Fritz Winter German, 1905-1976

Fritz Winter (Altenbögge, Germany 1905 – Herrsching, Germany, 1976)

Fritz Winter, whose work was significantly influenced by his activity at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he worked as a student and assistant to such important painters as Klee and Kandinsky, is also regarded as the main representative of the second generation of modernism. After the National Socialists seized power and labelled him an ostracised abstract painter, he retreated to Diessen am Ammersee in internal exile, where he was officially banned from painting in 1937. He painted "on a heap", hid his works in the attic, even bricked them up. After 10 years of military service and imprisonment, he worked on the hidden work, brought it to the public and continued it.

In 1949, he was one of the founding members of the "non-objective group" ZEN 49 and in the post-war period was regarded as an important link between the artistic avant-gardes of pre- and inter-war modernism and the postulated claim of West German connection to international art development. For Fritz Winter, nature became the central theme of his work, but for him the conventional concern of imitating nature is identical with abstract pictorial design.

For him, nature presents itself in the non-representational infinity of space and the building blocks lying behind visible reality. He strives for liberation from everything material and thus external by playing the meaning of his existence over into the spiritual, i.e. the abstract, independent of the body. However, he largely excluded the spontaneously sensual, the expressive-gestural, and instead focussed on conceptual rigour in order to reach a universally valid level freed from all individuality.

From 1955 to 1970, he taught at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste in Kassel and took part in the documenta. In 1965, he presented his work in the first major retrospective. Winter received numerous awards, including the 1st Prize of the Deutscher Künstlerbund Berlin in 1951, the Tokyo International Graphic Arts Prize in 1957 and the Order "Pour le Mérite" in 1972. In 1974, he received the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany with Star and opened the Fritz Winter House in Ahlen the following year. The artist died in Herrsching am Ammersee in 1976.

Copyright the artist. Photo UniCredit Group