Otto Nebel
Otto Nebel was a German painter born in Berlin, Germany.
Life
Nebel started his professional career 1909 in the field of building engineering. He took acting classes at the Lessingtheater in Berlin until 1914. His acting teachers were the famous Rudolf Blümner and Friedrich Kayssler. He wanted to give his debut at Stadttheater Haben when World War I broke out. Nebel spent the years of war on the German Eastern and Western Fronts. In 1918, during his 14-month war imprisonment in Colsterdale, England, he wrote his expressionistic poem Zuginsfeld condemning the war. In 1919, he returned to Berlin and became friends with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Georg Muche, Kurt Schwitters, and their art. He joined the circle around Herwarth Walden and his wife Nell Walden. She initiated his collaboration at the Sturm gallery and the art school Der Sturm. Together with Hilla von Rebay und Rudolf Bauer he founded the artist group Der Krater in 1923. During this time he also worked for the magazine Der Sturm. Nebel married Hildegard Heitmeyer, the assistant of Gertrud Grunow, in 1924. He met Hildegard at the Bauhaus in Weimar. They stayed in Weimar until 1925 where they painted, wrote poems and acted. In 1933, when the National Socialists disparaged his work as degenerate art, he left Germany for Switzerland, first in Muntelier, and later in Bern. Nebel had financial problems because he was not allowed to work in Switzerland. Thanks to the effort of Kandinsky, he could regularly sell some of his paintings to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation between 1936 and 1951. The German Federal Republic awarded Nebel the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1965.Early work
The cutthroat reality he experienced during the First World War as young soldier and army reserve lieutenant influenced his wish to pursue an artistic career. Landmarks for making this decision were the commemorative exhibition for Franz Marc and Nebel's acquaintance with Herwarth Walden, whom he met in 1916 in Berlin. Walden provided an important platform for avant-garde approaches in art, literature, and music with both his Der Sturm gallery and the journal with the same name, and thereby greatly facilitated the breakthrough of expression.Nebel's distressing experiences during the war is the central theme in his literary debut "Zuginsfeld". The 6,000-verse poem picks up the thread of August Stramm's poetry and the ensuing Der Sturm school while, however, exploring new paths. The literary collage depicts the mayhem of war by adopting its typical language. Associatively and playing with words, Nebel produced never-ending word chains using authentic word snippets from military orders, passwords and watchwords, headlines, folk songs, and from the language of the educated in Wilhelmine Germany. The satiric bite of the textual collage is visually manifest in the series of drawings for "Zuginsfeld", which he first executed in 1930. With barbed pen Nebel made caricatures in 50 pen-and-ink drawings of the military and other groups in society who, in his eyes, stirred up elation for the war. The grotesque figures are strongly reminiscent of the imagery used by Georg Grosz and Otto Dix.
War likewise impacted Nebel's work in that almost all of his pictorial oeuvre created prior to 1933 was destroyed in Berlin during the Second World War. Therefore, we know little of his early paintings, drawing, and prints. Nebel was in touch with well-known artists and writers during the disoriented post-war era of inflation. He lived in precarious conditions and, among other jobs, took on commissions in order to survive. He sought refuge in the utopia of art as the contrasting program to his dismal plight. In 1920, Nebel joined forces with Rudolf Bauer and Hilla von Rebay and formed the group Der Krater / Das Hochamt der Kunst. The three artists shared the view that painting should be purely non-figurative, zeroing in on artistic experience and emotions. The notion that the revolution of modern art could also lead to a wished-for transformation of society linked them to other avant-garde groups of artists and writers. Even if the group did not stay together long, the ideas it pursued remained fundamental for Nebel's work.
