GIES: German War Loans, 1917

[Goetzdude]

Here's a cool WWI medal I just purchased from a collector buddy. The piece was made by Ludwig Gies, a German expressionistic medallic artist who lived until 1966 in Munich.

 

This satirical piece displays his contempt with the amount of money Germany was spending for their involvement in WWI. Large bags full of millions in gold Marks dwarf the workers and are hauled, lifted, and weighed via manual labor by the common man. The German eagle sits pervertedly proud atop the scales.

 

Gies works are very, very rare. This is the only one of this subject that he made.

 

 

"German War Loans", 1917, Cast Iron, 67mm, 45.6g. Ernsting-WVZ 160a, Unique RRRR

[Art]

Interesting medal. The image certainly conveys the message.

[bill]

Does this medal fall into the category you mentioned a few months ago of an artist creating a piece for a competition? I'm intrigued by the notion of a very limited run of an art medal. Since many medallic pieces would seem to be part of a commerical art market, one-off pieces would either have to be very expensive, produced for a select clientele who otherwise support your endeavors, produced for a competition with no intention of the piece going on a commercial market, or a trial that did not make it it production or entered production in another form.

 

I've been reading about the development of the art medal and its ties to early numismatic publications. Art medals, as I understand them, were of limited production for an elite audience who could afford to build numismatic cabinets of medals and Roman (and Greek, etc) coins. These are the same people who were building librarys and who formed the market for the early numismatic publications. Jetons in Europe filled the same role for the "middle class," those who could not afford to build palace collections or librarys, but were still influenced by and participated in the art forms that were emerging at the time.

 

Then my own education has a gap between the development of the form and its form as evolved in Gemany of the early 1900s. Clearly, Goetz had a collecting public and he had "mass" produced series with collectors (do you have any sales records for any of his medals?) and wealthy patrons who commissioned limited edition pieces.

 

Anyway, some musings meant to be a rambling question and discussion.

[Scottishmoney]

An interesting thought comes over me, as to if this was indeed cast for a competition, how was such traitorous behaviour tolerated by the Prussian militancy which then lead Germany?

 

Even Karl Goetz seemed to ride the tide of opinion, with works critical of, and proponents of a certain subject. Whilst some works commemorated important WWI events, others were sarcastic, critical, and could have even been believed by some to be traitorous.

 

If you think it was hard to be critical of a war effort in Germany, it also was in the USA, where the Alien and Sedition act was passed during WWI, which granted the Federal Govt broad powers to spy on and convict people of even criticising the war effort. I wonder if equivalent medallic arts created in the contemporaneous USA would have met an undesired fate for the artist?

[Goetzdude]

Gies was first and foremost an artist rather than a commercial engraver. He made his meager living primarily off his earnings as a professor at the art institutes in Munich and later in Berlin. He also made income from private commissions from wealthy families and organizations both private and public. A typical semi-public commission would be from the Chamber of Commerce. Others would be long-time service medals given out to corporate employees. The eastern European system is far different than ours here in the US. In Germany, and in most of the eastern European countries, the government tries to keep their most talented artists employed by the state. This is a modern continuation of the patronage given by the Kings and Queens of the late 16th through the early 20th centuries.

 

Ersting, the reference I use for Gies medals, lists the individual examples of the medals known to him, where they are, in what collections or museums, and the few that can be acquired by private collectors. It seems to me that the numbers that would be most solid would be those medals cast by the Carl Poellath company. There is a book that traces the history of this company and the medals it produced. Here again, it was pure patronage that resulted in the few medals we have of some of these medallists. Carl Poellath, for one, sponsored an annual competition for younger medallists whose groundbreaking work had not yet been accepted by the general public. Without these competitions there would have been very few works produced by the expressionist medallists of the Munich School, which included Gies.

 

I can’t say Ersting’s figures are entirely correct or that I am interpreting them correctly. The numbers of medals that Ersting mentions - are they the only ones cast? Or are they the only ones he knows of? For instance, I have one example of a “Born during the War” birth medal that Ernsting lists as having only one example available for private collection, however, I recently saw another up for auction. Could this be attributed to Ernsting not being aware of the actual number? Could his estimates have been made from foundry records and not taken into consideration the examples made by Gies himself in his own workshop? Or, could a museum have relinquished ownership of some of its holdings? Either way, we are still looking at a very small edition.

 

After Gies began producing satiricals against the war the Army General Staff decided that it reflected poorly and brought ridicule on the military establishment. After a few more medals that couldn’t be interpreted as supportive of the war Gies received no further support or commissions from the government. It was not until 1917 when the public war opinion had changed that he was able to get some of his anti-war medals published. But even then they were cast in very small numbers - I image mainly for connoisseurs of his work or for museums who kept them hidden from view until after the war. Remember, too, that he had no personal financial resources to purchase bronze or even iron to cast his own medals.

 

My decision to collect German medals, or any medals for that matter, has been hindered by my lack of multilingual capabilities. As you know, most research material is either written in Italian, French, or German. I, at best, comprehend 5% of what I read and lose the other 95% of the information because English translations don’t exist for the references. Some of the reference books in my library do, however, attest to the true rarity of these medals.

