Curt Echtermeyer

Curt Echtermeyer (1896–1971), also known as Curt Bruckner or Curt Bruckner-Echtermeyer, was a German painter.

Curt Echtermeyer was born in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1896 as the son of an immigrant who soon returned to Germany, and his Chilean wife. Curt and his sister grew up in Berlin, where he attended art school from 1914. He lived in Paris in 1925/26, taking up contact with other surrealist artists.

The painter was "overlooked" for conscription in the First World War and spared service at the front in the Second World War. Yet it was the Nazi dictatorship which forced him to develop a fundamentally different second style, and the Stalinist dictatorship in the GDR which prompted him to leave Berlin.

In 1962, after the erection of the Berlin Wall, Curt Echtermeyer took up residence in the Old Town of Bamberg, a picturesque Catholic city. At the end of 1969, Curt Echtermeyer and his wife moved to his beloved Spain. From his cottage in the village of San Vicente de Calders (Province of Tarragona), he could see the Mediterranean Sea. On 11 December 1971, Curt and Wally Echtermeyer fell victim to a tragic accident; they were interred at El Vendrell.

This proponent of Modernism pursued an artistic double life – under the name of Curt Bruckner – by providing highly popular canvases in the style of 19th century Realism. As Echtermeyer, the artist often created vast, dark, dreamlike, unsettling scenes, while as Bruckner, he produced intimate, warm, quotidian, idyllic images.

Echtermeyer categorically rejected preparatory studies, drawing directly onto the canvas or wood before applying oil or pastel, and preferred to paint by night. Many oil paintings of his Paris period are relatively small and executed directly on wood, as he lived in various, narrow, lodgings and sometimes used parts of the furniture, for instance the bottom of drawers.

Curt Echtermeyer was related to the writer Ernst Theodor Echtermeyer and the sculptor Carl Friedrich Echtermeier, formerly Echtermeyer. The latter changed his name in 1905, possibly to confirm the break with his eldest son Romolus, Curt’s father.

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