BACKGROUND
The 1920s were characterized by the belief in the technical and industrial revolution, which advanced with seven-mile boots. Creativity, progress and tempo were the driving forces of an era which reflected emergence and hope after the horrors of World War I.
New means of expressing were also searched in art, means that could best reflect the fashion of the time, that were rationally usable and affordable and yet still conveyed a hint of something special.
Artists like El Lissitzky, Kandinski, Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Gunda Stölzl, Oskar Schlemmer, Johannes Itten, Moholy-Nagy, or Walter Gropius characterized individual styles like cubism, constructivism, suprematism, Bauhaus, New Objectivity....
In the field of ceramic art, people like Trude Petri, Martha Katzer, Paul Speck, Herman Gretsch and Artur Hennig established a reputation.
Spray painting, which wasn’t really something new, experienced a renaissance within a relatively short period of six to eight years (about 1926-1933). The technique that was known of since about 1890 carries coloured ornaments onto the already dried surfaces by using an aerograph. It was either done free-hand or by using stencils. Rational working and individual freedom of expression ideally went hand in hand.
The so-called lower class, affected by the economic depression and the beginning of mass unemployment, was able to bring home the large, wide world (of art).
Geometric ornaments and decorations, on ceramic and porcelain, tins, wallpaper and textiles seized the design vocabulary of the leading artists of those times before, after 1933, they were ostracized as “un-German” and again replaced by all available means by floral patterns in the homey (weird) living environments.
