Gustav Wunderwald, painter of the suburbs

Berlin in the 1920s is often associated with excess and decadence, but it is a very different side of the city that interested the painter Gustav Wunderwald (1882-1945).
For a few years, around 1927, Wunderwald's urban landscapes were very popular. Gustav Böss, then mayor of Berlin is among those who bought his paintings. Wunderwald's work consists mainly of landscapes of Berlin and its surroundings. The gray streets of popular neighborhoods are as often represented as the cleaner, more airy streets of the west end of the city.
It is for his paintings of the working-class districts of Berlin that Wunderwald is best known, and for the "non-romantic and objective approach" to his subjects, as one art critic put it. Wunderwald has been associated by art historians with the painting style Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) that emerged during the Weimar Republic.
Despite the destruction of the city during the Second World War, it is still possible to recognize some of the streets that Wunderwald painted in the 1920s, especially in the Wedding district.