Biography from Richard Rhoda Fine Art:
| Max Oppenheimer (Vienna, 1885-New York, 1954), also known under the
pseudonym "Mopp", was a landscape, genre, portrait and still life
painter. He was also a graphic designer and a writer.
From
1900 to 1903, he attended the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under
Christian Griepenkerl and Sigmund L'Allemand, and from 1904 through
1906 he studied under Franz Thiele at the Prague Academy. In 1906
Oppenheimer joined the Prague group 'OSMA' (the Eight), one of the
first associations of Czech avant-garde artists.
At the time, Oppenheimer's style revealed a growing interest in
Impressionist painting, especially that of Max Liebermann. In
1908, he moved back to Vienna, joining the circle of Oskar Kokoschka
and Egon Schiele. His encounter with Kokoschka's painting exerted
a formative influence on Oppenheimer, especially in the field of
portraiture which ultimately led to the development of Austrian
Expressionist painting. Existential needs and fears were a
dominant theme of their paintings. The three painters influenced
each other’s work by varying degrees. In their ‘psychological
portraits’, such as Oppenheimer’s painting of the composer Anton Webern
(1909), they tried to capture the sitters’ mental characteristics.
Oppenheimer
had his first one-man show at the Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1911. He
went on study trips to France, the Netherlands and Italy and lived in
Berlin from 1911 to 1915. In 1915, Oppenheimer moved to
Switzerland, where he would remain, with interruptions, until
1924. Introduced to Dada in 1916, Oppenheimer participated in the
first Dada exhibition in Zurich that year. Dada or Dadaism was a
cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I
and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved
visual arts, literature poetry, art manifestoes, art theory, theatre,
and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a
rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural
works. Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants
considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In
addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and
anarchistic in nature.
Oppenheimer officially took the name
“MOPP” in 1919 although he had signed his pictures with the pseudonym
since 1910. He achieved an individual style of portraying the
people and atmospheres of the modern city using a mixture of Futurism
and Neue Sachlichkeit (“The New Objectivity”). In 1920
Oppenheimer embarked on his celebrated orchestra scenes, which were
primarily the representation of music and composers that were shown in
1924 at a large-scale group exhibition mounted by the Vienna
Haagebund. In 1925 he was awarded the Austrian State Prize.
Oppenheimer
went to Berlin again in 1926, but by 1931 the increasingly tense
political situation in Germany prompted his decision to return to
Vienna. In 1932 Oppenheimer participated a last time in a group
show at the Vienna Künstlerhaus before fleeing to Switzerland in
1938. In 1939 Oppenheimer emigrated to the US, where his work
returned to earlier ideas and then began to explore American Abstract
Expressionism.
Source:
Galerie Weinpolter, German Wikipedia, Max-Oppenheimer.com, artnet.com and freiklick.com.at
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