Otto Manigk: 'Lüttenort'

• oil on cardboard, 1950,
  inscribed on the back as the property of Otto Niemeyer-Holstein;
  width: 38 cm

Together with Niemeyer-Holstein, Otto Manigk, Herbert Wegehaupt and Karen Schacht are described as the 'Usedom School of Painting' – friends and like-minded artists who settled on the the island with their families around the mid-1930s.

Their works focus mainly on the landscape of Usedom. They do not belong to a certain style, and are instead identified by their shared attitude. The artists of this generation are driven by the desire to visualise the elementary and the essential qualities of what they see before them. The subjectiveness of experience, in their view, is a precondition to enable a grasp of the universally valid nature of reality.

Considering the existential demand they placed in art, it is not surprising that the protagonists of Expressive Realism did not perceive their art to be bonded to particular styles, programmes or ideologies.

"The quest for the valid form, the collective state of participation in perennial confrontation between humanity and nature, brought these artists together and stimulated their friendship again and again as the years passed. Their conscious, strict narrowing of motifs to comprise merely experiential nature around them, means no iota of spillage in artistic insight, and utter concentration on what lies essential before them." (Matthias Flügge in Bildende Kunst, 1983, Issue 7)