More on Josef Fenneker

Josef Fenneker, the poster designer, employed different artistic genres, even if he most often was inspired by Expressionist painters like Ludwig Kirchner or Oskar Kokoschka.
 

In the 1920s, film posters were often commissioned by individual Berlin theaters, trying to appeal to their distinctive customer base. West Berlin theaters, with a bourgeois public, favoured the expressionistic style, which in its origins had been a radical, subversive movement, but which in the mid twenties had become fashionable.

In working class neighbourhoods, though, like the East or the North, the artistic taste was different : the harshness of everyday life did not give blue-collar workers the opportunities to expand their artistic sensibility. Expressionism, with its deformed figures and distorted perspective was not seen as symbolic representations of inner turmoil, but as satirical depictions by a scornful intellectual elite. What that public liked, what it demanded, was readily recognizable realism and inspiring idealism.

In this post we see some examples of his clearly non-expressionist, esthetically traditional production. Posters are from 1928-1933.