Kurt Kranz

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Kurt Kranz (born May 3, 1910 in Emmerich , † August 22, 1997 in Wedel ) was a German painter , graphic artist and university professor .

Life

Kranz did an apprenticeship as a lithographer in Bielefeld from 1925 to 1930 and met László Moholy-Nagy there in 1929 . On his recommendation, he studied at the Bauhaus, first in Dessau , then in Berlin with Josef Albers , Joost Schmidt and the photographer Walter Peterhans . Kranz also took courses with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky . Shortly before the Bauhaus was closed in 1933 due to National Socialist pressure, he obtained his diploma.

He then worked as a commercial artist and freelance painter in Berlin, including with Herbert Bayer in his Dorland studio on Kurfürstendamm. In 1938, after Herbert Beyer had left for the United States, he recommended himself as his successor. During the war he was used as a soldier in Finland.

He did not return to Berlin until 1946. In 1950 he was appointed to the Hamburg University of Fine Arts and worked there until 1972. Guest lectureships took him to America and Japan, including Harvard University in Cambridge / USA. After his retirement he lived and worked on a former farm in Provence in France.

plant

Kranz was considered one of the last important Bauhaus students and felt committed to his ideas throughout his life. Here he got ideas for his pioneering and pioneering impulses for serial art and developed them further. He took the position that creative and scientific work are not mutually exclusive and that art can also be a research discipline. With Klee, whose “Educational Sketchbook” he had already acquired in 1929, he saw art's recourse to the patterns of nature, an experience that is still reflected in his “Ammonite” series of pictures from 1975, in which the centrifugal force of The spiral shape is tried out and played through in changing form and color constellations. He got the impetus from Peterhans to experiment freely and cheekily in the field of photography and photomontage. Although in these montages and collages of the early thirties one can clearly see the environment of the contemporaries from Max Ernst to Hannah Höch and, last but not least, the bold pictorial inventions of Bauhaus photography, it was precisely these works by Kranz that later had the charm of the whole New ones.

Exhibitions

  • 1949: 22 Berlin Bauhaus members exhibit , Berlin
  • 1960: Kurt Kranz , Museum for Art and Commerce Hamburg
  • 1973: Kurt Kranz. Bauhaus and Today , The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
  • 1984: Kurt Kranz. Bauhaus and today , Galerie Rolf Ohse, Bremen
  • 1986: Werner Graeff, Kurt Kranz: Two artists from the Bauhaus , January 10th - February 23rd 1986, Städtisches Museum Simeonstift, Trier
  • 1990: The Infinite Image , Hamburger Kunsthalle
  • 1991: The Infinite Image , Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop
  • 2000: Description and image, 90th birthday retrospective , M-ART Gallery, Hamburg
  • 2000: Follow-up sequence series Kunsthalle Bremen , Bremen

Fonts

  • Everyday winter life in the Lapland primeval forest. A series of pictures from the Finnish jungle front , Limpert, Berlin 1944.
  • See, understand, love. 3 steps into art , people and work, Munich 1963.
  • Bauhaus and today , self-published, Hamburg 1973.

Movies

  • Frank Withford: Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century , UK 1994

literature

  • Kranz, Kurt . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 3 : K-P . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1956, p. 112 .
  • Renate Kübler-Reiser: Kurt Kranz , Christians, Hamburg 1981, ISBN 3-7672-0720-6 .
  • In the column hall: A sympathetic honor for Kurt Kranz . In: Hamburger Abendblatt . No. 48, p. 15, February 26, 1987.
  • Irma Schlagheck: After each side it goes to infinity. Kurt Kranz is one of the first modern visual artists to work in series. [...] In: Art . The art magazine (=  guardian of modernity . No. 2 ). Gruner + Jahr, November 1987, ISSN  0173-2781 , p. 86-92 .
  • Petra Kipphoff: The Infinite Image . In: The time . No. 32, September 3, 1990.
  • Gudrun Wessing: Kranz, Kurt . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 81, de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-023186-1 , p. 477.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "As the successor to Studio Herbert Bayer, I will take over all the work in the studio", advertisement in the advertisement section in: Die Nutzgrafik, Berlin, December 1938.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kranz, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, graphic artist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH May 3, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Emmerich (today: Emmerich am Rhein )
DATE OF DEATH August 22, 1997
Place of death frond