 

Take for instance another Munich medallist Hans Schwergle, in the book about his work by Wolfgang Hasselman he carefully lists each medal and its mintage. Schwergle’s cast medals of WWI were produced in editions of 1-12. Usually one was sold to the Kaiser (sometimes in a unique silver cast) for the royal cabinet and then, a few for the National Museums. Even a small 40mm medal he made for the Bavarian Red Cross charities was cast in an edition of 7 examples. On the other hand, tens of thousands were struck in zinc miniatures to use as a watch charms or worn as lapel medals.

 

Another book which gives us an idea of the rarity of these medals is the Hornlein book. Fritz Hornlein was the head medallist for the Saxon Mint. He made a several dozen medals during the war years. All of them had mintages of less than fifty - some far less. And these figures come from the Saxon State Mint and take into consideration medals that were struck after the war. Most were available from the Mint up until the hyperinflation of 1923 put them beyond the reach of only the most affluent collectors.

 

Another example of interest is the mintage figures given by Guido Goetz to the author of the book about Winston Churchill medals. He states that the Churchill-related medals by his father and himself were cast in both bronze and iron: 20 in bronze and 100 in iron. These figures make these medals in either composition very scarce. And one has to take into consideration that Goetz medals sold very well compared to the work of other medallists of the same place and period. Most often his 36mm struck medals were produced in editions of 500. Today those medals, which sold out their entire edition of 500, are considered common. In WWI some gedenktaler propaganda medals were struck in editions of 750 pieces. Today these are as common as dirt and will usually sell for about $40. Zetzmann sets up a scale for his rarity evaluations of R, RR, and RRR - a medal with a mintage of 50 pieces is only considered R. A medal must have been struck or cast in an edition in the single digits to be considered RRR.

 

Coin collectors always bring to medal collecting, at least at the beginning, a certain mindset. They are used to coins being struck in the tens of thousands and up into the millions. Medals are far different, in purpose, numbers, and distribution.

 

 

 

I see this as only a jumping off point to further discussion regarding such topics as cast vs. struck, classical vs expressionism, marketing, etc.etc.

 

Bill I would be interested in getting a list of books from you regarding the history of the art medal. Please forward when you get the time.

 

On another note, Goetz only "mass produced" a couple of pieces but many others could be considered so in comparison to edition numbers produced by other artists such as Gies. However, with the exception of Goetz' satiricals and any cast medals reduced and struck into 36mm medals, most of Goetz' cast medals were in editions of <10.

[Scottishmoney]

Indeed, very fascinating. It does appear as though whilst the German goverment would have withdrawn funding from artists which created satyrical works, they did not otherwise affect punitive measures against someone for such an act.

 

I don't know from what I have studied of contemporary USA laws and even prosecutions that the same would have been so tolerated on this side of the Atlantic during 1917-1918.

[bill]

The edition numbers you mention are much smaller than I thought and indicate (to me) that collecting is still an elite activity into the early part of this century. I guess edition numbers for modern art medals are also small (Society of Medallists for example ranging from 750 to a few thousand). I always have to remember the laws of supply and demand. If a Goetz medal has an edition of 10 and there are 50 interested collectors, the price will be high. If it has an edition of 100 for the 50 collectors to compete for, the price will be low despite the rarity a population of 100 would represent for an American coin.

 

As for what I'm reading. Its really piecing together a variety of threads. I got started on this thread after reading History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past by Francis Haskell (Yale:1993). Part I is relevant, The Discovery of the Image. Chapter 1 covers the Early Numismatists. He is looking at the role of numimatics, books, and medals in the development of how we look at images and portraits. It got me thinking about the linkage between numismatics and books. The rest of the volume passes into a modern art analysis that leaves me cold. But, the first few chapters sparked my interest.

 

Next came The Fabrication of Louis XIV by Peter Burke (Yale:1992). He discusses the propaganda machine that directed the development of the image of Louis XIV. He touches on the medal and the elite audience to which it is directed and the publication of numismatic volumes devoted to the medals and the public history of Louis. It touches on jetons in passing and their wider distribution to the middle class.

 

John Cunnally's Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance (Princeton:1999) is an introduction to coin collecting and books in the Renaissance. While it doesn't deal directly with medals, it does explore the development of coin collecting as an artistic pursuit of the wealthy.

 

Otherwise, my thinking is a smattering of ideas picked up in articles, in my own research. (I thought a lot about and tried to explore some of the development of the propaganda image via medals when I wrote the Medallic Portraits of Adolf Hitler. My ideas were not as sophisticated as Burke's and based on looking at, arranging, and cataloging the Hitler medals, whereas Burke's ideas are well grounded in previous research. My interests have turned to the French jeton and wanting to further explore these ideas and themes in my collection of jetons.

 

While its frustrating to not read in foreign languages, I am collecting French volumes on jetons. I can translate the cataloging information. That follows a standard, predictable format. The difficult part comes in working slowly through translating the analytic text and missing the "meaning" at times.

 

This reminds me that I have a digital image of an advertising piece for a Hitler commemorative porcelain medal (C-2) from the time of his encarcaration following the beer hall putsch. It was offered on Ebay before I started collecting again. I'll see if I can find that and share it here.