker painted more than just industrial scenes; in fact, for most of his career, he was primarily a landscape painter who also produced cityscapes, seascapes, and harbor scenes. Of the 2,488 paintings that Mercker logged, he listed 399 as industrial scenes. However, he included other types of representations within the category of die technische Motive (or technical subjects) including thirty-two paintings of road construction (particularly of the German Autobahn), thirty-seven construction scenes, and forty-three bridge paintings (most of which depict bridges that were built as part of the Autobahn).3 Mercker was born in 1891 in what is today the French province of Alsace in the town of Saverne, a city the Germans called Zabern. His father, Georg Mercker, was an officer in the local military garrison, for Germany had annexed the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine after the Franco- Prussian War of 1870–1871. Thus, Georg was a member of the German forces that occupied these two French provinces until the end of World War I. In Erich Mercker’s youth, his family later lived in the industrial city of Metz in Lorraine. Metz was particularly influential for the young Mercker, for he later noted that the city was “an area in which the furnaces spew smoke and the song of work can be heard all around.”4 His father retired at the rank of lieutenant colonel when Erich was still a young boy. Rather than steering him toward a military career, Georg strongly encouraged his son to pursue an interest in art, particularly painting. By 1906, the Mercker family was living in Munich, the foremost city of art in Germany. While Berlin by this time was competing with Munich as an art center, Munich still boasted significant state support for artists, as well as important public art collections and art museums such as the Glyptothek, the Pinakothek, and the Neue Pinakothek. The Glaspalast (or Glass Palace), built in 1854, had, for half a century by Mercker’s day, been the principal venue for major art exhibitions, and Munich was also the home of the famous Royal Academy of Fine Arts. However, Mercker never attended the academy; indeed, except for a short Citation: Patrick Jung. Erich Mercker and “Technical Subjects”: Industrial Painting in the Eras of Weimar and Nazi Germany. H-Labor- Arts. 10-07-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/25767/discussions/406738/erich-mercker-and-%E2%80%9Ctechnical-subjects%E2%80%9D-industrial-p ainting-eras Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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