What is perhaps most surprising about this work is that the artist who created it, Götz Dohler, remains almost completely unknown. I have managed to discover a first initial, C., and a year of birth, 1867, and that's it. He's not listed in Bénézit, Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs. Google comes up with almost nothing. I can't find any record of work by Döhler being sold or offered for sale. Via Libri doesn't come up with any books or journals illustrated by him. It's as if he just created this one perfect work and then vanished into thin air. And yet no one acquires the technical skill shown in Sehnsucht without a lot of practice. I can imagine that if Götz Döhler remained doggedly faithful to Judgendstil he would have faded from view as that style became outmoded, and equally that his lush romantic sensibility would have been out-of-tune with the times once the catastrophe of the First World War go under way. But it still seems mysterious that so little can be ascertained about an artist of such stature. Do any of my readers know anything more about him?
In the early years of the twentieth century, many German artists were busy constructing the vocabulary of Expressionism. But some remained faithful to the Symbolist/Art Nouveau aesthetic of the end of the previous century, known as Jugendstil. I think the etching in this post, published in 1906 by the Leipzig art revue Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst, is one of the masterpieces of late Jugendstil. It's one of the most perfect summations of Jugendstil I have seen - intricate, brooding, romantic, with a magical transformation between human and natural forms. Please click on the image to get a larger version with more detail.
What is perhaps most surprising about this work is that the artist who created it, Götz Dohler, remains almost completely unknown. I have managed to discover a first initial, C., and a year of birth, 1867, and that's it. He's not listed in Bénézit, Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs. Google comes up with almost nothing. I can't find any record of work by Döhler being sold or offered for sale. Via Libri doesn't come up with any books or journals illustrated by him. It's as if he just created this one perfect work and then vanished into thin air. And yet no one acquires the technical skill shown in Sehnsucht without a lot of practice. I can imagine that if Götz Döhler remained doggedly faithful to Judgendstil he would have faded from view as that style became outmoded, and equally that his lush romantic sensibility would have been out-of-tune with the times once the catastrophe of the First World War go under way. But it still seems mysterious that so little can be ascertained about an artist of such stature. Do any of my readers know anything more about him?
What is perhaps most surprising about this work is that the artist who created it, Götz Dohler, remains almost completely unknown. I have managed to discover a first initial, C., and a year of birth, 1867, and that's it. He's not listed in Bénézit, Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs. Google comes up with almost nothing. I can't find any record of work by Döhler being sold or offered for sale. Via Libri doesn't come up with any books or journals illustrated by him. It's as if he just created this one perfect work and then vanished into thin air. And yet no one acquires the technical skill shown in Sehnsucht without a lot of practice. I can imagine that if Götz Döhler remained doggedly faithful to Judgendstil he would have faded from view as that style became outmoded, and equally that his lush romantic sensibility would have been out-of-tune with the times once the catastrophe of the First World War go under way. But it still seems mysterious that so little can be ascertained about an artist of such stature. Do any of my readers know anything more about him?