Le progrès à bras-le-corps

Ella Bergmann-Michel & Robert Michel. Getting to grips with progress.
Catalogue d’exposition, Galerie Eric Mouchet, Paris, septembre 2018
 
“Ella Bergmann-Michel and Robert Michel were both born into wealthy families, she in 1895, he in 1897; they married in Weimar in 1919. In that year, the National Assembly founded the Weimar Republic on the ruins of the German Em-pire, which war had reduced to bankruptcy and popular insurrection. […] As a result of a solo exhibition by Rob-ert Michel at the famous von Garvens gallery in Hanover in 1921, when Robert was only 24, Kurt Schwitters, some ten years their elder, discovered Robert’s work, became acquainted with the ‘Michelmanns’, swapped works with them and became one of their greatest friends.
 
The tools and techniques most often deployed by Ella and Robert – ink (often with ruling pen), smooth paper, sometimes tracing paper – are the same. But though we speak here of an artist-couple, and though they often worked together to promote modern-ism and both spent their lives combating bourgeois ‘good taste’, their works approached modernity from very different directions. In his drawings, Robert transcended his passion for the mechanical, whereas Ella, who was drawn to natural sciences and physics, as early as 1925 created abstract collages using pieces of pa-per cut from books on the theory of the decomposition of light.” Eric Mouchet
 
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Published by Galerie Eric Mouchet & Galerie Zlotowski
Editorial direction: Michael Honecker, Eric Mouchet
Graphic design: Lisa Pages
WritersThierry Dufrêne, Norbert Nobis, Friedrich Meschede, Katharina Sykora, Michael Honecker, Eric Mouchet
Trilingual edition: French, German, English
ISBN 978-2-9553898-88-1
Hardback: 45 €