Artist Self Portrait

  Conrad Felixmuller is one of the leading figures in what is sometimes called the 'second generation' of Expressionists whose work coalesced around the revolutionary period in Germany following the First World War. Together with his much-celebrated portraits of daily life in the mining district of the Ruhrgebiet in the early 1920s, it is Felixmüller's portraits of himself and his family from this same period that constitute his best-known and most important body of work.  Representing a counterbalance to the powerful and yet depressing scenes of hardship and depravation found in his Ruhr pictures, Felixmüller's portraits of his family and the idyll of his home-life were intended to provide a positive alternative: one that proclaimed the simple value and harmony of his own progressive proletarian lifestyle. <Source : Christie's>