20th-century German male artists

Ernst Penzoldt (14 June 1892 – 27 January 1955) was a German writer, sculptor and painter.
Penzoldt was born in Erlangen. He had three older brothers. His father Franz Penzoldt was a German professor of medicine. From 1912 he studied sculpture in Weimar, under German sculpture professor Albin Egger-Lienz. In Weimar he met his friend Günther Stolle. In 1913 Penzoldt and Stolle went to university in Kassel. During World War I Petzoldt was in the army and worked as an emergency medical technician. In 1917 his friend Stolle died on active service.
After World War I Penzoldt lived in 1919 in Munich. There he met his next partner, Ernst Heimeran. Heimeran started his own publishing company, Heimeran Verlag. During the next years Penzoldt wrote several works, which he published in Heimeran Verlag. In 1922 Penzoldt married Heimerans sister Friederike. They had two children: Günther (1923–1997) and Ulrike (born 1927). He died, aged 62, in Munich.

Hans Grundig (February 19, 1901 – September 11, 1958) was a German painter and graphic artist associated with the New Objectivity movement.
He was born in Dresden and, after an apprenticeship as an interior decorator, studied in 1920–1921 at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. He then studied at the Dresden Academy from 1922 to 1923. During the 1920s his paintings, primarily portraits of working-class subjects, were influenced by the work 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 had his first solo exhibition in 1930 at the Dresden gallery of Józef Sandel. He made his first etchings in 1933.
Politically anti-fascist, he joined the German Communist Party in 1926, and was a founding member of the arts organization Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler in Dresden in 1929.
Following the fall of the Weimar Republic, Grundig was declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, who included his works in the defamatory Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937. He expressed his antagonism toward the regime in paintings such as The Thousand Year Reich (1936). Forbidden to practice his profession, he was arrested twice—briefly in 1936, and again in 1938, after which he was interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 1940 to 1944.
In 1945 he went to Moscow, where he attended an anti-fascist school. Returning to Berlin in 1946, he became a professor of painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1957 he published his autobiography, Zwischen Karneval und Aschermittwoch ("Between Shrovetide carnival and Ash Wednesday"). He was awarded the Heinrich Mann Prize in Berlin in 1958, the year of his death.

Eduard Bargheer (25 December 1901 – 1 July 1979) was a German painter and printmaker. His early oeuvre had a close affinity to Expressionism.

Albert Weisgerber (21 April 1878 – 10 May 1915) was a German painter whose work forms a bridge between Impressionism and early Expressionism.

Otto Reiniger (27 February 1863, Stuttgart - 24 July 1909, near Weilimdorf, now part of Stuttgart) was a German landscape painter in the Impressionistic style. Most of his works feature the area immediately surrounding Stuttgart, and he was particularly praised for his depictions of flowing water.

Christian Adam Landenberger (7 April 1862, Ebingen - 13 February 1927, Stuttgart) was a German Impressionist painter and a professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. He is especially known for his landscapes.

Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz, alias Fritz W. Schulz, (2 April 1884, in Berlin – 12 June 1962, in Hamburg) was a German marine artist and illustrator of the 20th century.

Arno Lehmann (23 May 1905 – 11 May 1973) was a German ceramicist, sculptor and painter who spent most of his productive time in Austria.

Werner Laux (15 April 1902 – 14 May 1975) was a German painter, university teacher and arts official. He was something of a party stalwart: between 1952 and 1956 he served as rector (head) of the Arts Academy at Berlin-Weissensee.

Edgar Karl Alfons Ende (23 February 1901 – 27 December 1965) was a German surrealist painter and father of the children's novelist Michael Ende.
Ende attended the Altona School of Arts and Crafts from 1916 to 1920. In 1922 he married Gertrude Strunck, but divorced four years later. He remarried in 1929, the same year his son Michael was born. In the 1930s Ende's Surrealist paintings began to attract considerable critical attention, but were then condemned as degenerate by the Nazi government. Beginning in 1936 the Nazis forbade him to continue to paint or exhibit his work. In 1940 he was conscripted into the Luftwaffe as an operator of anti-aircraft artillery.
The majority of his paintings were destroyed by a bomb raid on Munich in 1944, making his surviving pre-war work extremely rare. In 1951, Ende met the recognized founder of Surrealism, André Breton, who admired his work and declared him an official Surrealist. He continued to paint surrealist works until his death in 1965 from a myocardial infarction.
Ende's paintings are thought to have had a significant influence on his son's writing. This is inferred in the scenes depicting the surreal dream-paintings from Yor's Minroud in Die Unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story), and is made explicit in Michael Ende's book Der Spiegel im Spiegel (The mirror in the mirror), a collection of short stories based on (and printed alongside) Edgar Ende's surrealist works.