The project is dedicated to reconstructing the biographies and cataloguing the works of two Jewish artists of the Berlin Enlightenment: Moses Samuel Lowe (also known as Johann Michael Siegfried Lowe, 1756–1831) and Benedict Heinrich Bendix (1768–1828). Lowe was a portrait and (miniature) painter, copperplate engraver and etcher. Bendix worked primarily as a draughtsman and copperplate engraver. Both received an academic education at the Berlin Academy of Arts, and both were members of the Jewish Enlightenment society, the Society of Promoters of the Noble and the Good (חברת שוחרי הטוב והתושיה), whose artistic ambitions represented a novelty in German-Jewish history.
This research project focuses on the work of Lowe and Bendix as Jewish artists in Berlin. It examines their artistic careers and their academic tutors, their collaboration with other artists and their patrons, their artistic networks, the living and working conditions as well as the career opportunities available to Jewish artists around 1800, and, last but not least, the work of Bendix and Lowe in the context of the Berlin Haskalah. This leads to the question of how Bendix and Lowe fit into the art-theoretical discourse of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and what influences – for example, from Johann Georg Sulzer and Moses Mendelssohn, from Karl Philipp Moritz and, in particular, from their academic teachers – can be identified. Furthermore, the aim is to compile as comprehensive a catalogue raisonné as possible of the extensive artistic works of Moses Samuel Lowe and Benedict Heinrich Bendix.
