Bernhard Kretzschmar Sold at Auction Prices

Painter, Etcher, Lithographer, Water color painter

Bernhard Kretzschmar (born December 29, 1889 in Döbeln , † December 16, 1972 in Dresden ) was a German painter and graphic artist . In his early work, a representative of the New Objectivity , whose works were considered so-called degenerate art by the National Socialists , he later received the GDR National Prize in 1959 for his graphics and colored self-portraits .



After completing an apprenticeship as a decorative painter in 1904, Bernhard Kretzschmar began studying at the Dresden School of Applied Arts from 1909 to 1911. Like many painters of that time (compare Gregor Gog , Hans Bönnighausen ) he also went on hikes through southern Germany and Switzerland (1911) and traveled to Spain and Italy for almost a year (1913). Eventually Kretzschmar was accepted into the Dresden Art Academy, where he studied with Robert Sterl , Richard Müller and Oskar Zwintscher . From 1914 to 1917 he was a master student of Carl Bantzer at the Dresden Academy. Here his friendship with Peter August Böckstiegel andConrad Felixmüller , with whom he later founded the group in 1917 .

On August 26, 1916, he married Susanna Uhmann, who died in 1941.

Kretzschmar was a medical soldier in Bautzen for one year in 1917/18 . After the end of the First World War , he moved to Gostritz near Dresden in 1918 and was a master student of Robert Sterl at the Dresden Academy from 1919 to 1920 . In 1920 he destroyed his entire previous artistic production and then began to produce expressionistic and expressive-realistic graphics, which quickly earned him fame. The influential art critic Julius Meier-Graefe promoted him. In the 1920s he approached the New Objectivity in his work.

Bernhard Kretzschmar was a co-founder of the Dresden Secession in 1932 . In 1936 his work was shown in a solo exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In 1937 47 of his works were confiscated from German museums and were considered " degenerate ". On February 13, 1945, a large part of the factory was destroyed by bombs when the air raids of the time also hit his studio in the Polytechnic School on Antonsplatz . In 2012 a watercolor "Tram" appeared at the Schwabing art discovery . [1]

After the war, Bernhard Kretzschmar began as a professor at the Dresden University of Fine Arts in 1946, where one of his students was AR Penck (1956/1957). During this time he was particularly connected to the painters Karl Kröner and Wilhelm Lachnit [2] , with whom he went to the Baltic coast to paint. Together with the sculptor Fritz Cremer and the painter Harald Metzkes, he went on a trip to the People's Republic of China in 1954 .

At the beginning of the 1950s he met the painter Hilde Stilijanov and her son Peter. He and Stilijanov married in 1958. [3]

From 1955 to 1972 he mainly drew colored pictures (especially self-portraits). From 1969 he was a corresponding member of the German Academy of the Arts in East Berlin . Works by Kretzschmar are u. a. owned by museums in Barcelona, ??Berlin, Bremen, Dresden, Essen, Frankfurt a. M., Hamburg, Cologne, Copenhagen, Leipzig, Madrid, Mannheim, Munich, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Saarbrücken, Vienna, Winterthur, Zurich, Zwickau.