Gustav Wunderwald

Weimar Berlin wasn’t all cabaret, sex, drugs and lots of fun. The set designer and artist Gustav Wunderwald (1 January 1882 – 24 June 1945) liked to look at the other side of life in Germany’s biggest city. He avoided the decadence and any obvious comment and conspicuous sociopolitical ambitions of the likes of Otto Dix’s searing vision (1891-1969) to paint scenes of substance – the ordinary and mundane, the smoky and industrial.

His paintings show us the working-class Berlin districts of Moabit and Wedding, street canyons of Prenzlauer Berg, tenements, houses and back-to-backs in Spandau. He painted bridges, subways, train stations, billboards, as well as villas in Charlottenburg. Rural subjects included villages in the immediate vicinity of Berlin, Havel, Spree and East Prussia landscapes. People are usually absence, or reduced to the role of anonymous figures seen from behind. As he put it in 1926: “The saddest things hit me in the stomach. Moabit and Wedding grab me most with their sombreness and desolation”