Milwaukee Art Museum has recently acquired O ihr Wolkenschwärme by Emilie Mediz-Pelikan (1861-1908) from The Maas Gallery.
O ihr Wolkenschwärme wie neide ich euch um eure luftige Drift
Selig seid ihr Sturmvögel dass ihr ihnen auch nur nahen dürft.
[O you swarms of clouds, how I envy you for your airy drift]
[Blessed are you storm birds that you may even approach them.]
(Unattributed poem)
The wooded state of Hessen (or Hesse), which this picture is inscribed, was the homeland of Goethe. It is in the heartland of Germany near the Rhine and the Main rivers, and contains Frankfurt and the then Darmstadt Artist‘s Colony, a community of designers in the jugendstil. The inscription on the secondary backing, 'Schönstadt' prbably refers to the district of Schönstadt, north of Darmstadt.
Hoppener, or ‘Fidus’ [Faithful] as he was known, was a free spirit, known then as ‘Wandervögel’ [wandering bird]: he was the archetypical romantic German youth, into rambling, vegetarianism, anarchism, sunbathing, rambling and camping in the Rhineland, Theosophy and occultism, nudism, nationalism, together with socialism (he started a commune). He believed in free love, both hetero- and homosexual. He wore robes, lived the itinerant life of a nomadic prophet, and designed castles in the air. In 1925 he rejected the idea of racial purity and claimed that the ‘sun-drenched clarity of the soul’ was available to all humans. He stood out as an eccentric and individual man of creative genius; an exhibit of his photographic work was advertised as ‘Art in the Service of Ascending Life,’ and Fidus was acclaimed as ‘the revered master,’ the ‘mysterious artist’, and ‘the believer in light’. In 1932, before Hitler came to power, in common with many idealistic Germans he joined the Nazi party, but Fidus soon fell out with them and in 1937 the Nazis banned the sale of his images, condemning them as degenerate.