Max Geyer 1937
(he is the artist who made this presentation tray)
Max Geyer
Max Geyer was a Czech artist who was born in 1904 and grew up during the 1920s and was inspired by the artistic culture of the time. The 1920s and 1930s saw continued development and evolution of the key innovations of the primary years of the twentieth century. To have these years as the formative period for an artist was to be surrounded by incredible practitioners of the pictorial arts. It was also a time of recovery and introspection after the horrors of the First World War, which saw important shifts in politics. Marxism was a predominant political ideology which was also enormously influential among artists and their communities. The Bauhaus was founded in 1919, and became an important place surrounding ideas in favor of the unification of art, craft and design disciplines – an idea that became known as the Gesamtkunstwerk. Surrealism came to be the key expressive mode of the 1920s, and was aided by the liberalism of Germany’s Weimar Republic, which was an environment that allowed for tremendous creative flowering.
Max Geyer's work has been offered at auction multiple times. The artist died in 1958.
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(Mountain landscape with a castle)
This enigmatic charcoal drawing by Czech artist Max Geyer (1904-1958) depicts a coke oven in Witkowitz in Bohemia (now Vitkovice). This area of Bohemia was annexed by the Nazis in 1939 as part of the annexation of Sudetenland (where many ethnic Germans lived at the time). I feel that this dramatic drawing is connected with that time in history. It is likely that Max Geyer was a Sudeten German and that this was a piece of German propaganda given the calligraphic description of this piece on its matte. I translate it to read: Coke Oven in Witkowitz / drawing by Max Geyer / The Czechization and Abduction of the Sudeten German Industry Progresses from Day to Day.
Geyer's association with German politics is further reinforced by the fact that he designed and etched a silver presentation plaque in 1939 commemorating the cooperation of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party as represented by Vice Admiral Canaris and Konrad Henlein (the leading Sudeten German Politician and later Nazi Gauleiter for Sudetenland in 1939).
Konrad Henlein - a large presentation plate to the head of the foreign/defence department Wilhelm Canaris, 1939. Hard silver-plated edition with elevated rim, the centre with etched depiction of a handshake between Wehrmacht and Party under the national eagle. Continuous dedication (tr.) "Vice admiral Canaris - In commemoration of the years of cooperation 1934-1935 - Konrad Henlein", thereunder (tr.) "Drafted and etched Max Geyer 1939". On the reverse side a suspension hook. Diameter 51.5 cm.
By Max Geyer (1904 - 1958), Czechoslovakian painter and illustrator, studied at the Aca.