20th-century German painters

Ernst_Penzoldt

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

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.

Otto_Reiniger

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.