Albert Hennig - "The Lost Generation" watercolor and ink - self-portrait young and old

• Throughout his entire artistic career as a painter, illustrator and photographer, Albert Hennig repeatedly struggled with the prevailing political conditions. First the National Socialists prevented him from doing his work, then the GDR's cultural policy put obstacles in his way. Nevertheless, he developed into one of the last important artists of the Bauhaus school. Difficult conditions sharpened Hennig's eye for social injustices

Albert Hennig was born on December 7, 1907 in Leipzig; He came from a working-class family and grew up with several siblings in simple circumstances. The formative experiences of his childhood created in him an awareness of social injustice, which would have a decisive influence on his later art. Hennig's professional beginnings were logically in crafts, not in art. As a trained concrete worker, he worked in various regions of Germany. Albert Hennig became politically active at an early age: in 1923 he joined the Socialist Workers' Youth and in 1928 he became a member of the SPD. The most important consequence of his socio-political interest was the purchase of a camera (Zeiss Ikonta 6x), with which he, as a self-taught photographer, tried to capture the predominantly precarious conditions of the proletariat of his time. His first photographs served as a successful application to the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1929, where he was one of the last students until 1933. His teachers included, among other famous Bauhaus artists, Josef Albers, who also inspired Hennig to paint, and the great Bauhaus pioneer Paul Klee, to whose work Albert Hennig's work has a particularly large number of references.
Politics as the enemy of art Albert Hennig's photo series "Children of the Street", which was commissioned by the social democratic children's friends movement, became a sensational success. For Albert Hennig, this first triumph also meant the temporary end of his promising artistic career: in 1933, during the course of their occupation of the SPD office in Leipzig, the National Socialists who were rising to power destroyed Hennig's series of pictures exhibited there and declared them "degenerate". This meant that Albert Hennig was deprived of his livelihood as an artist and had to serve as a compulsory construction worker from 1934 to 1945. After the war there was a brief sigh of relief; Hennig took part in founding the “Visual Artists” group and joined the SED. However, his hope for a socially just society in the GDR, which he wanted to help shape through his art, was not fulfilled. The public praise of the art historian Will Grohmann hardly disguised the increasingly apparent conflict that existed between the abstract art of Albert Hennig and the state-imposed socialist realism of the GDR's cultural policy. Disappointed, Hennig finally left the SED and went back to work as a concrete worker. Albert Hennig retired, but never retired Unhindered artistic self-realization was only possible for Albert Hennig once he was retired. From 1972 onwards, his extensive late works were created, which earned him his own exhibition in the Chemnitz gallery "Oben" in the same year and attracted international attention after the fall of the Wall. The strict Bauhaus style conquered the enthusiastic art world one last time. The applause that had long been lacking was now heard from many voices for Albert Hennig, and prestigious awards such as the Max Pechstein Prize in 1991 and the Federal Cross of Merit in 1996 were the result. When Albert Hennig died on August 14, 1998, he left behind an extensive artistic legacy, a historically valuable correspondence and the memory of an artist who, although he belonged to a lost generation, was able to successfully resist oblivion. © Kunsthaus Lempertz