November Group (German)
[2] The association's first office was located at 113 Potsdamer Strasse in Berlin (destroyed during the Second World War, level with today's No.
The artists and founding members César Klein and Max Pechstein in particular had been associated with the art dealer for some time.
[3] In the first few months, 170 artists joined the newly founded Novembergruppe: 49 of them alone came from the editorial environment of Herwarth Walden's magazine Sturm.
The November Group was known for the diversity of its styles and disciplines, but is also criticised for this lack of uniformity and the resulting difficulty in classifying them stylistically.
This diversity ranged from Expressionism and Cubism to Constructivism and represented “a middle ground between visionary and lyrical expressivity, constructive pictorial organisation and a sensitive and milieu-oriented objectivity.”[6] From July to December 1920, the Novembergruppe published six issues of the journal Der Kunsttopf.
Together with Hans Siebert von Heister, Hausmann edited a new journal entitled NG (publication of the November Group), whose cover was designed by the artist Hannah Höch.
[9] With the dissolution of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst in spring 1921, many architects who had hitherto been organised in this association joined the November Group.
Abstract and surrealist avant-garde films by German and French artists, including Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack and Francis Picabia, were presented.
[5] The group parted company with its managing director Hugo Graetz in the spring of 1930 and moved its office to the rooms of the gallery Die Kunststube, which was located at Königin-Augusta-Straße 22 in Berlin (today Reichpietschufer, at the height of house number 48).
[14] The November Group held regular art festivals, costume parties, studio visits as well as literary and musical events.
In the diatribe Säuberung des Kunsttempels (The Cleaning of the Temple of Art) by Wolfgang Willrich, 174 former members and guests of the association were listed by name and publicly pilloried as “degenerate”.
Thus in 1919 Marc Chagall, in 1920 Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Marie Laurencin, in 1922 Henryk Berlewi and in 1923 El Lissitzky (with his legendary Proun Room) were represented in the Novembergruppe's section at the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung.
[19] In 1921, the association was represented at the 16th Jury-Free Art Exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 5 February to 6 March, at the invitation of the Dutch artists' group De Onafhankelijken.
[20] In October 1924, the First General German Art Exhibition in Soviet Russia took place in Moscow, which subsequently travelled to Leningrad (now Saint-Petersburg) and Saratov.
Josef Altmann, who had run the small gallery since 1914, can be considered the first art dealer of the Novembergruppe, who also represented individual members.
The group was initially founded mainly by painters Max Pechstein, Georg Tappert, César Klein, Moriz Melzer and Heinrich Richter.
Here, several women participated in exhibitions, in addition to Hannah Höch and Marie Laurencin, for example, Emy Roeder and Emmy Klinker.
Georg Tappert compiled a handwritten list of members in 1918, which is now in the estate of Walter Gropius in the Bauhaus Archive Berlin.
[26] A third list of members from 1930 was compiled by the Novembergruppe's managing director, Hugo Graetz, a copy of which is now in the Archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.
