Hans Grundig
1901–1958 · German painter and graphic artist of the New Objectivity
Hans Grundig (Dresden, 1901 – Dresden, 1958) was a German painter and graphic artist associated with the New Objectivity movement. His work, centred on portraits of working-class people, reflects the politics and repression of his time directly, which makes him an important witness to interwar Germany and to Nazism.
He trained as an interior decorator and, between 1920 and 1923, studied at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts and then at the Dresden Academy. In the 1920s his portraits showed the influence of Otto Dix. Like his friend Gert Heinrich Wollheim, he often depicted himself in a theatrical manner, as in his Self-Portrait during the Carnival Season (1930). He made his first etchings in 1933.
His anti-fascist commitment was early: he joined the German Communist Party in 1926 and was a founding member of the ASSO arts association in Dresden in 1929. After the Nazis took power, he was declared a degenerate artist, and his works were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937. He was forbidden to practise his profession and was arrested in 1936 and again in 1938. From 1940 to 1944 he was interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
In 1945 he went to Moscow, where he attended an anti-fascist school, and the following year he returned to Berlin to become a professor of painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1957 he published his autobiography, Zwischen Karneval und Aschermittwoch, and in 1958, the year of his death, he received the Heinrich Mann Prize.