Helmut Kolle: 22 interesting facts

Helmut Kolle (24 February 1899 – 17 November 1931) was a German painter who found major ability in France in the 1920s, fusing the German modernist style gone that of French painting.

Kolle was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg, the second son of the noted bacteriologist Wilhelm Kolle (1868–1935) and Helene Alwine Brigl. His father initially worked at Robert Koch’s Berlin institute (the Robert Koch Institute) and next relocated to Bern in Switzerland bearing in mind his relations in 1906. There Kolle also time-honored some opinion in painting and drawing.

In 1917, the family moved to Frankfurt where Wilhelm Kolle became director of the Royal Institute for Experimental Therapy (now the Paul Ehrlich Institute). In 1918 Helmut Kolle met his issue partner, lover, and mentor Wilhelm Uhde, an art collector, and moved considering him to Weimar. After to the front experiences as a fledgling writer, Kolle shifted his focus more and more to painting, getting suggestion from Erna Pinner in 1918/19, made attainable by Uhde’s friends in the art world.

In 1923, Uhde hosted the first operate of Kolle’s paintings at his art gallery in Berlin. In 1924, Kolle and Uhde moved to Paris, where Kolle was heavily influenced by the works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. A very wealthy exhibition followed in 1925, which even had a poem by Jean Cocteau not quite one of the paintings in the catalog. At a 1926 exhibition, almost all paintings shown were moreover sold, and regarding this epoch Helmut Kolle began signing his paintings as “Kolle” instead of using his earlier pseudonym “Helmut vom Hügel” (which is a profound pun based on the fact that the Latin word colle, which sounds like Kolle, is the ablative of collis, “hill”, and can mean “from the hill” when combined past an capture preposition—which subsequently translates assist to German as vom Hügel). In 1926, Uhde moved to Chantilly, where he was far along joined by Kolle in 1928 bearing in mind the latter’s health deteriorated.

Kolle had been suffering from endocarditis before 1922. In the summer of 1931, his health problems got worse and he died in November that year. He was interred at the Cimetière du Bois de Bourillon in Chantilly.

Kolle’s works, insofar as they depict people, tend to feature either males, often in various states of undress or slightly suggestive poses, either (in his earlier works) very feminine-looking boys or (later in his career) decidedly muscular men, the shift probably influenced by the ideals of masculinity as found in novels by Henry de Montherlant. Despite these fairly obvious homoerotic sentiments in his paintings, Kolle was notoriously guarded roughly his homosexuality and his membership with Uhde, much rotate to the user-friendliness of new homosexual artists in France or Germany at the time, e.g. Klaus Mann.

After Kolle’s death, major exhibitions of his works took place in Hamburg (1952 and 2011), Chemnitz (2010), and Munich (1994), in adjunct to numerous exhibitions in smaller European galleries. In England, Lucy Wertheim was the most important exponent of Kolle’s œuvre, exhibiting Kolle’s paintings in her London gallery in 1930, 1931, 1934, 1935, and 1938.

Page numbers deal with to:
Mössinger, I., Bauer-Friedrich, T., and Müller, K. [ed.]: Helmut Kolle – Ein Deutscher in Paris (exhibition catalog), 2010, 297 pp. ISBN 3-938832-73-8