Fritz Winter (22 September 1905 in
Altenbögge (now part of
Bönen) – 1 October 1976 in
Herrsching
Herrsching am Ammersee is a municipality in Upper Bavaria, Germany, on the east shore of the Ammersee, southwest of Munich. The population is around 8,000 in winter, increasing to 13,000 in summer.
Situated at one terminus of the Munich S-Bahn li ...
) was a German painter of the postwar period best known for his
abstract works in the
Art Informel
Informalism or Art Informel is a pictorial movement from the 1943–1950s, that includes all the abstract and gestural tendencies that developed in France and the rest of Europe during the World War II, similar to American abstract expressionis ...
style.
Life
Like his father, Winter began electrical work in the coal mines at a young age. In 1925, however, his travels in Belgium and the Netherlands kindled his interest in drawing and painting, particularly the work of
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, inc ...
. Within two years this affinity led to his admission to the
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the Bauhaus (), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., 20 ...
, the state-sponsored
Weimar
Weimar is a city in the state of Thuringia, Germany. It is located in Central Germany between Erfurt in the west and Jena in the east, approximately southwest of Leipzig, north of Nuremberg and west of Dresden. Together with the neighbouri ...
school of art and applied design founded in 1919 by architect
Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who, along with Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, is widely regarded as one ...
. Winter studied in Dessau under Bauhaus masters Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Oskar Schlemmer, among others, for three years, and participated in Junge Bauhausmaler (Young Bauhaus painters) in 1929. He formed a close friendship and artistic kinship with
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (6 May 1880 – 15 June 1938) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century ...
, frequently visiting Kirchner in
Davos, Switzerland
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Davos (, ; or ; rm, ; archaic it, Tavate) is an Alpine resort town and a municipality in the Prättigau/Davos R ...
, and also befriended sculptor
Naum Gabo
Naum Gabo, born Naum Neemia Pevsner (23 August 1977) (Hebrew: נחום נחמיה פבזנר), was an influential sculptor, theorist, and key figure in Russia's post-Revolution avant-garde and the subsequent development of twentieth-century scul ...
in
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
. During this period Winter worked primarily on paper due to the expense of canvas.
After leaving the Bauhaus, Winter taught at the Pädagogische Akademie, Halle an der Saale, Germany, but resigned following the establishment of the National Socialist regime in 1933. He moved to Munich and then Dießen am Ammersee. Winter was soon counted among the so-called degenerate artists whose work the Nazi government banned and purged from German museums in 1937. In 1939, with the onset of World War II, the artist was drafted into the German army and sent to the Eastern front, fighting in Poland and Russia. He nonetheless produced art during periods of leave and in 1944 executed his Triebkräfte der Erde (Driving forces of the earth), a major series of 45 paintings on paper that symbolically represent the struggle of anti-Fascist artists and intellectuals in Germany. In May 1945, shortly before the armistice, the Russian army took Winter as a prisoner of war and detained him in Siberia until 1949. His long-time companion and future wife Margarete Schreiber-Rüffer ensured that his paintings were exhibited in his absence.
On his return to Europe, Winter resumed painting in a more colorful palette and embraced prevailing avant-garde trends toward abstraction. In 1949, he cofounded with some of his fellow German artists the Gruppe der Gegenstandslosen (Group of nonrepresentational artists, renamed ZEN 49 in January 1950) in Munich. They exhibited together until 1957 and represented the German counterparts to Tachisme (from the French tache, for blot or stain), or Art Informel painters. Zen Buddhism greatly influenced their practice, which privileged a calligraphic painting style. In 1950 Winter received his first postwar solo exhibition in Munich and five other German cities, and visited Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung in Paris. Winter exhibited at the Pittsburgh International (now
Carnegie International, 1952); São Paulo Biennial (1955); Venice Biennale (1956); and
Documenta, Kassel, West Germany (1955, 1959). His first U.S. solo exhibition took place at Hacker Gallery, New York (1952), and he was included in Younger European Painters: A Selection (1953–54),
Guggenheim Museum
The Guggenheim Museums are a group of museums in different parts of the world established (or proposed to be established) by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Museums in this group include:
Locations
Americas
* The Solomon R. Guggenhei ...
, and The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors (1955), Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Deutscher Künstlerbund, Berlin, selected Winter for an award in 1951, but he resigned from the association in 1954 as a result of the debate surrounding abstraction. In 1955 Winter began teaching at the Landeskunstschule, Hamburg, West Germany, and two years later he was appointed professor at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Kassel.
Several German cities mounted major retrospectives to mark the artist's 60th birthday in 1965. Winter slowly withdrew from the art scene in the late 1960s, retiring from his long-standing academic position in Kassel in 1970 and returning to Dießen am Ammersee. He died on October 1, 1976, in Herrsching am Ammersee, West Germany.
Work
During his studies, Fritz Winter had distanced himself from the ideas of the
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the Bauhaus (), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., 20 ...
. He represented a "L’Art-pour l’Art attitude" and criticized the attitude toward painting within the Bauhaus community. He dealt intensively with the teachings of
Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (; rus, Василий Васильевич Кандинский, Vasiliy Vasilyevich Kandinskiy, vɐˈsʲilʲɪj vɐˈsʲilʲjɪvʲɪtɕ kɐnʲˈdʲinskʲɪj; – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter a ...
and
Klee
Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented wi ...
, but even his early experiments show a free approach detached from the Bauhaus ideals. His work should be viewed as a cycle, as he repeatedly took up old forms and added new ones, never completely detaching himself from the object like other abstract artists. After being banned from painting and exhibiting, as well as being a prisoner of war, Winter went on sabbatical in
Dießen. There he created the “driving forces of the earth”, an enduring key concept of the
post-war art scene. He was one of the major pioneers of abstraction in Europe. He was a founding member of the artist group
ZEN 49
Zen ( zh, t=禪, p=Chán; ja, text= 禅, translit=zen; ko, text=선, translit=Seon; vi, text=Thiền) is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that originated in China during the Tang dynasty, known as the Chan School (''Chánzong'' 禪宗), and ...
, which saw itself in the tradition of the
Blauen Reiter and acted as an example of the spirit of a renewed world.
In 1949 Fritz Winter produced his first serigraphs, making him one of the pioneers of artistic screen printing in Germany.
The Fritz Winter Foundation & Fritz Winter Prize
The Fritz Winter Foundation was founded in 1965 by Konrad Knoepfel and is dedicated to promoting science and research as well as art and culture by assisting talented young people in these fields. As part of its mission beginning in 1986 the foundation awards the Fritz Winter Prize to promote young talents in science and research as well as art and culture. In 2020, it was awarded to Nora Schattauer and Eva-Maria Schön.
''Verleihung des Fritz-Winter-Preises an Nora Schattauer und Eva-Maria Schön''
3. Dezember 2020.
References
External links
*
*
Entry
on the Union List of Artist Names
The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) is a free online database of the Getty Research Institute using a controlled vocabulary
Control may refer to:
Basic meanings Economics and business
* Control (management), an element of management
* Cont ...
Official site of the Fritz-Winter-Haus
Official site of the Fritz-Winter-Atelier
{{DEFAULTSORT:Winter, Fritz
1905 births
1976 deaths
People from Unna (district)
People from the Province of Westphalia
20th-century German painters
20th-century German male artists
German male painters
Abstract painters
Bauhaus alumni
Knights Commander of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Art Informel and Tachisme