Werner Graeff - painter, graphic artist, typographer, photographer and sculptor - is an important Bauhaus artist and a significant representative of Constructivism in Germany. Prompted by his friend Mies van der Rohe he wrote his moving autobiography "Hurdenlauf durch das 20. Jahrhundert" (The Obstacle Race of the 20th century), which this volume publishes for the first time with a representative selection of texts. Werner Graeff ( 1901 - 1978 ) was a student at the Bauh aus in Weimar and from 1921 a member of the De Stijl Dutch artists' group. Together with Willi Baumeister he was also closely associated with the "ring neue werbegestalter" founded in 1927 by Kurt Schwitters. At an early stage he focused much of his attent ion on film and photography, but in 1951 after his return to the Ruhr region from exile in Switzerland he once again increasingly devoted himself to his work as an independent artist. Illustrated with a large number of paintings, pictograms, multiples, dra wings and graphic works from the artist's estate, this volume leads the reader through Graeff's life and works and is at the same time a fascinating journey through the German art history of the 20 th century.

As a central artist of early modernism, Alexej von Jawlensky (born in Torshok, Russia, in 1864, died in Wiesbaden in 1941) considerably expanded the possibilities of painting. Based on an expressive, colorful appropriation of the world, by reducing form and intensifying color, he made his pictures an expression of an immaterial and spiritual truth. Despite the great individuality of his path, his work continues to give important inspirations to painting until today with respect to color, the serial, and the spiritual. The exhibition and catalogue present an exemplary selection of some seventy paintings and drawings and trace the development of the three big topics of "face, landscape, and still life," to which Jawlensky dedicated himself in his work.