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Oppenheimer, Max [MOPP]
(b Vienna, 1 July 1885; d New York, 19 May 1954). Austrian painter and printmaker. After training at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna (1900–03), and the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague (1903–6), he contributed, along with Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, to the development of Austrian Expressionist painting. The three painters influenced each other’s work in varying degrees. In their ‘psychological portraits’, such as Oppenheimer’s painting of the composer Anton Webern (1909; Wuppertal, von der Heydt-Mus.), they tried to capture the sitters’ mental characteristics. Existential needs and fears were a dominant theme of their paintings, Oppenheimer frequently depicting Christian themes, while such provocative paintings as Operation (1912; Prague, N.G.) reveal a close affinity to the literature of the period in the way that shocking subject-matter becomes a weapon in the fight against a reality that is felt to be unbearable. In Berlin from 1912, Oppenheimer made drawings for the Expressionist magazine Die Aktion and began to make etchings. Between 1915 and 1916 he moved to Zurich, where, after a series of Cubist and Futurist still-lifes and contact with Dada, he finally found his own subject-matter: the presentation of music in painting using Futurist stylistic devices. This reached its peak with a glorification of music, the monumental Orchestra (1921–3; Vienna, Hans Dichand priv. col., see 1982 exh. cat., p. 241, and 1994 exh. cat.). In Berlin in the 1920s, Oppenheimer, who had officially taken the name MOPP in 1919, although he had signed his pictures with it since 1910, achieved an individual style of portraying the people and atmospheres of the modern city, using a mixture of Futurism and Neue Sachlichkeit, as in The Editor (1927; destr. 1938–41, see 1976 exh. cat., illus. no. 83, and 1994 exh. cat.), or scenes from the world of sport such as Six-day Race in the Berlin Sportpalast (1929; Berlin, Berlin. Gal.). With his return to Vienna in 1932, and then his exile to New York via Zurich (1938–9), his work increasingly deteriorated into a mediocre form of late Impressionism.
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