A man sits on the windowsill and holds his heart in his hand, from which the roots of the veins still protrude.

The picture is called “Man with a Heart” - a self-portrait drawn by Walter Gramatté in 1918. The combination of motif and title is not black humor, but an expression of an existential disruption that the First World War had inflicted on the artist.

Gramatté, who had volunteered at the beginning of the war as a seventeen-year-old, suffered serious health and mental injuries as a paramedic on the Western Front.

They overshadowed his life and at the same time inspired large areas of his work.

You can now get to know its graphic part with the help of more than a hundred drawings, watercolors and prints in the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Not a crowd favorite to date

For most visitors, Gramatté's art should be a discovery, because although a catalog raisonné of his prints appeared shortly after his untimely death in 1929 and despite several exhibitions in the past decades, Gramatté is still an insider tip among art connoisseurs. Unlike Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel, to whom he was personally and artistically close, Gramatté has so far failed to achieve great public success. This has to do with the shortness of his creative period and the fact that his reception was interrupted by the National Socialist ostracism and did not really get going again after 1945. But it is also due to Gramatté's stylistic flexibility, which made him switch between expressionism, magical realism and surrealism again and again,which irritated the pigeonhole thinking and the anticipated expectations of collectors and art historians. The ambivalent image of a “bulky artist” and “interesting outsider” sticks to Gramatté to this day.

The variety of his visual language, which ranges from pleasing portraits to expressive dream sequences to the grimaceous fragmented forms of a "game with suicide", the exhibition curated by Andreas Stolzenburg shows the viewer again and again by showing similar motifs but stylistically contrasting images presented side by side. How much the pessimistic tone that underlies many pictures corresponded to Gramatté's own constitution is shown by his illustrations for Georg Büchner's “Lenz”: Eight self-portraits reflect Lenz's gloomy disposition, the world is falling apart. “Pain everywhere, not walking, sitting, lying down. ... Like 'Lenz' to me, it is always sometimes light and then deeper and darker ”, Gramatté wrote to his friend Walther Merck. For Gramatté, literature formedfor which his friend Hermann Kasack set a monument with the figure of the painter Katell in the novel “The City Behind the Stream”, an important point of reference throughout his life.

Lighter facets in Spain

His chalk lithographs for Nikolai Gogol's novella “The Coat” show depressed people crammed between threateningly narrow walls.

This claustrophobic mood continues in other leaves, which symbolize exhaustion and hopeless circles.

A series of works that were created in Spain provide a counterpoint in terms of colors, motifs and moods.

Gramatté and his wife, the Russian composer Sonia Fridman-Gramatté, wanted to emigrate there.

The attempt to gain a foothold in Spain failed, but the Andalusian and Mallorcan landscapes and cityscapes, the erotic portraits of women and half-nudes that he drew and painted here give his work many lighter facets.

After Gramatté's death, his widow and her second husband, the art historian Ferdinand Eckhardt, took care of the maintenance and presentation of the work from Winnipeg, Canada. It was mainly thanks to them that Gramatté was not completely forgotten. A rediscovery of his work is now becoming apparent: in 2019, the Canadian Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation donated a large number of pictures from their holdings to several museums. The Hamburger Kunsthalle received 47 drawings and prints as well as an oil painting, which, together with the existing holdings there, offer a good overview of Gramatté's work.

In addition to this donation, the occasion for the exhibition is also the special role that Hamburg played for Gramatté. The artist, who lived in Berlin and died in a Hamburg clinic, had two closely intertwined strands in the Hanseatic city: his illnesses and his art. In Hamburg he underwent medical treatment, and at the same time he met a network of collectors, gallery owners and art historians - among them Aby Warburg and Rosa Schapire - who supported him and alleviated his financial plight. The Hamburger Kunsthalle, which in 1920 was the first museum to acquire pictures by Gramatté, still presented an extensive exhibition of his works in 1933. This happened under the eyes of the National Socialists, who soon had Gramatté's pictures removed from German museums.

Walter Gramatté and Hamburg. In the Kunsthalle, Hamburg; until July 25th. The publication on display costs 12.90 euros.