Erwin von Busse
Erwin von Busse also known as Granand or Erwin von Busse-Granand (12 January 1885 – 10 April 1939) was a German writer, artist, theater director, art historian and critic. His 1920 collection of short stories devoted to erotic male relationships was banned; it was republished in German in 1993 and in an English translation in 2022 as Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights. As a stage director for several years he worked with some of the most prominent figures of his time and he directed the world premiere of James Joyce's drama Exiles in 1919. He devoted himself to painting in his later years, living in exile in Brazil. Biography Early years Erwin Oskar Leopold von Busse was born on 12 January 1885 in Magdeburg. His parents were Lieutenant Hugo Maximilian von Busse (1855–1922) and his wife Marie Louise Elisabeth Helene née Weste (1861–1935). He had a brother Rudolf Maximilian von Busse (1886–1957). Erwin von Busse went to school in Magdeburg and Kiel. Beginning in 1898, he attended several military schools, ending with graduation in 1905 from the Prussian military academy in Gross-Lichterfelde. He spent the next two years performing his compulsory military service. Beginning in 1907 he studied law in Munich, changing to art history in 1909. In 1912 he interrupted his studies for a trip to Brazil and a sojourn in Paris. Art criticism In 1912 he contributed an essay about Robert Delaunay to the Der Blaue Reiter Almanach. Reproductions of two recent Delaunay works, St. Séverin (1909) and The Window on the City (1911), illustrated the text. This essay has been praised for its "extraordinary insight" into Delaunay, who was soon to prove a critical leader in discovering the principles of expressionist and abstract art. Analyzing a few critical Delaunay canvases, von Busse traced the artist's shift from respect for the physical subject, to fracturing the object into particles formed and colored as "the dynamic needs of the space" require, and finally to excluding all references to the external world so that shape and color become the form and subject of the painting. Delaunay, in von Busse's words, now explores "the problem of space dynamics" without reference to the external world as he searches for the rules of "subjective understanding and representation". Von Busse returned to his studies before the end of 1912, now at the University of Bern. There he received his doctorate in 1914 with a thesis on ("The Historical Evolution of the Depiction of the Masses in Italian painting"). Theater Von Busse then turned to the theater and before long settled in Berlin, where he edited , a theater magazine, in 1917. By that year he had also taken up the position of director and dramaturge at the Deutsches Theater under Max Reinhardt, a dominant figure in the German-language theater. He directed several productions there in 1918–19. In 1919 he directed a revival of Walter Hasenclever's expressionist play The Son (1916), achieving greater success than Reinhardt had with the original production in 1918. He moved