£325
Contemporary & Post-War Art | 595
Auction: 16 April 2020 at 12:00 BST
Woodcut on japan paper, 22/25, 2nd state, signed, dated, titled and numbered in pencil to margin, unframed
and another 'Head (Kopf)' (plate, after p.308) from the periodical Genius. Zeitschrift für werdende und alte Kunst, vol. 2, no. 2
Biography:
Max Kaus was born in Berlin in 1891. He attended the School for Crafts and the Applied and Decorative Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg. His work was heavily influence by the expressionist art of the Die Brücke group.
A travel grant brought him to Paris in 1914, however, the onset of World War I forced him to return to Germany. He volunteered as an ambulance driver and medical orderly and it was in this work that he met several artists who would influence his work, including Erich Heckel, Anton Kerschbaumer, and Otto Herbig.
Around 1916, Kaus began printmaking but moved to more decorative painting after the war. With his reputation growing, he held his first solo show at the Ferdinand Möller Gallery in 1919 and, by the following year, had joined several artist’s groups who furthered the study of Expressionism in Berlin. In 1927 he was awarded the Albrecht Dürer Prize by the city of Nuremburg.
By the end of the 1920s, he had taken a teaching position at the Master School for the Applied and Decorative Arts, teaching landscape painting and figurative drawing.
Kaus travelled throughout Europe during the 1930s and came to teach in Berlin but was increasingly exposed to persecution by the National Socialists. The Nazis did not approve of his paintings of alienated, lonely figures, and thus his works were removed from public view in 1937 and he was forced to give up teaching until the end of WWII.
His home and studio were destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943 and, just two days before the end of the war, Russian artillery destroyed what remained of his work. In July 1945 he accepted a new teaching position at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin, where he eventually became Deputy Director, and taught until retiring in 1968. He continued teaching and creating art until late in his life.