While Wigman led a line of grieving mothers in pastel-blue veils, Alexander Camaro, as the god of war, wore a face-mask that according to one commentator made him look like a cross between the high-profile heavy-weight boxer Max Schmeling and the pioneering stage director Paul Wegener.
[1][9] The National Socialists were able to take power in January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship Many things changed, but Camaro was neither Jewish nor a political activist, and was able to pursue a stage career.
He joined the newly re-established Deutscher Künstlerbund ("German artists' association") in 1950 and participated in their first postwar exhibition with four oil paintings, including the large-format "Rosa Dame" ("Pink lady").
[8] The regular salary gave him a new level of financial security, but also reduced his public profile with art buyers because there was no longer a stream of new Camaro works appearing on the market.
The extent to which, after 1952, Camaro became something of a hoarder of his own artwork would only become apparent to commentators after his death, at which point his estate contained well over 800 oil paintings, along with a substantial, collection of graphic art, drawings and sketches.
That reflected the world in which he was living and working at the time, but as his career progressed beyond stage performing, those themes nevertheless remained integral to his output, though they were no longer always to the fore.
The image cycle "Das Hölzerne Theater" (The Wooden Theatre) of 1945/46 established Camaro as part of the postwar "Berlin arts scene".
Till the end of the 1940s Camaro's approach was mainly figurative, his paintings communicating a narrative that in part operates below the surface, but which also evokes a melancholy poeticism.
Bright colours, notably shades of white, dominate the large-format canvases of his later work, in some of which he revives devices from his earlier periods such as collage techniques.
Probably the best known example was his collaborative project with his then partner, the ceramics artist Susanne Riée, for a permanent work created from strongly coloured glass blocks at the Berliner Philharmonie (concert hall) (1963).