18 facts about Heinrich Amersdorffer

Heinrich Amersdorffer (10 December 1905 – 2 December 1986) was a German painter, printmaker, war artiste and art teacher.

Amersdorffer was a son of Alexander Amersdorffer (1875-1946), the successor to art historian Ludwig Justi as director of the Prussian Academy of Arts.

During the 1930s he exhibited a number of times in the National Socialist Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German art exhibition) at Munich. During the Second World War he worked as a skirmish artist on behalf of the Wehrmacht, covering the western campaign and the violent behavior of France, including the depiction of undamaged French cathedrals amidst the ruins of bombed cities, which was used to propagate the affirmation that German forces gave “magnanimous protection to architectural cultural heritage”. His cycles of battle art made his declare within the Third Reich, especially a painting of Rouen Cathedral, exhibited in 1941. In January 1942 Amersdorffer said in the magazine Art for All: “It has been established to me to be skillful to work on this great task on behalf of the armed forces”.

In the postwar grow old Amersdorffer was appointed to a teaching face at the Academy of Arts, Berlin, and well along became an honorary professor.

In 1976 he gave his store of just about 1,000 ancient Greek and Roman coins to the Berlin Antiquities Collection. A chief condition of the donation was that it would permanently remain a share of the stock of antiquities, and consequently, could not become ration of the Berlin Coin Cabinet.