Up for auction "Painter" John von Wicht Hand Signed Magazine Page.
ES-5799E
John von Wicht was
highly trained in fine and applied arts in his native Germany before he
immigrated to the United States in 1923. When he was seventeen he
apprenticed in a painting and decorating shop, and spent his spare time
drawing from nature. He began painting in oil about 1908, and soon
thereafter sold his first canvas. Encouraged that her son would have
a future as an artist, von Wicht’s mother sent him to the advanced private
school of the Grand Duke of Hesse, where the professors encouraged students to
draw plants and flowers to learn about organic growth, shape and
proportion. “I remember the Professor speaking of circular movements, of
space between forms and of Equilibrium,” von Wicht later recalled.(1) The
students also studied ancient art, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, as well as
Mathias Grünewald, Albrecht Dürer, Martin Schongauer, Hans Memling, and other
German masters whose work was in local collections. Von Wicht subsequently
studied printing methods at the Royal School for Fine and Applied Arts in
Berlin, but said he skipped class frequently to visit exhibitions of the newest
painting—van Gogh, Cézanne, Munch, Gauguin, Kandinsky, and Franz Marc. Wounded
and partially paralyzed in the trenches during World War I, von Wicht spent
several years recovering, doing book design and illustration work, and looking
at art. It was during this recuperation that he discovered Mondrian and
Malevich. In 1923, with inflation devastating the German economy, he
immigrated to the United States. In New York, his early training served him
well. He worked for two years with a lithography company, then joined
a firm making stained glass and mosaics. He learned to use symbols rather
than naturalistic motifs, and explored both geometry and dense color in
abstract paintings such as the Untitled gouache of about 1938,
and in murals for radio station WNYC and the New York World’s Fair. Von
Wicht had his first solo show, of mural designs, at the Architect’s Building
in 1936. It was followed, in 1939, by an exhibition of his paintings
at Theodor A. Kohn Gallery. The show at Kohn was well received by the New York
press, and the following year he exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American
Art. This exposure cemented von Wicht’s reputation as an abstract painter.
Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, he exhibited frequently
in solo and group exhibitions in New York and around the country. He was
invited to join the American Abstract Artists and the Federation of Modern
Painters and Sculptors. During World War II, von Wicht served as captain
of a supply barge ferrying food to army transport ships in New York
harbor; after the war he continued to command a supply scow. Harbor themes
began to appear in his abstractions, and during the 1950s his sensuously
colored geometric abstractions gave way to loose, expressionistic forms.
In 1954 von Wicht received the first of twelve annual residencies at the
MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. The spacious studio and contact with other
artists at the MacDowell Colony had an important impact on his work. In his
exhibition at Passedoit Gallery that year, he exhibited paintings with nautical
motifs in which the Cubist device of interlocking and overlapping planes was
paramount. But von Wicht also began relating his work to music created by the
composers he had met at MacDowell. Although his work was well received from the
time of his first exhibition, critics attributed the expanded sense of space,
brilliant color, and vigorous handling of paint surfaces in his new work to the
experience of living away from the city. By the time he died, in 1970, von
Wicht had received international acclaim.