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The spring 1937 issue of César Domela’s and Sophie Tauber-Arp’s Paris-based journal Plastique—a platform for non-figurative art in hostile times—featured an abstract painting by Otto Freundlich. The same year, Freundlich’s Großer Kopf (Large head), a sculpture created twenty-five years earlier (in 1912), was misappropriated for the cover of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art) exhibition catalogue. Otto Freundlich was a Polish-born, German-Jewish artist, who had established himself at the center of Berlin’s left-leaning avant-garde after the First World War, exhibiting with the Novembergruppe and contributing to Expressionist, Dada, and later Cologne Progressive journals. By 1924, he had relocated to Paris where, by the end of the decade, he exhibited with groups including Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création. With the declaration of war in September 1939, Freundlich was arrested as a German citizen by the French police. In 1942, he went into hiding in the Southern France and was captured, deported, and murdered in 1943.
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