Emil Orlik was interested in the great in the small. On his numerous journeys through Asia, it was not the great sights that he captured in his pictures, but rather the living conditions of the so-called little people, to whom he paid tribute with a fine eye for detail. He also portrayed many of the greats of his time and paved the way for arts and crafts.
(...) Continue readingEmil Orlik - Training as a painter
Emil Orlik was born in Prague on 21st July 1870 to the Jewish master tailor Moritz Orlik and his wife Anna. After the young Emil graduated from high school in Prague in 1889, he moved to Munich to study painting until 1893. He initially attended Heinrich Knirr's private painting school, then the Academy of Fine Arts, which had originally rejected him due to his lack of skills in life drawing. In 1894 he returned to Prague, where he volunteered for a year in the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1896, he met the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and in addition to Rilke, Orlik also painted portraits of Alfred Döblin and Adolph von Menzel during this time. He experimented with various graphic techniques alongside Bernhard Pankok, with a particular interest in the woodcut technique, and Pankok in turn produced a woodcut portrait of Orlik. The famous socially critical poster, one of Emil Orlik's main works, was created for a public reading of Gerhart Hauptmann's drama ‘The Weavers’.
Special relationship with East Asia
By now a very experienced painter, Emil Orlik opened his first studio in Prague in 1897, while simultaneously helping to design the Munich magazine Die Jugend, and in 1899, joined the Vienna Secession. Orlik enjoyed travelling from an early age and his first destinations included Holland, France, England and Scotland. He found inspiration and motifs everywhere, but nothing influenced him as much as his first trip to East Asia, which took him to China and Japan in 1900. The many impressions of Asian culture brought not only the turn of the century, but also a very personal turning point for the artist. The magic of Japan captivated him in particular and influenced a large part of his further oeuvre, whilst his works in the style of Japanese colour woodcuts support his attribution to Japonisme. In 1910, he took part in the World Exhibition in Brussels and returned to Japan in 1912 for in-depth studies.
Commercial graphics and portraits
Emil Orlik did not shy away from commercial commissions either: As early as 1902, he designed entire series of collector's pictures for the Stollwerck chocolate factory in Cologne, and from 1917 to 1918, accompanied the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a press illustrator. In addition to a large number of commercial prints, which not least helped to secure the artist's livelihood, Emil Orlik distinguished himself above all as a chronicler of his time and repeatedly portrayed famous personalities, including Thomas Mann, Ernst Barlach, Rudolf Steiner and Albert Einstein. He also designed numerous stage sets and costumes for the Austrian theatre director Max Reinhardt.
Emil Orlik died in Berlin on 28th September 1932. Since then, his work has been honoured in many exhibitions, often with a focus on his artistic relationship with Japan, including the 2015 exhibition at Schloss Moyland entitled Emil Orlik and Japan. From the Land of the Rising Sun.
Emil Orlik - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
