The November Group

To all the artists !

Novembergruppe, (November Group in German) was a group of artists from different media formed in Berlin in December 1918.

Taking its name from the month of the Weimar Revolution, which occurred immediately after World War I, the Novembergruppe hoped to bring about a new unity in art, architecture, crafts, and city planning, and to bring the artist into close contact with the workers. Support, however, came from the middle classes, who—better educated and with more leisure time—more easily accepted this radical, intellectual group and its new (often abstract) art forms.

Among the leading figures associated with the Novembergruppe were the architects Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Hans Poelzig, and Bruno Taut; the painters El Lissitzky, Lyonel Feininger, Otto Müller, Cesar Klein and Heinrich Campendonck; the sculptors Gerhard Marcks and Rudolf Belling; the artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy; the filmmakers Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling; the composers Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, and Kurt Weill; and the dramatist Bertolt Brecht.

The Novembergruppe’s main activity was holding public exhibitions throughout the 1920s, but it also sponsored lectures and avant-garde concerts and film presentations. The group’s support of socialism and its ideal of unification of the arts were concerns shared by other German organizations of this period, notably the Weimar Bauhaus, which was established in 1919 by Gropius.

Whereas another similar organization, the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, was politically more extreme, being close to the Communist Party, members of the Novembergruppe were often near the Social Democrats. The program of the Novembergruppe was more aesthetic than the Arbeitsrat, whose concerns were mostly political.

Info partly from www.britannica.com

The Berlinische Galerie is showing a comprehensive retrospective of the Novembergruppe's artists.Until March 11th 2019.