Hans Baluschek

Hans Baluschek was fully aware of the special place he occupied in the art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: “The academic couldn’t stand me, because my painting was too wild for him! The Impressionist complained that my painting was not ‘painting’. The Symbolist and the Fantasist were disgusted by my lack of fantasy; just what the Dadaists and the Expressionists think of me I haven’t bothered to find out yet; no doubt, they hold me in contempt.” Thus wrote Baluschek in his 1920 essay “Battling for my Art.”  

Hans Baluschek had a very unusual perspective on his times, and in particular on the growth, expansion, and proletarization of Berlin. Baluschek was born on 9 May 1870 in Breslau, today Wrocław in Poland. His father was a railroad engineer and aroused in his son, very early on, an interest in machines and especially the railroad. In 1876, the family moved to Berlin, where they lived in the newly constructed neighborhood of what is today Berlin-Kreuzberg, with its largely proletarian population. Thus even as a young man Baluschek became acquainted with the ideas of Socialism. From his high school graduation through 1893, he studied at the Royal Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Baluschek read a lot and himself wrote short stories. Reading the French Realist Émile Zola was an epiphany for him—one which would influence his art. He distanced himself from the academic style of his teachers and looked for his subjects in the outskirts of Berlin—on construction sites, in cemeteries, in railroad yards. “I was interested in medical, philosophical and economic studies; as well as what life was like in the East, the Southeast, the North of Berlin—and beyond city limits. Workers, the petty bourgeois, prostitutes and pimps turned up in my art and represented the new life that I wanted to live. I tried to give real—even if only two-dimensional—form to poverty, constraint, need, depravity, and vice. I feel I am God’s instrument, looking benignly upon the needy people that I am confronted with. I know what beauty is, I point out where it is lacking, and I search for it.” 

In 1898, Baluschek was a founding member of the Berliner Secession. Along with Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Nagel and Heinrich Zille, he counted among its socially critical artists. In the First World War, Baluschek at first contributed to publications supporting the War and is even said to have reported voluntarily for military service. He was more circumspect towards the end of the War and, initially, towards the November Revolution. In 1919 he illustrated the children’s book Peterchens Mondfahrt (Little Peter’s Voyage to the Moon) – which introduced him to a broader public. Eventually, he began to support the Weimar Republic, becoming a member of the SPD (Social Democrats’ Party) in 1920. He got involved in associations supporting artists and published in newspapers supporting the Social Democrats and Communists. From 1929 to 1933, he was in charge of the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung (Berlin’s Great Art Exhibition). His portraits of a “Prostitute on the Outskirts of the City,” of a “Cocaine Fiend,” of a “Drunkard Woman,” and of a “Procuress” from 1923, among others, show just how close he was to the lives of real people in the Weimar Republic. His preferred subjects remained the “little people”—those whom luck had neglected.  

Following the Machtübernahme, the National Socialists stripped Baluschek of all his public offices and defamed him as a “degenerate artist”. He died on 28 September 1935 in Berlin. West German art historians scarcely acknowledged his existence for many decades, but he is now once again recognized as one of the great Realists of the early 20th century. 

text: Matthias Zwarg, translation: Darrell Wilkins