Fritz Eisel

Fritz Eisel
Section from Humanity Conquers the Cosmos (Mensch bezwingt Kosmos ) by Fritz Eisel (Mosaic in former data processing centre in Potsdam)
Born	Friedrich Eisel (1929-03-27)27 March 1929 Lauterbach, Hesse, Germany
Died	19 September 2010(2010-09-19) (aged 81) Langen Brütz, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany
Occupation	Painter Graphic artist
Political party	SED
Spouse(s)	Christa Lörsch (1951)
Children	(1953) Paul (1955)

Fritz Eisel (27 March 1929 – 19 September 2010) was a German painter and Graphic artist.

Eisel was born into a Communist (albeit relatively apolitical) working-class family in Lauterbach, a small town roughly 100 km (63 miles) north-east of Frankfurt am Main. He was the eldest of his parents' five children. At the start of 1945 he was ordered to go to nearby Battenberg to join one of the flak units set up to try and reduce the impact of enemy bombing raids on the important railway line there. He did not obey the order, and very shortly afterwards the US army occupied Lauterbach. In May 1945 the end of the war marked a return to multi-party government and Eisel, by now 16 years old, immediately took the opportunity to join the local Communist Party. In 1946/47 he was working as a truck driver. In 1947, as millions of Germans were moving west, the Eisel family moved east, relocating to what was, between 1945 and 1949, the Soviet occupation zone in what remained of Germany. Fritz Eisel applied to study at the University of Architecture and Fine Arts (as it was then known) in Weimar and was accepted.

During his first two years as a student, Eisel's approach to the various abstract exercises and projects he was set by his teacher was entirely orthodox. As he himself said, that helped him in some ways, but it also undermined his abstract presentational abilities. That changed, however, in 1949 when responsibility for his further artistic education was taken on by who had transferred to Weimar the previous year from Stuttgart, and Eisel made further progress when Dähn and Eisel transferred to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts where Eisel continued his studies from 1950 till 1951. The Soviet occupation zone had become German Democratic Republic, formally in October 1949, and in 1951 Fritz Eisel was able to become a member of the young countries' . However, he still felt undertrained, and that same year he accepted an offer to attend the Academy of Arts in Leningrad, where one of his teachers was Boris Ioganson, and where he continued his artistic development till 1957.