“Berlin Decoration”: The elitist style that fell victim to robbers
A new book celebrates the German version of Art Deco. Its furniture was doubly torpedoed – first by anti-Semitism and war, then by the Bauhaus ideology.
When I traveled to Berlin as a student in the early 1980s, some of the furniture was still hanging around in the guesthouses along the Ku'damm. Shiny black lacquered tables on tentacle legs, a bathroom stool painted reseda green, a thick walnut sideboard with curious ornamentation. I should have bought at least that stool from the guesthouse landlady. Law firms have long since moved there, and the furniture remnants from Berlin's golden and tinny 1920s are permanently lost. Landed in Paris, Stockholm, or New York, they can only rarely be spotted on vintage platforms like 1stdibs or Pamono.
Now the good news: One of the rare German collectors of Art Deco designed and crafted in Germany took pity on us nostalgics. Markus Winter, a designer, vintage dealer, and Reiki master living in Brooklyn, is now publishing a book that puts the pieces from his museum-quality furniture collection into their proper context.
"I wanted to create a book that doesn't just showcase these pieces of furniture, but also makes their history tangible," Winter says in a telephone interview. Because: "I've always found these pieces in misunderstood positions. So often they were presented as something they weren't, like Baroque or Art Nouveau. They stood in basements or attics. And it was never said: I have something precious and want to pass it on. Rather, it was: What is it, anyway?"
The book is called "Berlin Deko," which has just been published by the Stuttgart-based art book publisher Arnoldsche and costs €38. The beauty of it—besides a highly elegant layout on roughened 120-gram Munken paper—is the lively lightness with which it introduces even laypeople to the subject. With the simultaneous hyper-precise footnotes, everything is documented, referenced, and nailed down.
The most beautiful thing, of course, are the pictures. We owe them primarily to the second author of this labor of love, Don Freeman. The renowned photographer took portraits of the chairs and dressers, in a mixture of original accompaniment (Persian rugs!) and boldly expressionistic backdrops, for which Markus Winter himself took up his paintbrush. Before art history, he studied conceptual art with Gerhard Merz. "Then I got kicked out of the academy in Düsseldorf," he confesses over the phone. You can hear his grin.
Added to this are glamorous interior photographs from German interior magazines of the 1920s and watercolor designs by major architects of the era, such as Bruno Paul, Oskar Kaufmann, Emil Fahrenkamp, and Fritz August Breuhaus. You can truly immerse yourself in this book, lose yourself in it, and dream of Asta Nielsen, Klaus Mann, Vicki Baum, and Rudolf Forster, of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and Brigitte Helm in "Metropolis." And remember that in Fritz Lang's 1927 film of the century, there is something else besides the man-eating, machine-driven modernism: the world of an urban elite, where half-naked nymphs revel in Rococo gardens and where Freder, the son of the ruler of Metropolis, is wandering around when he encounters Maria (in the form of Brigitte Helm) with her ragged orphans. Aha! Precisely that upper-class Elysium full of quotations from antiquity and the 18th century—that is the world of these pieces of furniture.
I'm on the phone with Markus Winter in mid-October; that same evening, he'll be celebrating his book premiere in the "East Room" of the New York design hotel Nine Orchard. (For the hotel's rooftop garden and bar, he designed a slanting trellis in bright green, which can be admired on his website.) Who's expected to attend the book party? "They're all characters. Experts, former dealers, museum staff, and interior designers," says Winter. "Because that's the beauty of New York: A lot of people come together who rarely go out in public, but for something like this, they do. Because they're interested in something extreme."
People like Bill Sofield, for example—the interior designer has created enormous stores and homes for Tom Ford, Ralph Lauren, Madonna, and many of the most pampered people on the planet. "Or Fernando Santangelo, a protagonist for my journey with this book," says Winter. Santangelo has been one of Manhattan's leading tastemakers for decades. He became famous for his complete renovations of historic hotels for entrepreneur André Balasz, including the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and the Raleigh in Miami Beach with its sensational Art Deco pool.
Markus Winter speaks very thoughtfully, almost ready for print. This isn't an influencer reveling in superlatives; his style is more that of a scientist or diplomat on a complex mission. And the topic he chose for his book is certainly complex. It took a correspondingly long time: 20 years, on and off.
