Štěpánka Grunová, Klára Ondrová and Veronika Šmídová, students at Masaryk University, and myself are conducting a research project on the German-Bohemian artist Ernst Neuschul. The idea arose from a seminar on the subject of New Realisms in the interwar period in Germany and Czechoslovakia, held by me at the department of art history in 2022. We planned the project together and are now carrying it out collectively.
The artist became the subject of extensive research in 2001, when Christine Hoffmeister and Pavel Liška prepared material for an exhibition that was shown in Regensburg and Brno. Ivo Habán and Anna Habánová have also revealed aspects of Neuschul’s work with their very meritorious research on German-Bohemian artists, in parts also František Mikš, and Neuschul also features in some other exhibition catalogues. Otherwise, however, the artist has not received greater attention in research, nor has he been read into a broader context. The student project aims to gradually change this, with the distant goal of perhaps one day working on a larger Neuschul publication.
We are grateful for information on the work of Ernst Neuschul! (at drobe@phil.muni.cz)
For now, the team would like to address the following topics:
- Neuschul’s early work in Vienna, Krakow and Prague
- Exoticism
- Neuschul’s contacts in the November Group
- The Workers’ Pictures
- The lost portrait of Edvard Beneš
Ernst Neuschul – Biography
Ernst Neuschul was born in 1895 to a well-off Jewish family in Ústí nad Labem, owners of a hardware store.[1] He was the oldest of three sons and wanted to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. After attending grammar school, he first worked as a decorative painter in Prague, as his parents refused to support him. He only took courses at the Academy as an extern. In 1915 he went to Vienna and studied for one semester at the ‘K.K. Graphische Lehranstalt’, an alternative to the School of Applied Arts. The academy in Krakow became his next destination, as he fled from the threat of military service in Habsburg. The threat made him inventive, among other things he starved himself or played the mentally ill. In Krakow he belonged to the circle of students who studied with Jozef Méhoffer, a Polish symbolist painter working with lavish colours. In 1917/18, Neuschul returned to Prague, the last period of his studies before moving to Berlin, which culminated in a solo exhibition in Weinert’s Salon, where he presented 39 of his works. He always emphasized producitivity and seemed to find new motives and scenes effortlessly. The last year in Prague marked a phase of his career, where he found immediate success.
This is also when he met Takka Takka in a Prague night club, who captivated him with her exotic countenance. The woman of Javanese descent became his favourite model, and they soon entered a relationship. They married in 1921, and instead of Neuschul further pursuing his career as a painter, they both prepared a stage show and went on a world tour as a Javanese dance duo that spanned across Europe and the United States. Before that, both presumably spent the years 1919/20 travelling extensively, among other places to Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Java. The main intention for these journeys was to trace her origins in Java. Dancers and artists successfully integrated exotic themes from the Middle or Far East and especially India and Southeast Asia as a common feature of dance revues since the early 20th century.[2] During this time, Neuschul and Takka-Takka both discussed a joint project and soon decided to develop a concept for a dance revue including exotic costumes and stage decorations. Having some experience with Yoga and theatrical performances, Neuschul himself joined the revue in the second main role of Yoga-Taro (a term for an ‘expert of yoga’).[3] The tours lasted from 1921 to 1926 and saw them travelling to the United States, to Paris and the Spanish royal court, seemingly enjoying great success and drawing a lot of attention from newspapers, as the many reviews in Neuschul’s belongings show.
After the tours from 1921 to 1926, Neuschul made his breakthrough as a painter in Berlin, securing a contract with the well-known Neumann-Nierendorf Gallery, a leading space for contemporary art in the 1920s in Berlin. Neuschul oriented himself to New Objectivity, as is indicated by his participation at the gallery’s major exhibition in 1927, which was devoted to the style.[4] During this time, he became interested in the workers’ movement and later advanced to become one of the leaders of the left-wing Novembergruppe.[5] This led to hostility and members of the Nazi party confiscated or destroyed his works at his last Berlin exhibition in 1933. He fled with his second wife Christl Bell to his hometown Ústí nad Labem, where radical parts of the Sudetendeutschen, the German speaking citizen of Czechoslovakia, destroyed his works at his last exhibition in 1939.[6] He had no choice but to emigrate. He spent the last part of his life in England teaching at the university, travelling and enjoying sporadic local success as an artist. Ernst Neuschul died in 1968 at the age of 73.
[1] See for his biography the catalogue: Christine Hoffmeister, Pavel Liška, Jana Vránová (eds.): Ernst Neuschul 1895-1969, Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg (Brno: Dům Umění 2001).
[2] Matthew Isaac Cohen, Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on International Stages 1905-1952 (Basingstoke u.a.: Palgrave Macmillan 2010). See also Idem, Dancing The Subject Of ‘Java’: International Modernism and Traditional Performance, 1899–1952, in: Indonesia and the Malay World, Vol. 35, 2007, pp. 9-29.
[3] Cohen 2007, p. 20.
[4] Archives of the Berlinische Galerie (BG), belongings of Christine Hoffmeister, see scrapbook Nr. 16, 30 and following numbers. For instance: Berliner Ausstellungen, in: Der Cicerone, Jg. XIX, 1927, Heft 3, p. 95. Fritz Schiff, Neue Sachlichkeit, in: Scherls Magazin, 3. Jg., Heft 8, August 1927, p. 851.
[5] Ralf Burmeister, Thomas Köhler, Janina Nentwig (eds.), Freiheit. Die Kunst der Novembergruppe 1918-1935 (München: Prestel), p. 212.
[6] See also the chapter on Neuschul in František Mikš, Posedlost – Extrémy a vášně malířské moderny (Brno: Books & Pipes 2018), pp. 143-171.