Otto Freundlich
1878–1943 · German Reich · Abstract art
The story
When the Nazis opened their Degenerate Art show in Munich in July 1937, the picture they put on the cover of the guidebook was a photograph of a sculpted head by Otto Freundlich. He had made it in 1912 and called it The New Man, a hopeful, near-abstract face meant to stand for a better human being to come. The organisers chose it to mean the opposite, as proof of what they claimed art had sunk to.
Freundlich was a German Jewish artist and one of the early pioneers of abstract art, who had spent much of his working life in Paris among the avant-garde. His work was stripped from German museums, and the 1912 head, taken from a museum in Hamburg, was afterward lost and probably destroyed.
He stayed in France as the war closed in. In February 1943 he was arrested in the Pyrenees, where he had been hiding, and deported to occupied Poland, where he was killed that same year, at Majdanek or at Sobibor. The 1912 head survives now only in photographs, among them the one the organisers printed on that catalogue cover.
