Heinrich Zille

Zille learned the trade of a lithographer and later worked as a highly qualified gravure printer at the renowned “Photographische Gesellschaft” until 1908. Here he came into contact with the most modern reproduction and printing techniques of the time and contributed to their further development.
It was in this context that he created his photographic and printmaking work around 1900, in which experimental techniques and a view of the life of the “lower classes” of the time, sharpened by his own experiences, produced images that soon attracted the attention of liberal artistic circles in Wilhelmine Berlin.
One of his most important patrons was Max Liebermann, who greatly appreciated Zille’s special talent and his sometimes dark humor. Zille exhibited at the Berlin Secession for the first time in 1901 and became a member in 1903. When the Secession split ten years later, he joined the “Freie Secession” led by Liebermann. He had some close friendships with Käthe Kollwitz, Hans Baluschek, August Gaul, Ernst Barlach, Gustav Meyrink and Erich Mühsam, among others. Leading illustrated publications such as “Simplicissimus”, “Jugend” and “Der Liebe Augustin” featured his work and commissioned him to create illustrations.
In 1908, Zille was forced to take the plunge and become a freelance artist. In the same year, he published his book ” Kinder der Straße”, the most successful Zille book to date. It contains the most important socially critical works of this period. From then on, he worked mainly for the magazine “Lustige Blätter”, and further publications appeared in quick succession, establishing his fame among all segments of the Berlin population.
The First World War (1914 to 1918), which Zille was initially ambivalent about like Liebermann and many other artists and intellectuals, interrupted this productivity. Zille worked for Paul Cassirer’s lithographic magazine “Der Bildermann” and until 1917 drew a weekly page for “Ulk”, a supplement to the “Berliner Tageblatt”, in which he invented fictitious (and at times astonishingly naive) war experiences of two German soldiers on the front. In 1917, he became a staunch opponent of the war and in the series “Kriegsmarmelade” (1917/18), recanted the “Ulk” drawings of earlier years. He began working with the Fritz Gurlitt publishing house, the art dealer I.B. Neumann and other galleries and publishers. With Gurlitt, he published the famous graphic cycles “Hurengespräche” (1920/21, under a pseudonym and without a publisher’s name), “Zwanglose Geschichten und Bilder” (1921, for which he also wrote the literary texts), and “Komm Karlineken, komm!” (1924).
During the Weimar Republic, Zille became an irrefutable authority in Berlin, but he also became a “trademark” for the so-called “Milljöh”. Zille became involved in social issues wherever he could, supporting social and political initiatives without directly joining a political party. He was accused on several occasions of “moral offensiveness” in individual erotic prints and was even convicted in one case.
In 1924, at the instigation of Liebermann and others, he was appointed a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts. In his later years, Zille suffered from illness and his working capacity declined. Nevertheless, he still published a series of books in which he recapitulated his life’s work and also updated earlier inventions.
On August 9, 1929, Heinrich Zille died in his Charlottenburg apartment after suffering several strokes. He was buried at the Waldfriedhof cemetery in Stahnsdorf with great sympathy from the people of Berlin.
Heinrich Zille is much more than a Berlin original. He is a critical contemporary witness of immense value, who also conveyed to an international audience the spirit of the times that ultimately led from the Kaiser through the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich.
And the ZiLLEMUSEUM actually does this in a very vivid and entertaining way!