page_title: Christoph Voll
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Christoph Voll / Career
caption_attribution_description: Portrait Erna Krake (die Frau des Künstlers), Federzeichnung in Tusche.
context_page_description: Christoph Voll was a German sculptor and graphic artist associated with Expressionism. He was a member of the politically active avant-garde group of Dresden artists known as the Dresdner Sezession.
context_section_description: After the war, Voll returned to Dresden, where he enrolled at the Kunstgewerbeschule and gradually entered Dresden's dynamic artistic milieu. 
  In 1920, he joined the Dresdner Sezessionsgruppe 1919, a creative society of intellectuals and artists intent on recasting world orders according to a utopian form of socialism. The group included prominent contemporary artists such as Otto Dix, Conrad Felixmüller, Hugo Zehder (architect), Lasar Segall, Otto Schubert and Gela Forster. 
  It was in the context of this group's exhibitions that Voll sold his first major works, and received important working grants. Oskar Kokoschka was an honorary member of the group, but never actually exhibited with them. 
  Among Kokoschka's students was a young Danish painter, Erna Sørensen, and to his dismay, she and Voll fell in love and got married in May 1922. This initiated a period of artistic productivity and emotional calm in Voll's life; a combination that he very much attributed to the positive influence of his wife.
  Voll's participation in countless exhibitions (including those of Gruppe 1919) led to greater recognition as a major German artist, and in 1924 he won the professorial chair in plastic arts at the newly founded Schule für Kunst und Handwerk in Saarbrücken (at the recommendation of Sterl from the Dresdner Kunstakademie). 
  This was an important period in his career and personal life. Saarland belonged to the poorest districts in Germany, and was predominantly inhabited by a working class population. After the end of WW1, the region came under French mandate as part of the Versailles accords. This status fostered a number of intense political ideologies, including a segregationist group intent on disassociating Saarland from both France and Germany. For a period, Voll appears to have sympathized with this notion (according to later testimonies from some of his students), though he never expressed this unequivocally.
  Artistically, Voll may have perceived Saarbrücken as a station in his career, but certainly not as the culmination. He continued to work in wood – especially oak – and was a dedicated teacher and instructor. Little is known about his personal life in this period, although his inclination to portray people in his life persisted. 
  Consequently, we know that his social circle included the painter Oskar Trepte, who he knew from his years in Dresden, and the art critic Arthur Binz, whom he sculpted in 1925–26 (sold from the Hoh Collection to Germanisches Nationalmuseum in 2008). Also included in his social circle was the African-American painter William Johnson (artist), whom he and his wife Erna Krake met in Cagnes-sur Mer in 1928-29.
  During his time in Saarbrücken, Voll attained increasing recognition as an artist. In 1926, he participated in the International Art Fair of Dresden with three wooden sculptures, and this resonated with both the public and the artistic elite to such an extent that other major exhibitions followed; the most important of which was a solo exhibit at Galerie Neumann & Nierendorf in Berlin in 1927. 
  As part of this wave of success, Voll was appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Badischen Kunsthochschule in Karlsruhe in 1928. Here, Voll intensified his professional life, dedicating himself fully to his work and his best students. This came at the expense of the students he deemed unworthy. His demanding approach to apprenticeship caused dismay and bruised egos among those that in his opinion were not dedicated or talented enough, and some of them would harbor enough resentment to later become key figures to feeding the national-socialist denunciation of Voll.
  In Karlsruhe, Voll engaged with his colleagues (Hubbuch, Schnarrenberger, and Scholz) to formulate and execute a new style, and the academy became a major center of Realism in Europe. It was not to last. By the late 1920s, Baden was marked by violent national-socialist tendencies. 
  When the Nazis came to power in 1933, many of Voll's colleagues were forcefully entpflichtet from duty. While Voll was declared ‘Kulturbolschewist’, was interrogat
caption: Portrait of Erna (artist's wife), Ink drawing. 42 x 33,5 cm.
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