Georg Muche Biography - Infos for Sellers and Buyers

Georg Muche

Querfurt 1895 - Lindau 1987

Georg Muche was born in Querfurt, Saxony, on May 8, 1895 but spent his childhood and adolescence in the Rhön. In 1913 Muche began to study painting at the "School for Painting and the Graphic Arts, Paul Weinhold and Felix Eisengräber, formerly. A. Ažbé" in Munich. After failing the examination for admission to the "Royal Bavarian Academy for the Fine Arts" in Munich, Muche decided to go to Paris but the outbreak of the first world war thwarted this intention.
Georg Muche went to Berlin instead, where he was introduced by Herwarth Walden to the circle of Expressionist artists and worked for Walden as an exhibition assistant.
The 37th exhibition of "Der Sturm", entitled "Georg Muche - Max Ernst" was mounted in January 1916, at which twenty-two pictures by Muche were shown. It was followed by the exhibitions "Paul Klee - Georg Muche" (thirty pictures by Muche) and, in 1918, by "Alexander Archipenko - Georg Muche".
By then Muche had begun to teach painting at the art school affiliated with "Der Sturm". In 1920 Muche dissolved his contract with Walden in order to be independent for the work he was about to begin at the Bauhaus.
Georg Muche left the Bauhaus in 1927 to teach at a private art school founded three years previously by Johannes Itten. Muche traveled to Italy, wrote a book on the art and style of fresco painting "Buon Fresco - Briefe aus Italien über Handwerk und Stil der echten Freskomalerei" and showed his own "Tafelfresken" ["Panel Frescoes"] at the Galerie von der Heyde in Berlin.
Georg Muche founded a master class for textile art at the Textile Engineering School in Krefeld in 1938 and remained director of it until 1958. The fruit of Muche's work on fresco painting was a design for a room, 6 x 6 m, to be decorated with frescoes but it was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1942 not longer after completion.
In 1960 Georg Muche moved to Lindau on Lake Constance, where he worked freelance as a painter and graphic artist. During the 1970s he worked on a cycle of drawings and paintings comprising the "Tafel der Schuld" ["Panels of Guilt"].The Bauhaus Archive in Berlin mounted a large retrospective, "Georg Muche - Das künstlerische Werk 1912-1927", in 1980.
Georg Muche died in Lindau on March 26, 1987.