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COPYRIGHT 2001 Society for the Advancement of Education
JOHN GUTMANN was born in Breslau (now Wroclaw), Poland, in 1905 to a middle-class Jewish businessman and his wife. They were typical of their time in that they identified more strongly with German culture than with their Jewish heritage. In the years after World War I, artistic activity flourished in Germany alongside a strong and lively populist culture that promoted, through magazines and popular novels, an image of America as a land of skyscrapers, painted Indians, gangsters, and Negro jazz. During that period, Gutmann pursued a career in art, studying under the renowned Expressionist artist Otto Muller, a romantic primitivist who stimulated his interest in the exotic.
In 1927, Gutmann left Breslau to continue his studies in the wild, decadent Berlin of the interwar years. He became a connoisseur of the city's internationally acclaimed nightlife, as well as the many new artistic movements that collided there: Expressionism, Constructivism, Dadaism, and New Realism. His own...
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