Alois Erbach (1888-1972) Wiesbaden; German Expressionist "maternity" Engraving, Wood

Alois Erbach (1888-1972) Wiesbaden; German Expressionist "maternity" Engraving, Wood. Numbered 33/50.
Erbach was the son of a mason. He painted impressionist watercolors in his spare time and wanted to become a painter. In Wiesbaden he was friends with John Heartfield, and in 1908 he decided to go secretly to Munich. There they took a room together. After presenting his paintings and an examination, he was admitted to Heinrich Knirr in 1908 to study at the Royal School of Applied Arts. He then studied painting at the Munich Academy of Arts from 1911. Until 1918, Erbach participated as a soldier in the First World War, from where he [1]returned to Wiesbaden-Sonnenberg. There he worked as a freelance artist. In 1919 he co-founded the group Das Junge Rheinland. He belonged to the Dresden Secession group in 1919 and to the artistic circle around the gallery owner, Johanna Ey, in Dusseldorf. In Wiesbaden he frequented the art collector and patron Heinrich Kirchhoff in the circle. There he met Conrad Felixm'ller in 1920, who "lectured" him on several occasions.[2] In his painterly works, Erbach first turned towards expressionism. Later works show influences of surrealism and new objectivity. In 1924, Erbach moved to Berlin. He lived there until 1933, among others, with the communist scene-maker Wolfgang Roth.[3] Erbach was at least close to the KPD and was a member of the association of revolutionary visual artists ASSO, the Red Group and the group “The Contemporary”. Under the pseudonym Aleus or “Marc Aleus”, Erbach provided caricatures for the flag rouge and the satirical magazines Kn'ppel, Die Pleite and Eulenspiegel. In 1925 he created the worker's lithograph of the poster for the KPD of the Reich presidential election. Choose [4] Erbach had close contacts in Berlin with Otto Dix, George Grosz, Otto Griebel and Heartfield, and the circle of other artists around the Malik publishing house and the Berlin Dadaists. When they held their mass in Berlin in 1920, he sent them a greeting.[5] The night of the Reichstag fire, Erbach was temporarily arrested by the Gestapo. [3]He was now greatly endangered and emigrated to Paris on Majorca in 1933. In 1937, five of his works from public collections were verifiably confiscated in the "Degenerate Art" action.[6]