Alice Lex-Nerlinger

Alice Lex-Nerlinger (October 29, 1893-21 July 1975) was a German mid-century artist in the media of painting, photography, photomontage and photograms.

Early life

Born on October 29, 1893 the daughter of Kreuzberg lamp manufacturers, during the First World War Alice Lex studied at the educational institution at the Museum of Decorative Arts with fellow students George Grosz, Hannah Höch and Oskar Nerlinger (1893–1969), whom she married. Berlin in the 20s was a laboratory for expressionist, Dadaist and futuristic rebels and Lex-Nerlinger, amongst them, tried out different styles and media searching for a politically effective means of expression.

In 1927 Lex-Nerlinger and her husband became members of the Communist KPD and, in 1928, of the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists, whose aim was to use art as a weapon in the class struggle. She began to design successful political posters, drawing no distinction between the applied work and that which she exhibited.

Career

For twenty years Lex-Nerlinger was part of an international avant-garde photography scene which centred on the Neues Shehen ('New Vision') emerging in Germany, a style she embraces in her straight photography of the period, all with a feminist ethos, and was represented in the 1929 in the Stuttgart showing of Film und Foto. Especially interested in the situation of her sisterhood, her documentary photography including the 1928 series Working Women in which the subjects are shown yoked to the machinery of industry. The poultry breeder poses half-hidden behind chicken-wire, or the seamstress is bent over her sewing machine, dreaming, in double-exposure of the carefree happiness of her girlhood, while the typist frustratedly scrubs at a misprint with an eraser.

She was the only woman photographer represented in Werner Graeff‘s (1901 – 1978) influential and now rare 1929 book Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (‘Here comes the new photographer!’) published in Berlin by H. Reckendorf, with her political photomontage of that year in which the photographic medium enables her multiplication of figures of authority, soldiers and police, commanded by the raised fist of the bosses to surround the bewildered workers, locked out of their workplace during industrial action.

Style

Lex-Nerlinger’s work is didactic and becomes gradually more diagrammatic; her photomontage Work! Work! Work! from 1928, for example, illustrates the everyday reality of life for the proletariat: a drab exchange of machine production for the hasty gobbling of dry bread in work-soiled hands. The stop-watch in the capitalist’s leather-gloved hand sets the rhythm, echoing the mechanical repetition of the workers’ fists.

That female self-determination entails more than employment is evident in Lex-Nerlinger’s most famous work Paragraph 218 of 1931 (pencil drawing, spray paint); an appeal against a paragraph of the law which punished those providing abortions with imprisonment, protested by many of her comrades in the communist movement. In this case the women are not presented as victims but as group who strive in solidarity and strength against a giant cross that reads “Paragraph 218”, toppling it.

Lex-Nerlinger addressed her traumatic experience of WW1 and its horrific aftermath in works such the 1931 Feldgrau schafft Dividende (‘Field Gray creates dividends’) denouncing capitalist profit-making through war; a factory in the background churns out armaments directly to a screaming soldier who – entangled in barbed wire – occupies half of the image. Using an air-brush to repeat the blank factory windows, faceless workers, tanks and shells, she explains the causes of a social evil in non-photographic as forcefully as in her black-and-white photomontages, such as Giftgas('Poison Gas) of 1929.

Her c.1929 Arm und Reich (Rich and Poor) makes the class difference explicit through vignettes to make direct comparisons; the elderly well-to-do relaxes in a café while outside the war invalid begs; the child of the rich woman pedals his toy car along the street beside her, while the children of the poor share their pram with newspapers being sold by their heavily pregnant mother; the tennis player exercises for recreation while the worker labours over his jack-hammer. Each of the abutted scenes is constructed in the darkroom from intricately cut paper printed as photograms; an exercise in masking that exploits the negative image and the texture and transparency of paper. Repetitions underline the imbalance in the ratio of numbers of poor to rich, but none is printed exactly the same, as the photogram technique entails variations in density and different degrees of light ‘bleed’ under the cut paper templates.

In 1931 Lex-Nerlinger participated in a major exhibition of photomontage that took place at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin. Also invited were John Heartfield, Andre Kertesz, Hannah Höch, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Nerlinger, Albert Renger-Patsch, and other prominent artists of the day.

Most productive in the years up to 1933 and the rise of Hitler she developed her spray technique at the same time as photographing and montaging; forms and materials selected for their capacity to urge critical and revolutionary messages:

”All my work had the aim of collaborating to improve people’s lives, and nothing seemed more senseless than for an artist to paint for snobs at a time when people were more and more impoverished.”

Imprisonment and obscurity

With the seizure of power by the National Socialists the artist was not allowed to exhibit. Following a short imprisonment in 1933 she retreated into an ‘inner emigration’ and did not publish until 1945. Fearing raids on her studio, she destroyed much of her work and the depredations of the Second World War obliterated much of the rest. We are left with only the vestiges of her output of this period, though researchers like Ira Plein of the University of Luxembourg's Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History, whose German language master’s thesis Alice Lex Nerlinger (1893 – 1975) Motifs and imagery in the service of the class struggle 1928-1933 passed at the University of Trier in 2012, are searching the archives and ephemera of the era for what can be salvaged. Having rediscovered the artist in the mid-2000s, US feminist art historian Rachel Epp Buller, with a grant from the Fullbright foundation in 2011, searched the artist’s archive at the Berlin Academy of Arts, then in cooperation with the Academy and assistance of the gallery, mounted Lex-Nerlinger’s first retrospective in 2016, appropriately at the ‘Hidden Museum’

Post-War in the German Democratic Republic

For the last three decades of her life, Lex‐Nerlinger continued as a well‐known graphic designer and portraitist in the GDR, working until the day she died in 1975, but under the state’s sanctioning of “Socialist Realism” her photomontages, that she had worked so hard to master, were denounced as ‘formalistic’. However, the force of her image Paragraph 218 was restored when it was taken up by the women’s movement of the 1970s.

Even without a contract in the fifties Lex-Nerlinger created photo-derived portraits of workers, among which is the painting Schaffnerin Anni (‘Conductor Anni’) the now legendary streetcar artist. Anni faces the viewer head-on, looks us in the face with a challenging smile and points to her tram-conductor’s money changer, which in street jargon is a “Krautkasse” (“Herb’s purse”), which she wears around her neck. She was the mother of Hannelore Kraft, a German politician who was the President of the Bundesrat, the first woman to hold the office.

Exhibitions

• 1929-1931: Internationale Ausstellung des Deutschen Werkbunds Film und Foto (FiFo), Städtische Ausstellungshallen, May 18–July 7, 1929 Stuttgart, and traveling to Kunstgewerbemuseum, Zurich August 28–September 22, 1929; Im Lichthof des Ehemaligen Kunstgewerbemuseums, Prinz-Albrechs-Strasse 7, Berlin October 19–November 17, 1929; Stadtmuseum, Danzig (dates unknown) Österreichisches Museum, Vienna February 20–March 31, 1930; Agram, Zagreb April 5–14, 1930; Münchner Bund/Verein Ausstellungspark München E.V. (as part of Internationale Ausstellung. Das Lichtbild), Munich June 5–September 7, 1930; Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo April 1931 Asahi Shimbun, Osaka July 1–7, 1931.
• 1975: joint show of Alice Lex-Nerlinger and Oskar Nerlinger, Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, 14 October–18 November
• 2005: Neues Sehen in Berlin:Fotografie der Zwanziger Jahre, Kunstbibliothek, Museum für Fotografie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, September 16–November 20
• 2016: Retrospective curated by Rachel Epp Buller, Das Verborgene Museum, 14 April – 07 August.