Nogent-sur-marne By Walther Ruttmann (1887-1941)

An oil on cardboard measuring 32X26 cm representing Nogent-sur-Marne, signed lower left and dated 1914 by Walther Ruttmann (1887-1941)

Walter Ruttmann, sometimes Walther Ruttmann, is a painter and a German filmmaker pioneer of "absolute cinema", born December 28, 1887 in Frankfurt and died July 15, 1941, aged 53, in Berlin. After his baccalaureate passed in 1905, Walter Ruttmann began studying architecture in Zurich then painting in Munich where he befriended Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger. In 1917 he painted his first abstract compositions then declared, the following year, to abandon paintings for "painting with time (Malerei mit Zeit)". He then built a device which would be the basis of his Opus I. During the First World War, he was an artillery lieutenant on the eastern front, then, ill, spent the year 1917 in the sanatorium. With Opus I, produced in 1921, Walter Ruttmann is the pioneer of abstract cinema called in Germany the Absoluter Film. The first public screening took place on April 27, 1921 at the Marmorhaus in Berlin. The original musical score is by Max Butting. At this screening, he met Oskar Fischinger, from whom he bought, the following year, his wax cutting machine with which Fischinger made his first works. Opus II, III and IV, are presented on June 25, 1925 at the Marmorhaus in Berlin, at the same time as the Diagonal Symphony by Viking Eggeling. From 1925 he worked with Lore Leudesdorff, a Bauhaus student, who assisted him for his Opus V and the commercials that Ruttmann was making at the time. In 1925-26 he met Karl Freund and the screenwriter Carl Mayer with whom he had the idea of a film on Berlin, it was Berlin, a symphony of a big city (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927), which makes it famous all over the world. Considered then as a pacifist of the left, he will make a trip to Moscow in 1928 and 1929. He adheres to the Nazi ideology in the 1930s. He is the assistant of Leni Riefenstahl for Les Dieux du stade, then directs films. propaganda campaign for the Nazi army shortly before he died of a leg amputation in 1941.