Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966)

"Ludwig Meidner was born in Silesia from jewish family. In 1905 he moved to Berlin and worked as a fashion illustrator until a relative gave him enough money to spend a year in Paris in 1906-7; there he studied Manet, Cézanne and Van Gogh at the Academies Julian and Cormon and met Modigliani. The next five years in Berlin were fairly unproductive and it was not until 1912 that he suddenly found his own style, almost certainly after seeing the Futurist exhibition in the Sturm Gallery in April. With two other fellow countrymen from Silesia, Richard Janthur and Jakob Steinhardt, he founded the group Die Pathetiker. Their style derived from the crazy perspectives of Robert Delaunay and the Futurists, but what was startling were the apocalyptic subjects, dominated by earthquakes, burning cities, floods and revolutions. This style was closely paralleled contemporary Expressionist poetry. In 1935 he moved to Cologne and in 1938 he fled to England where he met Kurt Schwitters in a refugees-camp. In 1952 he returned to Germany and died in Darmstadt fourteen years later.

No catalog or study of Meidner's prints has ever been written nor is it easy to find the material on which to base judgements, but it seems that he only made drypoints or, in later years, etchings. The earliest drypoints seem to have been made in 1913 and the best belong to the two years before the First World War. His production increased enormously after the War and he must have made several hundreds of etchings in the early 1920s. Prints by him from the 1930s or later are rarely seen." (Excerpt from The Print in Germany. By Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths)