Heinrich Zille
Heinrich Zille, also known in Berlin as “Pinselheinrich”, remains one of the city’s most well-known and most popular artists. And yet, he was not born into a career in art: it was only following his dismissal as a lithographer from the Photographische Gesellschaft which provided him with the impetus to devote himself entirely to his craft.
. From then on, the depiction of scenes from the proletarian underclass – the reason for his dismissal – took centre stage in his creative work and became his main source of income.
Zille’s career path
Rudolf Heinrich Zille was born in Radeburg near Dresden on 10th January 1858. The family came to Berlin in 1867. As the son of an artisan and a miner’s daughter, his childhood was characterised by economic hardship. Therefore, as a young boy, Zille earned extra money doing odd jobs. At the same time, he came into contact with all levels of society and gained experience of life in a big city. It was also these impressions which were to become so important for his later creative works.
Young Zille took this advice to heart. He went onto the street: the streets of a city which between 1890 and 1910 had grown far too rapidly, a city full of social differences and cultural conflicts. This is where Zille found his subjects: the proletariat of Berlin with their high aspirations of the growing metropolis, yet who were so often disappointed, and whose everyday lives were defined by low wages, prevalent starvation and serious housing shortages.
Zille and his “Berlin Milljöh” [Berlin social environment] – real life
The tenement and back-street people of Berlin, the people in the bars and brothels were the focus of Zille’s work. He drew real life in this social milieu: domestic disputes, alcoholism, prostitution, child labour and poverty-related diseases. Through contacts in Berlin’s artistic circles, as of 1901 Zille displayed some of his works in the exhibitions of the Berlin Secession. Even here he already showed a reality “which to date has not been seen in Berlin art in this clarity and steeliness”, as Matthias Flügge writes in the book H. Zille – Berliner Leben.From 1905, Heinrich Zille worked for Lustige Blätter. Drawings from the milieu with amusing words and images were in demand. As commissions increased – publishers of books and newspapers became his main clients – he perfected his technique for pen drawings. Zille also learnt to be blunt in his expression and hone his style of “unobserved drawing”. His prints appeared in a wide range of magazines, including Simplicissimus and Jugend. Editorial offices were not merely looking for artworks depicting themes of housing shortages, criminality and alcohol. Readers ought to recognise themselves in the pictures too.
Photographer of the modern age
The fact that Zille had also taken photographs was something that remained in the background into the late 1960s’. Zille had already become acquainted with the medium of photography during his training to become a lithographer and went on to use photographs as references for his drawings. Also, while working for the Photographische Gesellschaft, he acquired knowledge of photography, even if no record exists about the extent to which it was part of his daily work. At any rate, he took photographs as a private civilian without any financial interests. And: he took photographs solely in the years when he was not earning money as an illustrator and graphic artist. His earliest works date back to 1882.
While his first subjects were akin to those of professional photographers, in the years to come, snapshots would take up more and more space in Zille’s photographic works. As well as people, they often show city views, for example from Charlottenburg, Westend – his own area in his later years – or Krögel-Viertel on the banks of the Spree between Fischerinsel and Waisenbrücke. He is directly in the thick of things, lying in wait for people almost. As photographer, he himself assumes a position completely in the background. In the images he creates, he records the microcosm of a rapidly evolving Berlin. From 1902, Heinrich Zille’s photography becomes increasingly scarce. The last datable photographs – private images of his family – were taken in around 1905/1906.
Even if Zille never saw himself as a photographer and his photographic work ended with his departure from the Photografische Gesellschaft, he, nevertheless, left a mark on the medium in such a way that was to be instrumental for the imagery of the 20th century. The modern aspect in Heinrich Zille’s photography “is shown by how he used the camera for his artistic intentions and which photo-aesthetic results he achieved”, according to Berlin photographer and art historian Enno Kaufhold in summarising Zille’s accomplishment: “With his earliest series of photos, he initiated reportage photography of the years that followed, with his motifs he deviated from thematic conventions.”
On 9th August 1929, Heinrich Zille died in Berlin following several family misfortunes. He has left an important legacy of drawings, prints and photographs in which he lives on to this day as an entertaining chronicler and pioneering artist of this era.
Heinrich Zille in the collection of the Stadtmuseum Berlin
As early as 1928, the Märkisches Museum – which is a part of Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin since 1995 – acquired 130 drawings by Heinrich Zille. Sadly, only one of these prints survived the Second World War, entitled “Christmas market on Arkonaplatz”. Despite these irreplaceable losses, by 1978, the museum, which reopened in 1946, held an extensive Zille collection with around 180 graphic works, photographic prints and documents. From 1966, the Berlin-Museum – the West Berlin counterpart to the Märkisches Museum situated in East Berlin – acquired its first Zille works.