Dame mit Lippenstift und Katze

Ulrich Neujahr

A stylishly dressed woman of her time applies her lipstick, preparing to go out in public. Her small apartment is crowded, a mirror, wall clock, table with water pitcher and bowl, clothing draped over a chair and, at her left elbow, her cat tries to assist her. There is a lot of information packed into a small, yet easily readable format.

This may very well be a portrait of Bauhaus painter, designer, and photographer Charlotte Voepel, who Ulrich Neujahr met in the late 1920s when she was a student of Wassily Kandinksy and Josef Albers. By 1930 she had become a regular subject of his paintings and prints, and in 1938 they married.

Little of Voepel's work is found online, though her technical interpretations of Kandinsky's analytical theories regarding color and form are frequently found in books on the famed Bauhaus teacher.

Painter and printmaker Ulrich Neujahr was born in Landsberg an der Warthe, Germany on June 20, 1898. At the age of twelve he and his family relocated to Wilmersdorf where he attended the Joachim-Friedrich high school, graduating in 1917. That same year he was called up as a Reserve Lieutenant in the First World War and in 1918 he was badly wounded at Verdun and sent back to Wilmersdorf. After his recuperation one year later he enrolled in architecture course at the Technical University of Berlin, graduating with an intermediate diploma in 1920; he followed this with courses at the State School for Free and Applied Arts as well as the State Art School, both in Berlin.

In 1924 he began participating in exhibitions, starting with the Berlin Artists' Association's Jury-Free Art Exhibition, and regularly showed his work throughout Germany thereafter. Beginning in 1926, after completion of his studies, he took a teaching post at the Walter-Rathau high school, where he would continue to teach until 1944. In the late 1920s he met Bauhaus artist Charlotte Voepel, who was then a student of Wassily Kandinksy and Josef Albers, and they married in 1938, eventually having two children. From 1944 to 1945 taught in Konin, Poland.

Following the end of the Second World War he returned to Germany and worked as a painter in Weimar, taking a position part time at a women's college and continuing to exhibit. Between the wars and after, he traveled regularly to various cities and villages on the Mediterranean Sea, particularly the island of Ischia and the city of Sant'Angelo, Italy. These landscapes, cityscapes, and images of daily life would become regular subjects of Neujahr's work.

He continued to teach until his retirement in 1963, at which point he spent much of his time in Sant'Angelo. He often worked with artists Werner Gilles, Eduard Bargheer, and Hermann Poll in the studio he had built on the coast. His final painting was created there in the summer of 1977. He died in Berlin on October 9 of that same year.

As a side note, Neujahr's studio address in 1930, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Babelsberger Str. 51a, now has a "stumbling block" (a small copper plate set into the pavement) that is dedicated to Elsa and Dr. Maximillian Goldschmidt, a tribute to Jews who lived there who were murdered or disappeared in the Holocaust. The Goldschmidts disappeared in Auschwitz.