Heinrich Zille
(From Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia)
Rudolf Heinrich Zille
(January 10, 1858 - August 9, 1929), German illustrator and photographer,
was born in Radeburg near Dresden, as the son of watchmaker Johann
Traugott Zill (Zille since 1854) and Ernestine Louise (born Heinitz). In
1867, his family moved to Berlin, where he finished school in 1872 and
started an apprenticeship as a lithographer.
In 1883, he married Hulda Frieske, with whom he had three children. She
died in 1919.
Zille became best known for his (often funny) drawings, catching the
characteristics of people, especially "stereotypes", mainly from Berlin
and many of them published in the German weekly satirical newspaper
Simplicissimus. He was first to portray the desperate social environment
of the Berlin Mietskasernen (literally tenement barracks), buildings
packed with sometimes a dozen persons per room that fled from land to the
rising Gründerzeit industrial metropolis only to find even deeper poverty
in the developing proletarian class.
Zille did not feel himself as a real artist: he often said that his work
is not the result of talent but merely hard work. Max Liebermann
nevertheless promoted him. He called him into the Berlin Secession in
1903, put his works in expositions of the upper class, and encouraged him
to sell drawings - and at the time Zille lost his job as a lithographer in
1910 he encouraged him to live from his drawings alone. The Berlin "Common
People" tolled him the greatest respect, and very late in life his fame
culminated in the roaring twenties with the National Gallery to buy some
drawings in 1921, the Academy of the Arts to honour him with a
professorship in 1924, Gerhard Lamprecht to make a movie of his stories in
1925 "Die Verrufenen", and his 70th birthday was celebrated at large in
Berlin. He died one year later.
Less known is that he was the artist of many erotic pictures which are
close to pornography but also show the life of normal people. Some of them
can be seen in the Beate Uhse Erotic Museum in Berlin. In 1983 director
Werner W. Wallroth made an East German movie based on a musical written by
Dieter Wardetzky and Peter Rabenalt. This movie Zille und Ick (Zille and I
in Berlin Dialect) isn't a real biopic but uses parts of Zille's life for
the story.
