Fritz Stuckenberg: 11 interesting facts

Fritz Stuckenberg (16 August 1881, Munich – 18 May 1944, Füssen) was a German expressionist painter.

He was born Friedrich Bernhard Stuckenberg in Munich, but moved once his relatives in 1893 to the northern industrial city of Delmenhorst (near Bremen), where his daddy took higher than as director of the Hansa-Linoleumwerke. After unfinished studies of architecture and art studies in Weimar and Munich, he spent five formative years (1907–1913) in Paris. From there he made excursions to Pont-Aven as well as to Provence (Cassis, Martigues) where he “cleaned his palette”. He belonged to the circle of artists in the “Café Du Dôme” and exhibited in some of the best salons and galleries in Paris.

Coming urge on to Germany, he took dwelling in Berlin, where he was discovered in 1916 by Herwarth Walden and integrated into the Sturm circle. He became associates with Georg Muche, Arnold Topp, Walter Mehring and Mynona. Disillusioned later than Walden, he united in 1919 the Arbeitsrat für Kunst concerning Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut, later the Novembergruppe. Several “Sturm”-exhibitions, participation in the first Berlin Dadaist exhibition, and fascination in the third Bauhaus portfolio, mark his rank in the artists’ scene of these years. In the further on 1920s, his works were shown in Germany, the USA and the Soviet Union as that of a speculator of the European avant-garde.

Severe complaint and financial problems annoyed Stuckenberg nevertheless to recompense to his parents in “gloomy Delmenhorst” (as he writes in a letter to the Flemish dadaist Paul van Ostaijen). Under increasingly difficult conditions, both diplomatic and personal, he developed a constructivist and spiritualist late work. All of his pictures were removed from German museums (and some of them destroyed) during the Nazi purges. In the infamous exhibition on “Entartete Kunst” in 1937, his “Straße mit Häusern” (street gone houses, 1921) was exhibited as an example of “degenerate art”. During the Second World War he moved to the South of Germany and died there, already in version to forgotten. In 1993 he was rediscovered as a portion of the campaigner art liberal with a retrospective in Delmenhorst, Berlin and Neuss. A large allowance of his enduring work is now to be seen in the Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst.

Media united to Fritz Stuckenberg at Wikimedia Commons