NOVEMBERGRUPPE

English November Group group of artists formed in Berlin in November 1918 by Max Pechstein and Csar Klein. Taking its name from the month of the Weimar Revolution, this group of Expressionist artists hoped to bring about a new unity in painting, sculpture, architecture, crafts, and city planning, and to bring the artist into close contact with the worker. In an attempt to reach the working masses, the Novembergruppe established Workers' Councils for Art in 1919; support, however, came from the middle classes who, with greater education and more leisure time, more readily accepted this radical, intellectual group and their new (and often abstract) art forms. Among the leading artists associated with the Novembergruppe were the architects Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Hans Poelzig, and Bruno Taut; the painters El Lissitzky, Lyonel Feininger, Otto Mller, and Heinrich Campendonck; the sculptors Gerhard Marcks, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, and Rudolf Belling; the filmmakers Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling; the composers Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, and Kurt Weill; and the dramatist Bertolt Brecht. The most important activity of the Novembergruppe consisted of public exhibitions (held through the 1920s); but it also sponsored lectures and avant-garde concerts and film presentations. The group's support of Socialism and its ideal of unification of the arts were common concerns of this period and the goals of other organizations as well, notably of the Weimar Bauhaus, established in 1919 by Walter Gropius (see Bauhaus).