Edmund Kesting (1892-1970): Portrait of Herwarth Walden

Artist
Edmund Kesting (1892–1970)
 
Title
Portrait of Herwarth Walden
 
Medium
Linocut
 
Material
Paper
 
Dimensions
28 x 28 cm
 
Editor
Edition Panderma, Basel
 
Year
1920s
 
Signature
Signed in pencil
 
Provenance
Edition Panderma, Carl Laszlo, Basel
Galerie von Bartha, Basel
Private Collection, Basel
 
Condition / Restauration
Mint archival condition
 
Biography
Edmund Kesting (Dresden 1892 – Birkenwerder 1970) was a German painter, photographer and avant-garde art teacher, one of the most inventive experimental image-makers of the German modernist movement. He studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts under Richard Müller and Otto Gussmann, and from 1919 taught at the progressive private art school Der Weg.
 
In 1923 Kesting held his first exhibition at the legendary Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin — the gallery and movement founded by Herwarth Walden, the subject of this very portrait. Walden was the great impresario of German Expressionism and the avant-garde, and Kesting moved within his circle alongside figures such as Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and Alexander Archipenko. Kesting pushed photography into radically experimental territory, pioneering photograms, solarisation and multiple exposures; under National Socialism twelve of his works were condemned as "degenerate art" and banned.
 
After the Second World War, Kesting created his searing photographic cycle Dresdner Totentanz (Dresden Dance of Death) in response to the destruction of the city, and from the mid-1950s developed his "chemical painting" — camera-less images made directly on photographic paper with developer, fixer and masks. From 1956 to 1967 he taught at the film academy in Potsdam. This linocut portrait of Herwarth Walden, issued by Carl Laszlo's celebrated Edition Panderma in Basel, is a rare graphic homage from one twentieth-century pioneer to another.