Novembergruppe

Novembergruppe, group of artists from many media formed in Berlin in December 1918 by Max Pechstein and César Klein.

Taking its name from the month of the Weimar Revolution, which occurred in Germany immediately after World War I, the Novembergruppe hoped to bring about a new unity in art, architecture, crafts, and city planning, and to bring the artist into close contact with the worker. In an attempt to establish a dialogue with the common man, the Novembergruppe established the Workers’ Council for Art in 1919. Support, however, came from the middle classes, who—with greater education and more leisure time—more readily accepted this radical, intellectual group and its new (and often abstract) art forms.

Among the leading figures associated with the Novembergruppe were the architects Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Hans Poelzig, and Bruno Taut; the painters El Lissitzky, Lyonel Feininger, Otto Müller, and Heinrich Campendonck; the sculptors Gerhard Marcks and Rudolf Belling; the artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy; the filmmakers Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling; the composers Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, and Kurt Weill; and the dramatist Bertolt Brecht.

The Novembergruppe’s main activity was holding public exhibitions throughout the 1920s, but it also sponsored lectures and avant-garde concerts and film presentations. The group’s support of socialism and its ideal of unification of the arts were concerns shared by other German organizations of this period, notably the Weimar Bauhaus, which was established in 1919 by Gropius.