Winter owns just under 100 pieces of "Berlin Deko" furniture, divided between two warehouses in New York and Lower Saxony. His very first piece of German Art Deco furniture? "That was this pink cabinet on page 15," says Winter. "I exhibited it at the Palm Beach Antiques Fair back then. I worked for a carpet gallery owner and was tasked with designing a room based on the carpets. The cabinet was offered at the time as a design by Dagobert Peche. I bought it in 2002." Peche, the ornamental genius, was one of the stars of the Wiener Werkstätte: False attributions, which must be corrected with extensive knowledge and patient research, are unfortunately common practice with German Art Deco furniture. This "expressionistic rococo" style is so shockingly weakly anchored in the consciousness of the specialist world and thus in the antiques trade.
For his book project, Markus Winter assembled a team of both qualified and enthusiastic authors. The essays were written by renowned furniture historians such as Ulrich Leben, Michael Mertens, and Arne Sildatke; the final editing was carried out by Wendy Brouwer. Polish art historian Magdalena Palica has written an emotionally moving text about one of the lost Gesamtkunstwerke of this style, the Villa Lewin in Breslau/Wroclaw: "Ms. Palica knows this building and its former furnishings inside and out. I even went there twice to take photos," reports Winter. Today, the building houses a private school, the British International School of Wroclaw.
The architect and designer of the villa was Oskar Kaufmann – famous for his seven Berlin theaters, of which only the Renaissance Theater survives. He employed an entire team of artists and master craftsmen from Berlin for the Jewish textile industrialist Leo Lewin. Even the ebony Steinway grand piano was decorated with reliefs, and the children's room had a light, fairytale atmosphere. "In this villa, everything came together: the mosaics, the stained-glass windows by César Klein, a Barlach sculpture, paintings by Hans von Marées and Liebermann," says Winter. "The panel painting fit into the spatial art; everything had equal validity. The point was to create something beautiful." Not to dominate individual artists.
Magdalena Palica coolly recounts what happened to Leo Lewin's villa. After 1933, it was occupied by the Luftwaffe, and the "Executioner of Breslau," Karl Hanke, moved into his father's nearby villa. Leo Lewin and his wife Helen managed to escape to northern England – "His furniture and paintings came to Durham in three trucks," says Winter. Lewin's younger sister, Johanna, was killed by the Gestapo in Berlin in 1943, and his sister, Cäcilie, was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.
And why was this book published in English by a German publisher? "Because it had become quite clear that there was no interest in it in Germany," Markus Winter states. At the time he was researching in Berlin, in the 2000s, such obvious institutions as the Kunstgewerbemuseum or the Berlinische Galerie were "not interested in a presentation," he reports coolly. "The subject is simply avoided." Wernigerode Castle in the Harz Mountains was the only museum to hold an exhibition featuring the furniture in 2019. "This resistance also motivated me," says Winter. "Because it piqued my curiosity. There were even people who wanted to explain to me why such a piece of furniture wasn't so good. But for me, there was always something left unsaid."
Here, the highly successful campaign of strategist Walter Gropius and charismatic Mies van der Rohe for the Bauhaus School of Modernism had a lasting impact. By adapting the Bauhaus to the German national obsession with everything reductionistically "tidy" and technical, and cementing it with manifestos, they patriarchalized living. "Suddenly, the Bauhaus became the officially recognized group. Only now, after a hundred years, is it being torn apart," Markus Winter notes. The Bauhaus coup worked particularly well here, as flat roofs, bare windows, and tubular steel furniture could be instrumentalized as proof that one wasn't a blood-and-oak Nazi. (The fact that the Nazis themselves sat on steel tubing when things got adventurous, like in the Zeppelin airship, was irrelevant.) And of course, ancient resentments also resonated with all this interior morality, a contemptuous framing for everything French/decadent/feminine/queer.
As the artist César Klein, who had fled to a village near Lübeck, wrote after the Second World War: "First, the rubble—in this case, the intellectual rubble—that stifled every development of genius must be cleared away." Unfortunately, the rubble is still not completely gone, which is one reason why one hopes this book will find many readers in Berlin. It clears things up.
Berliner-zeitung
