Willy Jaeckel
When I first saw this portrait I knew I must feature it in DailyArt, even though I had never heard of its author. Unfortunately it was quite difficult to find any information about the painter or the painting itself. Here is what we know:
Willy Jaeckel was a German Expressionist painter and lithographer. From 1906 to 1908, he studied at the art school in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), then enrolled at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1913, he moved to Berlin to work as a free-lance artist and became a member of the Berlin Secession in 1915. Four years later, he was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and became a teacher at the University of the Arts in 1925. Jaeckel painted landscapes, nudes, and still lifes.
He was named an Associate Professor in 1933, but he was dismissed when the Nazis came to power. His students protested, and he was eventually reinstated. This victory was short-lived, however. Those who took classes with him were likely not to graduate and, in 1937, some of his works were officially classified as degenerate and they were destroyed. Many of his works survived the war only because the Nazi government removed them from Berlin.
He lost his studio to a bombing raid in 1943 and he was killed during another raid early the following year.
We know nothing who the girl in the painting is, but we can tell you more about the Barcelona chair from the title. It was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich for the German Pavilion at the International Exposition of 1929, hosted by Barcelona. It is an icon of modernity, exuding a simple elegance and epitomizing the van der Rohe theory that less is more.
See you tomorrow!
P.S. I love her style! If you want to know what was it like in the Roaring Twenties in art and fashion, go here! <3