Max Thalmann (1890-1945) trained as a bookbinder under Henry Van De Velde at Weimar, and then became his assistant. He taught briefly at the Bauhaus before 1922/3 going to America, an experience that inspired his print portfolio Amerika in Holzschnitt.

Der Dom plays inventively on the theme of figures and interiors, with spiritual evocations of Gothic architecture, arch, window and aisle in a visual language familiar to Thalmann's generation of Expressionist artists. The sun flares in a variant on the Rose Window. A comparative image might be Feininger's design for the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto. Thalmann's repertoire of form is almost a musical synthesios of black and white in the ways we see in Kupka. It may be my misreading but there seems a proliferation of cowls and anonymous figures in procession. In the Amerika portfolio the shapes take on a more Cubic formulation without the sinuous shapes of the arch mouldings that occasionally evoke natural growth such as tree limbs. In Amerika the mechanical has come to dominate the composition.

G.F.Hartlaub was a writer and art historian who specialised in writing about contemporary art, those associated with Expressionism and is credited with the generation of the critical term Die Neue Sachlichkeit in 1923.

Thalmann's career was however not spent as an exhibiting artist but as a graphic designer. most notably for Diederichs of Jena. See how confidently he deploys letterfoms in the titlpage to the portfolio.