Curt Frankenstein

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Curt Frankenstein (born March 11, 1922 in Hanover ; died January 4, 2009 in Wilmette , Cook County , Illinois ) was an American draftsman , painter and lithographer of German origin.

Life

Curt Frankenstein was born as the first child of the Jewish retail merchant Carl Frankenstein and his Protestant wife in Hanover, where he grew up in a sheltered environment on Podbielskistraße and Eilenriede . He had a brother two years his junior. The family was not religious. In 1937 she moved to Halle (Saale) because of her father's business plans . After the National Socialists came to power, Curt experienced discrimination in school as a so - called half - Jew . His goal of an artistic training after school was blocked; He was only able to begin an apprenticeship as a window dresser because he was nominally hired as a commercial apprentice in a Jewish department store in Halle.

His father was arrested in the course of the Reichspogromnacht in 1938 and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp . After his release, he immediately tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to emigrate with his family to Uruguay ; instead he was transported to Shanghai in April 1939 . Curt Frankenstein did not want to stay in Germany under any circumstances, and his mother arranged for him a regular ship passage in May 1939 from Trieste to Shanghai, where he arrived penniless before his father and lived under disastrous living conditions in the Shanghai ghetto . His talented drawing and painting helped him to stay afloat in adventurous conditions in Shanghai. Because of his talent for drawing, he gained the attention and sympathy of a captain in the US Navy, who got him a B'nai-B'rith scholarship for the American Academy of Art in Chicago, thus enabling him to immigrate to the United States in 1947 .

Artistic development

Drawing was the talented student's favorite subject; He also liked to illustrate his German essays with drawings. During his time as a refugee in Shanghai, he was apprenticed to a German artist, Mr. Borg, for whom he made European-style oil paintings, landscapes and still lifes , which he was able to sell to the Chinese. With picturesque pictures of US warships in the port of Shanghai at the end of the Second World War , which were coveted by American marines as “souvenirs”, he practically went into business for himself.

In the United States, he enjoyed traditional academic art training from 1947 to 1951 at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, then some time later at the Otis Art Institute (now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ) in Los Angeles, where he learned more figure drawing . After a year and a half, he went back to Chicago, where he took figurative painting as a part-time student at the Art Institute, earned his living in an advertising agency and painted at home. He first had financial success as an artist in 1957 when he was able to sell works of art at the 57th Street Art Fair. From then on he attended about six trade fairs a year, "from Pittsburgh to Kansas City, and in all the cities in between" , and that until the last years of his life. In his hometown of Wilmette , where he lived with his wife Renate, he had a spacious studio and his own printing workshop.

In the 1950s he turned away from the more representative art and to surrealist painting. It was important to him to “tell a story to the viewer of my pictures”. To transport reality into a dream world, that was the preferred subject of his often subtle pictures.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary in the Chicago Tribune
  2. ↑ Timeline - B'nai B'rith International
  3. ^ 57th Street Art Fair
  4. ↑ Biography
personal data
SURNAME Frankenstein, Curt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American draftsman, painter and lithographer
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Hanover
DATE OF DEATH January 4, 2009
Place of death Wilmette , Cook County , Illinois