The Beggars (after Breughel) (Die Bettler [nach Breughel])

Having exhibited with the Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter prior to World War I, Heinrich Campendonk went on to serve two years in World War I. During this period, the combat deaths of his friends and fellow Blaue Reiter members Franz Marc and Auguste Macke affected him profoundly.

The turbulent years between 1916 and the stabilization of the politically and economically battered Weimar Republic in 1925 were for Campendonk a period of intense production and experimentation with the woodcut medium. One work from this period, The Beggars, is based on a painting from 1568 by the Northern Renaissance master Pieter Breughel the Elder. Breughel’s tiny panel depicts dancing figures, assumed to be lepers because of their crutches and costumes.

While directly referring to art of the past and evoking a kind of fairytale world, Campendonk’s print also resonates with horrific images of mutilated war veterans such as those depicted by fellow Weimar artists Otto Dix, George Grosz, and others. These artists enlisted such imagery as a leftist critique of the German government and its anti-humanistic ideology. Displaying both war wounds and new forms of manmade appendages intended to replace lost body parts, such pathetic figures were often portrayed begging on city streets. In his small, evocative work, Campendonk alludes perhaps to the lingering trauma of the war by equating the social ostracizing of war cripples with that of lepers.