Leopold Museum Honors Max Oppenheimer: Rediscovery of an Almost Forgotten Protagonist of Expressionism
09.10.2023
Large-scale retrospective highlights innovative paths chosen by this artist so significant to Modernism
The extensive presentation illustrates not only the radicalism with which the Vienna-born painter and graphic artist kept transforming his style but also the substantial contribution he made to modern art. Featuring around 180 exhibits, the presentation Max Oppenheimer. Expressionist Pioneer sheds light on the artist’s largely unknown oeuvre and taps into the wealth of his motifs, ranging from portraits and religious themes, via still lifes to music depictions. The artist attracted attention early on, and exhibited his works all over Europe. While his successful career frequently took him abroad between 1912 and 1932, he invariably returned to Vienna. He became acquainted with numerous protagonists of Modernism, including Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Paul Cassirer, Adolf Loos and Sigmund Freud, and explored trend-setting art movements, such as Cubism and Futurism. In 1938, Oppenheimer was forced to flee from the National Socialists via Switzerland to the US. In New York, where he died in 1954, he was unable to build on his former success.
“The following dictum, taken from Oppenheimer’s autobiographical manuscript Aus meinem Leben [From My Life], became the artist’s basic attitude: ‘You never stay still, there is no uniformity that forces inactivity; instead, you drift restlessly towards new experiences, towards unknown horizons.’ In light of his successful career and the innovative paths he took, it is surprising that Max Oppenheimer’s oeuvre has not only failed to be recognized throughout the past decades but has all but faded into oblivion. It is therefore all the more gratifying that this large-scale retrospective exhibition at the Leopold Museum now affords the opportunity to retrace Oppenheimer’s largely unknown but surprising oeuvre, and to rediscover this artist who was of such significance to Modernism.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum and curator of the exhibition
Early Oeuvre
Max Oppenheimer – also known by his abbreviated signature MOPP – was born in 1885 into an intellectual, middle-class family. At the age of 15, he started attending the General School of Painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, before transferring to the Prague Academy. His participations in the legendary exhibitions Kunstschau Wien 1908 and Internationale Kunstschau Wien 1909 earned him first recognition and introduced him to other progressive artists. The first room of the exhibition is dedicated to portrait painting. Vienna around 1910 was shaped by a radical reorientation of the art scene and a modernization of existing paradigms. This novel focus on capturing the nature of the portrayed led to a gradual stylistic transformation towards Expressionism, with El Greco, Rembrandt and Liebermann acting as Oppenheimer’s role models.
MOPP and His Networks
The presentation looks at the artist’s role and networks through his contemporaries Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. His initial friendship with the latter would soon turn into a veritable feud. In 1911, Oppenheimer created a poster for his exhibition at the renowned Munich gallery Thannhauser, which prompted Kokoschka to accuse him of plagiarism. Kokoschka insisted that Oppenheimer’s work was a copy of his 1910 poster for the magazine Der Sturm, and his circle went on to discredit Oppenheimer’s oeuvre.
The friendship and artistic connection between Schiele and Oppenheimer, by contrast, would last years, and manifested in their shared artistic work – Schiele’s watercolor The Painter Max Oppenheimer (1910) and Oppenheimer’s painting Portrait of Egon Schiele (1910), for instance, illustrate how the two artists portrayed and inspired each other. The Leopold Museum’s latest acquisition hails from this time, and is an icon of early Expressionism: Oppenheimer’s Self-Portrait (1911). The work, which was long considered lost, resurfaced at an auction in 2023, but was withdrawn shortly before the sale owing to claims raised by the heirs of the work’s former owner. The painting was once owned by the Viennese physician, merchant and art collector Dr. Oskar Reichel. Following Austria’s Anschluss in 1938, Dr. Reichel was persecuted by the National Socialists for being Jewish, and died in 1943 in Vienna. The whereabouts of his art collection are still largely unknown. Following a settlement with Oskar Reichel’s legal heir, the Leopold Museum purchased the work in August 2023 to be able to make it accessible to the public.
