(Vienna 1885–1945 New York) ‘Portrait of Prof. Dr. Martin Hahn’, circa 1926, signed Mopp, to stretcher label with note (typewritten): Dr. Fred Himmelweit LONDON, oil on canvas, 98 x 88 cm, framed, (K)

Marie-Agnes von Puttkammer, Max Oppenheimer 1885–1954, Leben und malerisches Werk mit einem Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde, Böhlau, 1999, p. 264, cat. raisonné no. 172 (with ill.)

Dr Martin Hahn (Berlin 1865–1934), professor ordinarius of hygiene at the University of Berlin. Member of the academic committee for military hygiene, of the committee for the training of military physicians at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Academy, and of the Berlin Medical Society. He was relieved of his posts in 1933.

He began his career in 1889 under Robert Koch at the Berlin Institute for Hygiene. Further training under Ernst Leopold Salkowski at the Institute of Pathology in Berlin, under Marcel von Nencki in St. Petersburg, and in Munich under Max von Pettenkofer, Hans Buchner and Max von Gruber See Wikipedia entry.

Provenance: Private Collection, Berlin
Villa Grisebach auctions, Ausgewählte Werke, Berlin, 5 June 1998, cat. no. 71;
Martin Suppan art dealership, Vienna;
From an Austrian private collection

Exhibited: Art and Antiques Fair, Hofburg, Vienna
Art and Antiques Fair, Residenz, Salzburg 1999

Oppenheimer, who had officially adopted the artist’s name, MOPP in 1919, was now able to move back into his old atelier in Joachimthalerstrasse in Berlin. A series of exhibitions at the Galerie Caspari, Munich, the Galerie Arnold, Dresden, and at Paul Cassirer’s ensured he received the attention for which he had hoped. Aside from a number of articles, which were published in various art periodicals, the Werkkunstverlag dedicated a double issue in its art archives series to his works, with articles by Max Osborn, Alfred Stix and others. Thomas Mann, whom he had painted in early 1926 (cat. raisonné 166), became aware of his large ‘Orchestra’ picture and published an enthusiastic essay on it in the Berliner Tageblatt. This increasing regard assisted Oppenheimer, and the city of Berlin and several museums made a number of purchases of his work...
Without aiming to be socially critical in his work, which he oriented much more towards the unpartisan, realist painting of the Neue Sachlichkeit in terms of subject matter, Oppenheimer does convey modern people who mirror the dynamic, vibrating metropolis in his paintings from this period. He wrote on the subject of his portraits dating from these years, “... the favourably composed man, placed within a space, is not enough for the portrait painter of today. The sitter’s surroundings impinge, the room, the street, the city. Things that cannot be perceived optically intensify the portrayal of the man of today. His attributes have disappeared, emblems have been eliminated. In their place the surroundings and objects play a symbolic role. A product of the great cities, the nervous man, chiefly considered as an object, requires new, emphatic means of expression. ...’
This requirement that a sitter’s surroundings and objects should threw light on him symbolically meant that in his portraits, Oppenheimer consciously shifted closer to those produced by the Neue Sachlichkeit artists, in which the closest possible, realistic depiction of the job or occupation of the person portrayed is instrumentalised as an ‘interpretation of his or her individuality’. Where Oppenheimer was concerned in his early portraits dating from the period before the First World War to depict a simple illumination of the human psyche, now he would aspire to portray the nature of the sitter by delineating the external appearance of his or her characteristic environment and typical employ, which led him to a distinctly individual formal language. Excerpt from Marie-Agnes von Puttkammer, Bilder der Großstadt - das Berlin der zwanziger Jahre, op.cit.