100th birthday of Max Linger - Germany / German Democratic Republic 1988 - 5 Pfennig

100th Birthday Max Lingner On the occasion of the 100th birthday of Max Lingner, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of the German Democratic Republic issues four multi-colored special postage stamps. Special cancellation from 8 November 1988 to 7 January 1989 Max Lingner 1888 - 1959 The careful care, preservation and productive appropriation of national and international cultural treasures are among the principles of socialist cultural policy in the German Democratic Republic. To promote a creative approach to the treasures of German culture, the "National Council of the German Democratic Republic for the Care and Dissemination of German Cultural Heritage" was founded in 1980. One of his stipulations is to comprehensively acknowledge the achievements and impact of the painter and press artist Max Lingner on the occasion of his 100th birthday on November 17, 1988. We regard his complete work as the impulse and measure of a new stage in socialist art and we are an outstanding example of German revolutionary-artistic avant-garde. Today, Lingner's pictures and graphics are part of the heritage of our socialist-realistic art. The honor of this artist should contribute to making his life and work accessible to a broader public, opening up his works to today's questions, and thereby intensifying his search for the inseparable unity of artistic and political impact at Lingner. The famous German graphic artist and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz had pointed this out to him when, in 1929, she gave him the suggestion to go to Paris. This stay, which became exile after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, became significant for his artistic development, and in particular his activity for French communist newspapers. It forced him to deal with the problems of the time on a daily basis, leading him to an unmistakable expressiveness with emphatically graphic means. As a German artist Lingner studied intensively the nature of the French people and shaped in his works its typical expression of national self-consciousness. His portrayals of the French worker testify to the inner pride and dignity of the working class in France, his works documenting the creative power, ideals and historical optimism of the revolutionary working class in the internationalist sense. The four special postage stamps are illustrative examples. The artist himself once said that art must be shaped not only with pen and color but with passion. When Max Lingner left France in 1949, he returned to his homeland and presented 40 works to the future president of the first workers and peasants state on German soil, Wilhelm Pieck. They are his artistic accountability to the working class of their own country. In the GDR Lingner worked as a professor of contemporary painting at the Berlin Academy of Arts and created similar as once in Paris at the festivals of the "Humanité" political "show walls" and another large decoration. In 1954 Lingner, now in "his own responsibility", begins a series of four major historical pictures with revolutionary events in German history. Only two of the themes "1848" and "Peasants 'War" have gone beyond the draft stage, the "Peasants' War" being the only one completed. Five years imprisonment (1939-1944) in internment camps of the reactionary French government, flight, seizure by the German fascists, renewed flight with false papers and finally fight in the French resistance movement had shattered his health. On March 14, 1959, Max Lingner dies. Highly respected also in the GDR as a founding member of the Academy of Arts, as a multiple National Prize winner, he expresses at the end of his autobiography in simple words, as he sees his position in the development of art itself: "Maybe even me once a new German realistic art who will come, because she must come, to be one of her pioneers. "