Christian Rohlfs

Conrad Felixmuller

Conrad Felixmüller was a German Expressionist painter and printmaker best known for his colorful, graphic landscape and portrait work. His art from the 1930s onward demonstrated a more restrained color palette and a focus on realistic, genre-like representation—markedly less socio-critical than his early work. Born on May 21, 1897 in Dresden, Germany, he studied under Carl Bantzer at the Dresden Academy of Art and worked in the studio of Ludwig Meidner. In 1917, Felixmüller founded, and frequently published in, MENSCHEN, a monthly, politically progressive art and literature periodical. Two years later, he helped found the German Expressionist group, Dresden Secession, with Otto Schubert, and Otto Dix, a student of Felixmüller’s. Around the same time, the artist published an autobiography, Mein Werden, and his thoughts on artistic design, Künstlerische Gestaltung. Felixmüller’s paintings were shown in the Nazi exhibitions “Reflections of Decay” in 1933, and “Degenerate Art” in 1937, at which time his art was confiscated from public collections. He taught drawing and painting at Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle from 1949 to 1961 before retiring in Berlin. The artist died on March 24, 1977 in Berlin, Germany. Felixmüller’s works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.