Herbert Fiedler 1960

Herbert Fiedler 1960 Still Life. Oil on linen on board. 42x61cm.

Herbert Fiedler - 1891-1962 Painter between Germany and the Netherlands

He loved Germany, but fled the Nazi regime; he painted figuratively, but disliked overly naturalistic 'brushing'; Herbert Fiedler spent his whole life between the shore and the ship. These were difficult times - in general but also for him personally - which meant that he never really made a career in his lifetime. Herbert Fiedler was born in Leipzig in 1891. During his studies at the Königlichen Kunstakademie in Dresden (on the recommendation of Liebermann and Trübner) he met George Grosz, with whom he shared his home and studio in 1912 in Berlin. But in 1913 he was already attracted to Paris, then the Mecca of art. There he lived in the middle of Montmartre, signed at the Académie Colarossi and got to know Jules Pascin, Karl Hofer and others in Café Dôme. Then the First World War broke out; Fiedler had to return to Germany, ended up on the Eastern Front, and was wounded. The young artist spent the 1920s in Berlin. It was a difficult time; Fiedler became acquainted with artists such as Max Pechstein and Bertolt Brecht; he earned a living doing all kinds of jobs, for example at the UFA film studios, where he worked for two years as a set painter and poster designer. In 1934 he left Germany and ended up in the Netherlands (with his later wife, the Swiss painter Amrey Balsiger). But even there he could not escape Nazi Germany: war broke out in 1940. The years before the war he lived in the artists' village of Laren. He developed his own style, which Dutch art critics called 'baroque expressionist'. He strived for greater abstraction within his figurative painting. In rural Laren, mainly landscapes and portraits arose. From December 1940 he lived in Amsterdam, and in the 1940s and 1950s he returned to the motifs from Berlin: the city and the people. He was especially fond of the world of the circus: time and again he painted clowns, acrobats and trapeze artists. These works were in great demand, and many are now in private collection, distributed all over the world, mainly in the Netherlands and (presumably) Germany. In 1962 Herbert Fiedler died of a heart attack, in the middle of preparations for a major exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Several Dutch and German museums own works by him (including Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Singer Museum, Laren; Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig). But Fiedler has remained virtually unknown to the general public.