Adjoining exhibits at Baylor University’s Martin Museum of Art offer contrasts not only in style and technique, but intent.
“The Hammer That Shapes Reality,” a collection of black-and-white woodcut prints and etchings by 20th century German artist Käthe Kollwitz, shows art made to communicate timeless messages of pacifism and maternal love.
“Clickbait! A Treasure Trove of Pulp Fiction Cover Art” offers bold, colorful and largely disposable art created for the equally disposable medium of 20th century pulp fiction books and magazines.
Much of the Kollwitz exhibit, displayed on black walls with artwork framed by simple white wood strips, comes from the Martin Museum’s permanent collection, its nine Kollwitz artworks supplanted by six pieces from Kollwitz’s “Seven Woodcuts on War” series loaned from the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin. The Blanton will rotate its loaned items with six others from the same series after three months.
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Martin collections manager Mike Schuetz felt the number of Kollwitz pieces held by the Martin could prove a nucleus for a show on Kollwitz, a Prussian-born artist active in the decades before and after World War I, whose career was largely marginalized and suppressed when the Nazis came to power in the 1930s.
Kollwitz advocated for women, the working class and peace in much of her artwork, the latter subject turning intensely personal when Peter, the youngest of her three sons, died in action in the early months of World War I. In 1932, she and a number of German artists, authors and scientists signed a socialist party “Urgent Call for Unity” opposing the Nazis, which brought them to the attention of the Nazi Party, and in 1933 she lost her position at the Prussian Academy of Arts, where she had been the first female professor.
The 1930s and 1940s saw the artist largely banned from exhibiting, but she declined an offer from a collector to move to the United States, preferring to stay with her family. Her husband Karl, a doctor, died in 1940 and their Berlin home and her studio were destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943. She and her family moved to smaller cities in the next two years before her death in 1945, only 16 days before the war’s end.
“She was an outcast in her own country,” Schuetz noted. The visual power of her work, however, underlined the urgency in which she saw issues of pacifism, women and mothers and their children. “It has a rawness to it that’s very visible and humbling. There’s not a lot of window dressing, not a lot of frosting,” Schuetz said.
Baylor graduate Makayla Jenkins did research on Kollwitz and her life while an intern at the Martin Museum. “The Hammer That Shapes Reality,” a quote from German playwright Bertolt Brecht about the impact of art, highlights some of that research with a poem Jenkins wrote, “The Fortress Against Death,” in a lantern-like display in the exhibit’s center.
Pulp art
Eye-catching color, striking composition and the occasional image of women in provocative poses mark “Clickbait!” in the neighboring gallery. The show of more than 40 paintings by 16 artists, paired with the book and magazine covers that were the ultimate destinations for their work, meant months of sleuthing for Adam Kimball, a graduate assistant in museum studies.
Kimball said most of the approximately 60 paintings found in the Martin’s permanent collection were unframed, often with printing registration marks, mixing strokes and notes to printers scribbled in their margins, with little more than an artist’s name and publication title on the back to go on.
The work created was strictly for money, made on paper with little intent for permanence and focused on the essentials of genre fiction: women in suggestive poses for detective mysteries and romances; men and guns for westerns, war stories and crime fiction; futuristic scenes for science fiction.
The demands of commerce shaped the art. Paperback covers were small, requiring art that could communicate at a glance and in a forest of paperbacks with competing covers. Wrinkled clothes and dynamic poses implied the action on the pages within the covers and artists often got little more than generic phrases, such as “killer surgeon,” as a book description to illustrate, Kimball said.
The rise of a competing visual medium — television — new entertainments and cultural change spelled the end to the heyday of pulp fiction, the 1940s and 1950s. The Martin exhibit serves as an example of skillful, yet disposable art created for, and confined by, strictly commercial use, Kimball noted.
"The Hammer That Shapes Reality" and "Clickbait!"
When, where: "The Hammer That Shapes Reality" through Nov. 10 and "Clickbait!" through Sept. 1 at Baylor University's Martin Museum of Art, Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 1-5 p.m. Sundays.
Admission: Free.
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- Käthe Kollwitz
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Carl Hoover
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