William Wauer

Biography

William Wauer was born into a pastor’s household, yet his sermons would be delivered in paint, bronze, and flickering light. After sharpening his eye at academies in Dresden, Berlin, and Munich, he reached Rome in 1893 and never stopped moving. Back in Dresden he wrote acid-tongued art reviews and steered the magazine Quickborn; a hop to Berlin turned him into an editor again, then a stage conjurer for Max Reinhardt, coaxing dramas out of the Hebbel and Kleines Theater boards. 1911: he traded footlights for film lights, founding his own company to write and direct movies that no censorship yet knew how to strangle. A year later Herwarth Walden hung his canvases in the epoch-making Sturm exhibition, catapulting Wauer to the front line of Expressionist shock troops. Between covers of Der Sturm his essays detonated; in 1924 he took the helm of the International Association of Expressionists, Cubists, Futurists, Constructivists—four “-ists” in one breath—and captained the painters’ collective “Die Abstrakten.” From 1928 to 1933 Berliners tuning in to their radios heard his baritone dismantle and rebuild modern art before bedtime. Books followed—thick, fearless volumes—until 1933, when the Nazis erased his name from every list except the one that spelled danger. After the war he stepped back into the daylight, resumed teaching, and sat on the boards of the Association of Fine Artists and the Community-College Lecturers’ League. Every five years the city threw him a retrospective—80, 85, 90, 95—proof that some fires, once lit, refuse to go out.