Carlo Mense

From 1906 to 1908, the painter and graphic artist Carlo Mense studied at the Düsseldorf Academy; he later studied with the history painter Peter Janssen and with Lovis Corinth in Berlin. His early work was decisively influenced by Cubist and Expressionist influences. In 1911 he became a member of the Rhenish Secession and exhibited regularly, for example, at the Cologne Sonderbund exhibition of the following year and at the Bonn exhibition of “Rheinische Expressionisten”, which was organised by August Macke. Mense’s commitment to social causes is revealed, e.g., in his socially critical series of etchings “Großstadt” (Metropolis), his work with the leftist periodical “Die Aktion” and his joining the politically active “Novembergruppe”. In 1918, in Munich, Mense began to develop a pictorial idiom related to the New Objectivity, with his works displaying links to the Magical Realism of his fellow artists and friends Alexander Kanoldt and Georg Schrimpf: particularly in the case of his portraits, the meticulous graphic articulation and minutely detailed depiction of his motifs – which often stand stiffly and disconnectedly next to one another – stirred a strong resonance with the public. From 1924 to 1932, Mense was a professor at the Academy in Wrocław (then: Breslau). In 1943 the Nazis confiscated and destroyed 34 of his paintings, which had been declared “degenerate”. In Mense’s late work, in which the motif of the Paradisal landscape frequently appears, the romanticising tendency of his earlier landscapes combines itself with fantastically surreal elements.