Jean Leppien

Jean Leppien (as Kurt Leppien ; born April 8, 1910 in Lüneburg , † October 19, 1991 in Courbevoie near Paris ) was a German-French painter .

Kurt Leppien studied at the Bauhaus Dessau from 1929 under Josef Albers , Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee . He had lived in France since 1933 , from where he was deported in 1944. After the war he stayed in France under the name Jean Leppien, where he exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles , among other places . Leppien is one of the most important representatives of geometric abstraction in France. Stylistically, he is close to painters such as Alberto Magnelli , Jean Deyrolle , Michel Seuphor , Emile Gilioli and Aurélie Nemours .

Life

Jean Leppien in 1987 in his Paris art studio

Kurt Leppien was born in Lüneburg in 1910 as the son of the horsehair scarf manufacturer Jean-Gottfried Leppien. The mother Gertrud Leppien, nee Domnich, came from a Hamburg merchant family, the ancestors were manufacturers, merchants, pastors, lawyers and musicians. Leppien spent his youth in Lüneburg and developed an interest in art at an early age. Inspired and guided by painters from Lüneburg such as Ehrich Turlach and Otto Brix , Jean Leppien began to draw and paint continuously as a student at the Lüneburg high school.

Education and apprenticeship years

From 1929 to 1930 Leppien studied at the Bauhaus Dessau, where he attended Josef Albers' preliminary course and the painting classes of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee . He left Dessau after Hannes Meyer's departure as director because of the associated change in the orientation of the Bauhaus.

From 1931 to 1933 he studied photography at the Itten School in Berlin with Lucia Moholy and worked with László Moholy-Nagy (International Building Exhibition 1931).

Emigration to France

In 1933 Leppien, like his future wife Suzanne Leppien (née Markos-Ney, also a Bauhaus student), emigrated to Paris. In order to earn a living, he dealt with applied graphics (book covers), photo montages, exhibition designs (“le grand Garches”) and photo reports.

War years

In 1939 Leppien was interned in the Marolles camp, he accepted service in the Foreign Legion and spent almost a year in Algeria and Morocco.

Fearing discovery by the Gestapo , Jean and Suzanne Leppien led a secluded life in Sorgues near Avignon from 1940 to 1944 and survived as vegetable farmers on a small piece of land.

In 1944, Suzanne Leppien was arrested by the Gestapo as a so-called "half-Jewish woman" and deported to Auschwitz . Jean Leppien was sentenced to death in Paris for helping the enemy with weapons and then pardoned to a long prison sentence. He survived the prisons in Bruchsal, Ludwigsburg, Ulm and Donauwörth and was liberated by US troops in Kaisheim on April 25, 1945 . He met Suzanne, who had survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, again on May 25, 1945 in Paris.

New beginning after 1945

For Leppien, the restart in post-war France was the actual beginning of his artistic development, the basis of which, however, had become for him the short period of study at the Dessau Bauhaus. Leppien and his wife Suzanne lived in Nice. In 1946 he was able to begin drawing and painting under difficult material conditions. After that, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin became Leppien's center of life and work alongside Paris since the 1950s.

Leppien made numerous contacts and friendships with artists of the "art abstrait" (including André Bloc , Heinrich Maria Davringhausen , Jean Deyrolle , Adolf Fleischmann , Richard Mortensen , Serge Poliakoff , Hans Reichel , Michel Seuphor , Pierre Soulages , Victor Vasarely ) and the Critic Herta Wescher . He became a member of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles , to which he remained lifelong, and exhibited there regularly since 1946.

He took part in various group exhibitions, including 1947 at the Galerie Deux Îles in Paris, organized by the art critic and promoter of the "art abstrait" Charles Estienne (curator) (Deyrolle, Leppien, Reichel, Sérusier, Springer).

In 1948 Leppien received the Prix ​​Kandinsky as a “prix d'encouragement” next to the main prize winner Max Bill . He was in close contact with Kandinsky's widow Nina Kandinsky . In 1949 he had his first solo exhibition at Colette Allendy. In 1953 he became a French citizen.

Numerous national and international solo exhibitions and participations in group exhibitions followed.

In 1987 Leppien was appointed Officer des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture .

Jean Leppien died in Courbevoie near Paris in 1991 and was buried in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.

In his hometown of Lüneburg, a street in the Wienebütteler Weg development area is named after him.

literature

• A look beyond. Life story of a painter. Klampen, Springe 2004, ISBN 3-934920-47-0 .
• Jean Leppien - From the Bauhaus to the Mediterranean. Status-Verlag, Waiblingen 2013, ISBN 3-942924-10-2 .
• Peter Lufft : Jean Leppien , in: The Artwork , Issue 3/4, Baden-Baden 1953.
• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.), International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.2. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 710.
• Volkhard Knigge , Harry Stein (ed.): Franz Ehrlich . A Bauhaus member in the resistance and concentration camp. (Catalog for the exhibition of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation in collaboration with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in the Neues Museum Weimar from August 2, 2009 to October 11, 2009.) Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-935598- 15-6 , p. 153 (short biography).

Web links

Commons : Jean Leppien  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Jean Leppien on Arts in Exile
• Jean Leppien on Facebook
• Literature by and about Jean Leppien in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Autobiography, p. 77.