Josef Fenneker, designer

In a previous post, we have seen how Cesar Klein, besides his artistic activity, also worked for the film industry, as a designer. This post is about another artist : a painter, stage designer and graphic designer : Josef Fenneker. The film posters he created in the 1920s and 1930s still appeal to us, even when the films they advertised have been long forgotten.

Fenneker was born in 1895 and in 1918 he designed his first film poster. During his career, he produced several hundred. 

 

He employed a wide range of artistic genres : Art Deco, Neo-Historicism, « Sachplakat » and Cubism. However, the style he employed most often was Expressionism. According to the poster of the film, he also designed the sceneries of Zwischen Nacht und Morgen, a film from 1931.

 

 
He chose to artistically interpret the film’s emotional core, picking up the essentials, rather than faithfully, photographically, rendering a scene from the movie. Through exaggerated gestures and facial expressions as well as grotesque distortions of the characters, unreal surroundings, extreme lighting and an unnatural color scheme, he attempts to express the emotional states of the main characters. Which could be a quite accurate description of that highly influential movement from the first decades of the 20th century called Expressionism.

The "Marmorhaus" was one of the leading cinemas of Berlin, located on the Kurfürstendamm.

Josef Fenneker also had a long and distinguished career as a theater and opera designer. After the Second World War, he worked for the operas in Berlin, Vienna, Monaco and Milan’s La Scala. He died in 1956.