Portrait of Heinrich Mann, c. 1912

Heinrich Mann (1871–1950) is one of numerous artists portrayed by the painter Max Oppenheimer (1885–1954) – also known as MOPP. The brother of Thomas Mann (1875–1955), Heinrich was also active as an author and wrote socio-critical and anti-fascist texts. In 1908, MOPP found himself within the circle of Austrian Expressionists, a fact that is reflected in the 1912 Portrait of Heinrich Mann in the unsettling manner of painting and the intention to create a psychological study of the depicted. The eyes appear translucent, as if all dynamism had flown into the activity of the hands. The depicted holds a folded piece of paper between his fingers. His calm expression is opposed by the tension-filled structuring of the painting in which MOPP intertwined blocks of color and angular shapes in an animated manner. Heinrich Mann and MOPP must have met in Berlin, where the artist moved to on the invitation of his publisher and collector Paul Cassirer and where he lived from 1911 until 1915.

RR, 2021