Carl Heidenreich

Carl Heidenreich (born October 4, 1901 in Bad Berneck in the Fichtelgebirge , † September 6, 1964 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German-American painter .

Life

Spartakusbund and KPD-O

Heidenreich came from a family of farmers and craftsmen. Against the wishes of his parents, he went to Munich at the age of 15 after attending primary school. Towards the end of the First World War he became a member of the Spartakusbund and in the workers 'and soldiers' council in Munich. After the end of the Munich Soviet Republic , he was arrested, but was able to escape. From about 1919 he attended the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule for two years, where he was probably a student of Johan Thorn-Prikker and Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke ; then he studied painting in Hans Hofmann's private art school . Heidenreich went to Berlin around 1922, where he joined the KPD . There he worked as a freelance artist and stage painter. He had his first exhibition in Hamburg in 1927, followed by exhibitions in Berlin ( Secession and Academy of the Arts ). In early 1929 he joined the KPD-O .

Persecution, Spanish Civil War

An exhibition in Berlin planned for March 1933 could no longer take place because Heidenreich was classified by the Nazis among the " degenerate " artists. He was kidnapped by the SS , brought to Moabit and tortured there. After his release in 1934, Heidenreich decided to emigrate to France in order to work as an artist. He had to leave a number of approx. 300 pictures in Germany; these were lost, and probably fell into flames towards the end of the war. From 1934-35 he stayed illegally in Barcelona, ​​where he was arrested and deported. Heidenreich went to Paris, where Heinrich Blücher already lived, with whom he had been close friends since the 1920s; Through Blücher he got to know Hannah Arendt and the poet Chanan Klenbort.

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War , he went to the front as a militiaman. He joined the International Brigades of the POUM and went in December 1936 with the Rovira Shock Battalion to the Aragon Front near Huesca against Franco . He was arrested by the KPD's secret service - like numerous other KPD-O campaigners in May 1937 - and imprisoned in Barcelona in the Modelo prison. After the end of the republic, Heidenreich moved to France and lived in Paris until the outbreak of war. After spending several months in the Cepoy camp (Loiret), he managed to escape to the USA via Marseille, Casablanca and Martinique in 1941.

Painter in USA, return

Carl Heidenreich took American citizenship in 1949. In the same year he presented his first major exhibition in New York. He was friends with the painters Carl Holty , Romare Bearden and Mark Tobey and was considered an excellent watercolor painter . In 1964 his pictures were shown for the first time in 30 years in Germany at exhibitions in Frankfurt / Main and Berlin. Already seriously ill, he returned to Germany in 1964 and died on September 6, 1964 in Frankfurt am Main.

He left behind a qualitatively and quantitatively impressive painterly work. Above all, the diverse oeuvre of his later years, with its roots in German Expressionism and in visible reality, represents a significant, individual contribution to Abstract Expressionism .

literature

• Gabriele Saure: Carl Heidenreich. Goethe-Institut New York 2004 (catalog for the exhibition Carl Heidenreich and Hans Hofmann in Postwar New York, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum 2004).
• Theodor Bergmann : Against the current. The history of the KPD (opposition) . Hamburg 2004 (therein: short biography Carl Heidenreich p. 459).

Web links

• Literature by and about Carl Heidenreich in the catalog of the German National Library
• Carl Heidenreich. Entry at Artnet