Siegfried Berndt, north & south

Last night a reader in Germany put me onto a number of proofs by Siegfried Berndt in a Berlin auction house catalogue. I need to say first off not all of the prints you see here are for sale at Hauff & Auvermann kunstauktionen-berlin.de and also need to thank Klaus for what turned out to be a very good tip.

Because a number of the prints for sale use the expressionst style that Berndt adopted soon after the end of the war - if not before. His earlier Japanese-influenced woodcuts come up on Google but other work stays secluded in catalogues ignored even by universal search engines. Not that Berndt dropped his earlier style altogether because he was still making prints from his Auf de Rehde block in full Hiroshige mode as late as 1925. Like his beloved sailing-boats, I think Berndt tacked with the wind.

The first print is Nordischer Hafen (northern harbour) from 1919. It comes in at least three versions, the red one at the top being the one for sale at Hauff & Auvermann. And before you rush off to put in a bid, the work you see here is properly valued in Berlin and does not come cheap. Mind you, hardcore expressionists will cost alot more.

The monochrome woodcut, above, is Suedlicher Hafen, also from 1919. Which southern harbour it is remains a mystery to me. Eight o' clock in the morning over a mug of tea is not the best time for infallible research but having turned up variants of Nordischer Hafen, I am going to assume that Berndt did much the same thing for its companion print. During his career, Berndt tried his hand at many things, working his way through studios and styles with considerable gusto. It says a great deal that an artist working in Dresden should be so taken with boats and the sea.

It was a long-term interest, as Segelboote (above) from 1909 shows. It's habits like these - using the same types of image and making prints in colour - that set him against the general trend of early modernist prints in Germany. By 1909, this woodcut would have seemed almost conventional when set against Karl Schmidt-Rottluff or Erich Heckel. Schmidt-Rottluff in particular had looked to west African carving as an examplar. Nothing could have been less use to him than the craftsmanship of Hokusai. The catalogues at Hauff & Auvermann suggest that Berndt had just as many problems with printing on japan as Sylvan Boxsius did in Britain. Like Boxsius, the work comes complete with printing creases (Knitterspuren vom Druck). This helps to explain why some prints aren't signed. He tried hard to get it right. You can adopt a new style more easily than a fresh attitude.

But the much bolder cutting and the flattened perspective are lessons he had learned from the younger printmakers. But, to be honest, one of the problems with this work is that it seems weaker than their work does, which is a shame, because he was prolific and  made many good images. Which is another way of saying you haven't seen the last of Siegfried Berndt.

Tales from ebay: Siegfried Berndt's 'Auf der Rehde'

It is somehow rewarding to see a print that has been recently featured on the blog come up for sale on ebay. I'm not suggesting there is a connection but from Germany we have Siegfried Berndt's first version of the colour woodcut Auf der Rehde from 1911. This is the ebay print above; I have added, below, the proof that I used on the post, for comparison.

I'm never sure why it is that sellers don't get the image square but it doesn't always fill me with confidence. But one important thing included, all the same, is the full paper size, which shows the deckle edge at the bottom. But the image isn't signed and so far there has only been one bid so that it stands right now at €1 only. Unfortunately, the dealer also adds Blatt im unteren linken Teil etwas knittrig,  as you can see below:

                                                                                  
Now, this creasing detracts but I don't want to go on about the disadvantages because, etwas knittrig or not, this is a fine print, romantic and well-expressed, and well worth having depending on how you feel about creases. I've bought unsigned and imperfect images of German work in the past because they are interesting to have and can be expensive otherwise. As for the change in the colours you can see, his version from 1925 (see August post) is radically different. He experiemented, as I said in the post. This is one of the most attractive things about Berndt. He never really stayed the same. And if you already have one version of this print, it may be wise to buy another. I am only waiting now for a deluge of versions. Go!

