Der Materialist (Gegenwart). 1931.
Oil on canvas.
Golinski 247. Signed, dated and inscribed "Calw" lower left. Signed, dated, inscribed and titled "Gegenwart" on verso. 109,5 x 109 cm (43,1 x 42,9 in).

PROVENANCE: Private collection North-Rhine Westphalia.

Kurt Weinhold was born 28 September, 1896, in Berlin, son of the artist Carl Weinhold. His youth, which he spent in Essen and Bonn, was coined by an intensive occupation with art, music and literature. In 1911 his family relocated to the art metropolis Munic. Kurt Weinhold showed a high level of creativity and imagination from an early point on. His talents in drawing and painting were supported by his father from early on, he taught him the basic terms of art techniques. Despite the impulse from Carl von Marr to complete his artistic training at the Munich academy, Kurt Weinhold preferred to teach himself. In 1922 he married Margarete Schütz from Calw in Baden-Württemberg a settled in her hometown. There he was not only committed to portraits – an intense examination of mind and matter – but he also seizes the opportunity to study nature. In these days he made numerous watercolors and drawings. He also developed a close friendship with artists such as Kurt Schlichter, Otto Dix and George Grosz. In the late 1920s the artist celebrated first success with audience and critics. His works were shown all over Germany.

The social criticism in German art of the 1920s and 1930s is proof of the social problems in the time after World War I. The element of social equalization is contrasted with the existential struggle as a mere struggle for survival. Accordingly, those who benefit from the social shift are increasingly in the focus of a social criticism that is no longer content with the mere denunciation of social grievances. Materialism versus religiously motivated coping with existence seems to be the central theme that motivated Weinhold to make this somewhat drastic subject. How else could the person in the back with the threatening gesture be perceived. The possessive hands of the materialist hint at a character of a man whose sense in life is to pile up as much material goods as possible, goods the greedy eyes descry. The erotic aura of materialism is present and is persecuted by the other side of the quest for meaning, which seeks salvation and fulfillment in abstinence and renouncement. Weinhold uses drastic means to convey his message in this work, but the subjects of his contemporaries, such as George Grosz or Otto Dix, are not less drastic in the depiction of the fake glamour of the 1920s, as an expression for a society that is self-deceiving.

Kurt Weinhold confronts the National-Socialist regime with open rejection and is declared an ostracized artist without occupational ban. The early success ceases and the artist more and moe withdrew to inner emigration. In 1940 Kurt Weinhold was released from military service for health reasons. Because of permanently showing open criticism of the system, the regime decreed an arrest warrant against him, which the artist dodged through journeys abroad. After 1945 Kurt Weinhold gained new inspiration from the changing art scene. He takes on forms of abstract painting and combines them in his continuous examination of mind and matter. After numerous study journeys to Southern Europe the artist died in his adopted home Calw in 1965. [KD].