Chess Art
The ChessMaster Portraits of David Friedmann
We update an article from the September 1996 issue of Chess Life with additional works by David Friedmann that have been discovered.
By Miriam Friedman Morris
W
ith pencil and paper he captured the great chess cham- pions of the 1920s. The painter and graphic artist David Friedmann, a student of Hermann Struck and Lovis
Corinth, became one of the most prestigious press artists of his day. He was a chess enthusiast and thus had a special affinity toward portraying luminaries in this field. His nimble hand also sketched hundreds of celebrated personalities from the arts, music, theater, sports, politics, and indus- try that were published mainly in the Berlin news- papers and the radio-program magazine, Der Deutsche Rundfunk. However, his chess portraits were unique. Some show players in deep concentration on their game, looking down at their chess- board and pieces. One can sense the drama of the chess tournament in the quiet atmos- phere of a smoke-filled room. Friedmann lived in Berlin
from 1911 and was a suc- cessful artist until the Nazis came to power in 1933. The Gestapo looted Friedmann’s oeuvre of 2,000 works in 1941, but despite the destruction by the German Reich, numerous portraits sur- vived. The story of his prewar career and my search for his looted art was published in the September 1996 issue of Chess Life: “David Friedmann’s Artwork for Berlin’s Newspapers.” 1
New dis- 48 Chess Life — July 2011
coveries since then have inspired this update. My father was born in 1893 in Mährisch-Ostrau, Austria-
Hungary, now Ostrava in the Czech Republic. He learned that an international chess master tourney would take place in his hometown and met Emanuel Lasker, the former world chess champion. As he explained his intention to issue a portfolio of portraits of the participat- ing chess masters, Lasker was absolutely enthusiastic about the idea and wrote the foreword later in Berlin. He produced 50 num-
bered editions entitled, Das Schachmeister Turnier in Mährisch Ostrau, Juli 1923. Each portfolio was com- posed of 14 lithograph portraits, one for each player: Emanuel Lasker, Richard Réti, Ernst Grün- feld, Rudolf Spielmann, Efim Bogoljubow, Alexey Selezniev, Max Euwe, Sieg- bert Tarrasch, Savielly Tartakower, Amos Pokorný,
Akiba Rubinstein, Heinrich Wolf, Karel Hromádka, and Max Wal- ter. All the prints bear the signature of the depicted chess masters and are part of the original plate. The artist hand signed each print in pencil. At some point, Friedmann replaced the portraits of Pokorný and Hromádka for the more famous Ossip Bernstein and/or Richard Teichmann. He gave these port-
uschess.org
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