PAINTING OF THE DAY: COAL LOADS

Hans Baluschek's picture of Schöneberg

In 1898 Hans Baluschek, an artist living in Schöneberg’s Kiez (neighbourhood) known as Rote Insel, moved from Gotenstraße to Cheruskerstraße 5. He did not move far - fond of the area, he wanted to stay on what is, indeed, an island: a triangle of land which was once cut off from the rest of Schöneberg by railway tracks and viaducts.

One of the main features of Rote Insel at the time were gasometers towering above the densely populated area with its typical Berlin tenements. Baluschek would have been looking at them daily, just as he would have been watching trains delivering coal to the gasworks (the artist was a bit of a trainspotter).

Traditionally, pieces of coal which fell down from the coal-trains and left strewn along the railway tracks would be quickly collected by local women and children who arrived with any sort of container that would have allowed them to transport their black gold back to the chilly households.

And it is this moment that Hans Baluschek captured in 1901 in his painting “Kohlfuhren” (“Coal Loads”). Two things are striking about the artwork he created: his choice of topic (realism was not the favourite genre of the day and either were working-class subjects) and the fact that the faces of all those working-class women and their children, although marked by their plight and by visible sadness, are all full of quiet beauty.

The original can be admired at the Stadtmuseum Berlin, who also own several other works by the artist.