Diversity of Motifs and Styles
Mythologically charged depictions like Samson (1911), or The Scourging and Lamentation (1913), show how the artist cast himself in the role of a sufferer owing to the insults he sustained as a result of Kokoschka’s hate campaign, due to emerging Anti-Semitism and on account of his homosexuality, which was condemned by society. While he had initially hoped that World War I would act as a catharsis, Oppenheimer came to see this as an illusion, and in 1915 went into exile in Switzerland as a staunch pacifist. There, he began to explore musical themes in his art, a focus that is highlighted in two exhibition rooms. The presentation further showcases many examples of his extraordinary skill as a graphic artist and of his exploration of still lifes throughout various periods in his oeuvre. In 1925, the artist moved once again to Berlin. MOPP captured the spirit of this era shaped by contrasts – by resignation and accusations on the one hand, by longing and a zest for life on the other – in his depictions of the diversions sought by metropolitan society, such as Six-Day Race (1929), for which he merged aspects of New Objectivity with Futurist elements.
Persecution and Exile
When the National Socialists rose to power, Oppenheimer was persecuted in Germany on account of his Jewish roots, and labeled a “degenerate artist”. His works were confiscated from public collections, prompting him to return in 1932 to his hometown of Vienna. When German troops invaded Austria in 1938, he was forced to flee via Switzerland to the US. Many of his works were destroyed, while others are considered lost. His exile in the US turned out to be very difficult for Oppenheimer; his uprooting led to apathy and a stagnation of his creativity. Max Oppenheimer died in 1954, lonely and impoverished, in New York.
Curator: Hans-Peter Wipplinger
The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive, bilingual catalogue with essays by Markus Böggemann, Alfred Fehringer, Kerstin Jesse, Lisa Smit, Aline Marion Steinwender, Hans-Peter Wipplinger as well as an artist’s biography compiled by Lena Scholz.
The exhibition opening ceremony, hosted by Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger, was attended by more than 1,500 visitors, among them the head of the board of directors of the Leopold Museum Private Foundation Josef Ostermayer and board member Daniella Spera, the collector Elisabeth Leopold, Moritz Stipsicz, the Leopold Museum’s Commercial Director, the general manager of mumok Karola Kraus, Peter Weinhäupl (director Klimt Foundation), Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, the owner of Siwacht Christian Knobloch with the security company’s GM Andreas Plamann, the collectors Diethard and Waltraud Leopold, Reinhard Diethardt, the partners of the auction house im Kinsky Ernst Ploil and Michael Kovacek with Charlotte Kreuzmayr, the gallery owners Herbert Giese (Giese & Schweiger), Christa Armann (Galerie Ruberl), the art dealer Walter Freller (Kunsthandel Freller), Marianne Hussl-Hörmann (Dorotheum expert), Sascha Worrich (marketing expert & gallery manager), Pia Schölnberger (head of the Commission for Provenance Research of the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport [BMKÖS]), Lisa Smit (Van Gogh Museum), Alexander Klingenbrunner (BMKÖS legal affairs), Bernd Ernsting (chairman of LETTER Stiftung), the curator of the collection of Klosterneuburg Abbey Wolfgang Huber, Ebi Kohlbacher (Wienerroither & Kohlbacher), Andrea Glanninger-Leitner (director of the gallery Wienerroither & Kohlbacher), publisher Bernhard Echte (Nimbus), Bernadette Reinhold (head of the University of Applied Arts Vienna’s Oskar Kokoschka Center), the art historians Markus Kristan and Stefan Üner, the artists Gerda Leopold, Walter Vopava and Peter Baldinger, entrepreneur Peter Goldscheider, Sylvia Eisenburger-Kunz (Society of Friends of the Fine Arts), Edelbert Köb (former mumok director), musicologist Therese Muxeneder, philosopher August Ruhs, historian David Marwell, provenance researcher Konstantin Ferihumer, Katharina Henkel (head of the culture festival Internationale Tage organized by Boehringer Ingelheim; author; curator), the curators Kerstin Jesse (LM) and Chiara Galbusera (OeNB), Martin Engelberg (member of parliament; ÖVP), Heinz Neumann (art & antiquities appraiser), Werner Muhm (former director of the Vienna Chamber of Labour), musicologist Markus Böggemann, and many others.
Link to the APA picture gallery
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