Behmer, Marcus. (1879–1958)

"Der Tod im Baum" - Woodcut from "Ver Sacrum"

Striking early woodcut from the German illustrator, graphic designer and painter, created for the final issue of the Vienna Secession art journal Ver Sacrum in 1903, when Behmer was only 24. The illustration shows the skeletal, red figure of Death crouching in the branches of a tree. Identified in a later hand at the foot. Fine. 6.25 x 6.5 inches (16.6 x 16 cm).

"Fascinated by the book art of Charles Ricketts and directly influenced by Aubrey Beardsley's revolution is in the field of illustration, Marcus Behmer starts out at the turn of the 19th century as an autodidact. He soon liberates himself from Art Nouveau and, parallel to Expressionism that was just emerging and to the new impulses from the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, develops his own inimitable formal idiom. In his native Weimar he catches the eye of the legendary Harry Graf Kessler. Behmer draws, writes and designs books (for Kessler's Cranach Press, but above all for the publisher Insel) developing a style of engraving that was both absolutely precise and astonishingly personal. He achieves a degree of fame in the bibliophile circles that keep abreast of the beginnings of Modernism. At the start of his career everything seems possible for Behmer, he makes early comic books, creates a language of ornament all of his own, and produces writings and pictures of astonishing comic imaginativeness and sexual frankness. But as early as the twenties Behmer suffers from the crisis in the field of the art book, and consequently from his unwavering dedication to the small format. While his book illustrations for Oscar Wilde's "La Sainte Courtisane", Hermann Bang's "Exzentrische Novellen" (Eccentric Novellas) and above all Phillip Otto Runge's "Von dem Fischer und syner Fru" (Of the Fisherman and his Wife) are highly regarded internationally, his visibly freer graphic works continue to disappear into a cultural black hole which swallows up almost all Modernist illustrators. He is still sufficiently visible however to come up on the National Socialists' radar, and in 1937 they imprisoned Behmer, who was living openly as a homosexual, for two years." (Oliver Tepel for Galerie Daniel Buchholz, quoted at 50watts.com/marcus-behmer.) (17273)

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