Siegfried Berndt

If Emil Orlik went all the way to Japan to learn the art of woodcut, then Siegfried Berndt (1880 - 1946) did the next best thing: he went to Scotland. He was born in Goerlitz in the far south-east of Germany in 1880. If  he had been born in 1889 as some people seem to think, he would have been nine years old when he entered the Academy of Fine Art in Dresden and although he came out as a prizewinner, even Berndt wasn't that sort of prodigy.

I've started this post off with two versions of Auf der Rehde (the topmost is from 1925, the one below from 1911) to try and give some idea of what kind of an artist we are dealing with here: someone willing to try out new ideas and someone who was willing to learn. At Dresden between 1899 and 1906, a leading student of the landscape painter Eugen Bracht (1842 - 1921), he had also managed to become an accomplished printmaker. My hunch is that, like Orlik, he had to pick things up where he could. Winning a travel scholarship in 1907 certainly gave him the chance to study far away from the academy.

Paris was an essential stop-off on the itinerary and Bruckenlandscahft von St Cloud shows an artist who has not only learned from Japanese woodblock but an artist who was well-aware of the lessons of French impression. But what strikes me most about this work is the freedom of his handling. This is still a painter's work, with none of the graphic qualities we associate with C19th Japanese printmaking. In fact, I will say this now: I think talk of the influence of Japanese art on Berndt has been overdone. I don't know if this print was made in France or when he returned to Germany. He also visited Belgium.

But Scotland is far more intriguing. I certainly can't think of any German or Austrian printmaker that made Scotland the subject of one print let alone two. In Hafen von Stranraer  he moves sideways into the spare, muted territory of the German printmaker Wilhelm Laage. Unfortunately, I was unable to track down an image of Brucke uber der Firth of Forth but Edinburgh is nearer to home. The idea that fascinates me is this one: Frank Morley Fletcher has become director of the Edinburgh College of Art in 1906 and I am guessing this is what took Berndt as far as Scotland. He wanted to learn from someone who was working in the Japanese manner. (By then Orlik was not). I also think that Orlik's Japanese prints were too literal for what Berndt wanted.

This woodcut is seriously Japanese but is seriously German as well. The sketchiness of the details also remind me of Fletcher. The glorious print below does not. This makes me think of Ponte degli Alpini by a Scotsman, Charles Hodge Mackie (1862 - 1920). What I suppose I am saying is that Berndt was somewhere between magpie and chamaeleon. It's another way of saying he was modern.

I am also going to say now that I am a late convert to the work of  Siegfried Berndt despite the nice noises I have made elsewhere online. (Look if you dare). I thought his prints were hesitant and amateurish but there is nothing like the kind of photographs you get on ebay to give the worst impression possible of any artist let alone a more experimental one like Berndt. So I didn't look farther.

It would be very easy to play spot-the-artist with Berndt. It's a temptation I'm going to resist. What I will say is that he must surely have known the work of the impressionists as well as Cezanne and Van Gogh. The three cows are starker than Walther Klemm would have done them but I think he knew Klemm's early woodcuts. (Klemm taught in Weimar from 1913 onwards). The strong colours and high horizon are Klemm with the Vienna Secession removed. The use of other artists is a key to his prolific printmaking - remember that he was also painting.

I am going to leave you to make up your own minds about the rest of these strong and varied prints. Yes, he often does boats and water but he is far less susceptible to the old standby of snow. (I held a snow scene back, partly because the image was murky). I don't really know a great deal about his life or career after he returned to Dresden. He married and between 1932 and 1941 taught at Waldorfschule. There must be other written sources in German somewhere and his prints are still available. A commercial Berlin gallery held an exhibition of his woodcuts from 1905 to 1945 only last August.

I know he came to monchrome woodcuts after the first war, surely influenced by the contemporary work first of Die Brucke and then the Expressionists. This says alot about his willingness to adapt. But true to form, he amalgamates with aplomb. Because there is Cezanne and van Gogh in the mix as well as art deco. (Those two artists I have to say come over more in his oil paintings). And with facility like that, it's no wonder he won prizes. [I forgot to say I nned to credit Annex Galleries for the 1925 version of Auf der Ruhe.]