Hans Purrmann, Young Art Volume 36

Christoph Wagner (ed.)

The painter Hans Purrmann (1880-1966) is one of the most important artists in 20th century art history. With his vital colorism based on Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne, he developed an internationally independent and recognized position over the course of his life in Munich, Paris, Berlin, Florence and Switzerland. It is part of the secret of Hans Purrmann’s art that he translated the visible into his works in a spirited manner. With irrepressible curiosity, attentiveness and an unerring eye for the beautiful, the original and the essential, he created pictures whose classification as “representational painting” falls short of the mark. Rather, he occupies a position within art history that is still relevant to modernism today: Purrmann was represented at documenta I in Kassel in 1955 as well as in a major retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 1962, which was celebrated as an event by the press. On the basis of new sources, Christoph Wagner presents the life and work of Hans Purrmann and locates the painter as an outstanding protagonist in the art-historical coordinates of the 20th century.