Ludwig Meidner

Painter and printmaker Ludwig Meidner was born in Bernstadt, Germany, in 1884. He studied at the Royal School of Art in Breslau for about two years beginning in 1903, before relocating to Berlin. Here, he established a career as a draftsman, and garnered work as a fashion illustrator. He briefly lived in Paris, between 1906–07, where he took classes at the Académie Julian, and befriended fellow artist Amedeo Modigliani.

After returning to Berlin in 1907, Meidner lived in abject poverty, curtailing his art making, as he was rarely able to afford supplies. In 1911, Max Beckmann gave him a grant to help support his artistic pursuits. Although not associated with a specific group, Meidner produced portraits and landscapes in an Expressionist manner, with many of his landscapes later being categorised as “apocalyptic” due to their catastrophic, chaotic tone and subjects of devastation. These compositions reveal both Meidner’s interest in biblical prophecies and the deteriorating political and social climate of Germany in the years prior to World War I.

Two years after the outbreak of the First World War, in 1916, Meidner was drafted into the German Army, where he served as a translator—the same year he would complete what is considered his last “apocalyptic landscape.” Following the war, his style became more realistic, and his subject matter began to include Judaic imagery, reflecting his own Judaism. After Meidner was included in the infamous 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, he fled to London.

His exile to London was marked by extreme poverty. It was not until his return to Germany in 1953, when he began exhibiting again, that he was able to regain some of his former artistic stature. In 1963, he was granted his first retrospective, and in 1964 he was presented with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and gained membership to the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.