Studio: international art (17.1899)

Fritz Erler

FENDER

BY FRITZ ERLER

Riigen, whilst a student, he began to learn, by
the bleak shores of the Baltic, some of those
secrets of the sea which have in all ages touched
the imagination and affected the art of man.
And in the breeze from those icy water-wastes
he breathed in something of that grim Norse
spirit which sometimes animates his art. Later
he went down to the Mediterranean, to dream in
the enduring sunshine by the blue classic waters,
to dream and to work and to learn the ancient
lore of the waves and the winds.

We find him at Munich in 1890 studying the
Old Masters in the galleries of the Pinako-
thek, and two years later he set up his easel at
Julian’s in Paris. From Paris there was another
journey to the sea, and he found in Brittany the
echoes of an art which appealed to his poetic
fancy.

Fritz Erler has been established in Munich
since 1895. His activity has been great in
many directions. His many designs for ceramics
his bindings and ex libris, illustrations and
posters, to all of which he has brought the
treasures of far-reaching observation and a rich
invention, have still left him time to accomplish
a number of very successful easel-pictures and
portraits. With these we hope to deal on
another occasion. The present article is con-
cerned with a work of interior decoration upon
which he has been engaged for some time past
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—a large music-room in the house of an eminent
German scientific authority, Dr. Albert Neisser,
at Breslau. This has been a rare opportunity
for the display of the artist’s gifts, for he has
been left practically untrammelled. In this
temple of music everything is from the one
artist’s brain and hand; the architectural forms
of ceiling and wainscot, of doors and windows ;
the decorative work of all kinds, in carved wood,
in forged and chased metals, in the furniture
and stuffs, and in the beautiful paintings of the
broad frieze and other colour-lending adornment
of the room.

Here was a commission which might, in its
unlimited possibilities, have lured a less self-con-

ELECTRIC LIGHT CORONA

BY FRITZ ERLER