Pierre Clerk - Untitled Painting
Ilya Bolotowsky - Series 5
Untitled composition by Adolf Fleischmann

Adolf Fleischmann – Click to enlarge.

Adolf Fleischmann

German (1892 – 1969)

Untitled 1962 color serigraph
edition of 40

Blattmaß: 83.5 x 60 cm
Acquired at Ketter Kunst, Germany – April 2014

More information on Adolf Fleischmann

Adolf Fleischmann (German 1892-1968)

Adolf Fleischmann is an important German abstract artist whose artistic development took place in Paris and New York.

Fleischmann studied in Stuttgart at the Royal School of Applied Arts (KKunstgewerbeschule) and at the Royal Academy of Art (KKunstakademie) 1908-1913. One of his teachers was Adolf Hoelzel, whose use of the line as a means to define form and indicate direction he made his own. During the 1920s Fleischmann was influenced by Cubism and Expressionism and exhibited with the ‘Neue Sezession’ in Munich (1922) as well as in Berlin and in Stuttgart. In 1932 he exhibited at the Paris Salon des Surindépendants. In 1933 Fleischmann was forced to emigrate, his work being labelled ‘degenerate’. During the 1930s until 1952, Fleischmann spent time in Italy, Spain and France, where he exhibited regularly.

Towards the end of the 1930s, his compositions built with elegant arabesques and curbs developed into a rigid geometry as he painted his typical L- shaped forms which he later labelled His sole use of horizontal and vertical lines, showing affinities with Mondrian’s ‘neo-plasticism’, profiled him as an abstract artist and it was as such that he appeared at the 1945 Paris Salon des Surindépendants.

In 1952 Fleischmann settled in New York where at the end of the 1950s he created his first relief-paintings, now using three-dimensional ‘equerres’ fashioned from papier maché. These works were exhibited in shows of the American group of abstract artists. From 1963 he painted his so-called metamorphoses using black ‘equerres’ stacked in block. In 1965 Fleischmann returned from New York to Germany, where he died in 1968.

Bibliography
Rolf WEDERER. Adolf R. Fleischmann. Stuttgart, 1977.