Fritz Schwimbeck

(1889 – Munich – 1972)

Blooming Cactus

Signed and dated lower right F. Schwimbeck/ 1943

Oil on panel

27 5/8 x 19 ¾ inches (70 x 50 cm)

Munich artist Fritz Schwimbeck is best known for his dark, psychological pen and ink images from before 1920. Labeled a Malerpoet (Painter poet), Schwimbeck illustrated numerous books with his engrossing narrative prints and graphic drawings. The term Malerpoet was made popular by the German art historian and publisher of the important art periodical Die Kunst für Alle, Dr. Georg Jakob Wolf (1882-1936), who coined the description for artists that created visions of pure, primeval imagination. The Malerpoeten championed black and white images because they believed that a lack of color allowed for just enough distance from reality, moving the viewer to create their own subjective understanding of the picture. German artists drew upon the brooding influence of Albrecht Durer’s prints to create a modern supernatural experience. Schwimbeck’s many notable accomplishments include illustrations for art books and editions of works by Arnold Strindberg, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann.  

As a young man Schwimbeck studied painting at the Technical University in Munich under the history painter Friedrich Bodenmüller (1845-1913). Following his training at the university, he maintained his studies in art history and taught himself to make etchings. After World War I, Schwimbeck continued to illustrate Malerbücher or Livres d’artiste, but his focus soon shifted to subjects of the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. Like many artists of the inter-war period, Schwimbeck acted on the imperative to react to the turmoil of the Weimar Era, moving his gaze from the fantastic and to the objective truth. His decadent images of horror and fantasy no longer served the depressed socio-political climate of his defeated country. Before the war, Munich was considered a vibrant cultural epicenter of Germany, but the city’s significance declined in 1920s as the capital city of Berlin gained notoriety for its energetic progressivism. Munich gave birth to an alternative approach to the New Objectivity that countered Berlin’s Verist School, which was characterized by the graphic street scenes of George Grosz and Otto Dix. These “right-wing” artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit, as dubbed by the art historian Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, stood on the opposite end of the spectrum from the ruthless and often grotesque satirical images of society. The Munich painters were rooted in classicism, their images seemingly sterile and removed, intimating a return to order. Painters such as Georg Schrimpf and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen found great critical success upon their participation in Hartlaub's 1925 namesake exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Mannheim. However, the city’s fame was short-lived, and no artists from Munich were invited to exhibit at the second “Neue Sachlichkeit” exhibition, held in Amsterdam in 1929.

Schwimbeck revisited the current subject of a blooming cactus set in front of an Oriental rug over the course of at least ten years (Figs. 1 and 2). The motif of the cactus was widely depicted by artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit, often conveying a nuanced emotional experience of isolation and austerity. With its strange and almost alien fuzzy stems and bright white blooms, Schwimbeck’s coarse and spiny plant straddles the line between inorganic and alive. The setting for the potted plant is constricted and detached, kept away from any windows or other allusions to nature. It is no wonder that the cactus is often understood as a metaphor for the human condition during the Weimar Republic, especially for “Degenerate” artists who continued to live in Germany after Hitler rose to power. The cactus may have been a careful way to express the crisis of disassociation from one’s country and identity.