Runic fugues and runic flags
Nebel executed them for his poem "Unfeig", which is a pivotal work for his notions about the alphabet. He called the poem a runic fugue. In "Unfeig", as in his other runic fugue "Das Rad der Titanen", he used only nine or twelve letters of the alphabet.The Runen-Fahnen are optical scores that visualize the interplay between individual letters of the alphabet and their various facets. Analogous to the fugue in music, in the runic fugues the vowels and the consonants chosen at the beginning determine the "theme", which is continually repeated and transformed by expansion, reduction, and inversion. Nebel's goal in reduction and concentration of linguistic material was to create a contrasting language to hackneyed everyday language and its rational use. He wrote, "The miseducated people of our times are deaf to words and blind to images. They do not hear what they read. What they write, they cannot see." Nebel believed that he regained the directness lying hidden behind the conventions of language in individual words and letters of the alphabet. With format larger than man-size, the Runen-Fahnen intimate that the whole body should participate in reading.
The Runen-Fahnen are a fourfold visual representation of the original beginning of the text:
Runic Flag 1 displays the wording in a typography invented by Nebel. Runic Flags 2–4, in turn, replace Latin characters with another system of signs and thereby break with habitual perception. The individual letters of the alphabet can no longer be overlooked. Runic Flag 2 records sounds by allocating each one a special form and color affiliated to its specific qualities. Runic Flag 3 takes on the level of characters, which we become aware of as graphic unities and forms by means of alienation. Runic Flag 4 combines both aforementioned aspects. Nebel understood characters or runes as independent linguistic entities whose sound or acoustic and visual dimensions were the key part of an artwork. The runic fugues, however, represent an experimental search for the "inner sound" of words and letters, their impact on the emotions. Although the fragments of Uns, unser, Er sie Es are to be read as preliminary attempts that culminated in the runic fugues, they nevertheless have a very independent and distinct quality. In the original single sheets that were bound together to make the book, Nebel drafted an ABC using painted geometric symbols. On these folios he attempted, at least partly, to find a correspondence between characters and sounds. The artist reworded them later into collages of paper cuttings, making extremely short poems. These works underscore the parity between word and image in his work, between literary and visual forms of expression. His legacy of manuscripts gives insight into the writing process behind the runic fugues and gives a palpable impression of how content is dependent on language.
"Musical" works
Even before Nebel "officially" gave up using representational visual language he created a number of non-objective works, which often had titles taken from music terminology: Animato, Dopio movimento, 'ondo con brio gai or Con Tenerezza. They were produced during the 1930s, some during his sojourns in Italy. Nebel compared his endeavors with those of an orchestra conductor who "rehearses" a score with an orchestra. These works herald his non-objective work.This is very much what Wassily Kandinsky had in mind in his trailblazing book Concerning the Spiritual in Art: "Musical sound acts directly on the soul and finds an echo there because, though to varying extents, music is innate in man." With increasing tendencies to abstraction, Kandinsky too referred to music and sought to express emotions - analogous to writing scores - with colors and forms in his Compositions, Improvisations, and Impressions.
Nebel untiringly demanded of spectators that they open themselves up to the "resonating tons" of the pictures they view. Nebel asserted, "My painting is poetry, the sister of my linguistic art. Where language ends is where the runic order of symbols begins."
Bavaria and Ascona
Around 1926 to 1928 Nebel was often in the Bavarian village of Kochel, not far from Murnau. He loved to regularly visit Ascona in Switzerland as well. In Kochel he founded a wallpaper factory and met with much adversity and red tape, forcing him very soon to give up the experiment. He produced numerous wallpaper designs at the time, and was able to utilize them repeatedly for his collages at later dates. During his stay in Kochel he often went on hikes in search of motifs in the Bavarian countryside. The artist commented on his colorful drawings from this period in the following words: "The strangeness of the composition is to be understood humorously. The images are such that belong in children's souls. They may be kept protected under galls on small round tables that can be revolved at will. Then mums can take their darlings for a walk around the countryside of Kochel and tell fairytales. They only have to read the story that Uncle Painter has laid down there." Thus are the instructions that Nebel gave to "read" his "colorful and bright compositions" of this period.Later in the 1920s he returned periodically to Ascona. There he painted intensely colorful scenes with a southern flair or Ascona-Lido. The town in the Ticino region had a strongly Italian flair and was a key attraction for many avant-garde artists. Among those he met there was, and they planned to start a painting school together. He was additionally invited to exhibit in Ascona together with the artist's group Der grosse Bär. The group comprised artists such as Marianne von Werefkin and the founder of the group, Walter Helbling.