Gert Heinrich Wollheim

Gert Heinrich Wollheim (11 September 1894 – 22 April 1974) was a German painter associated with the New Objectivity, and later an expressionist who worked in United States after 1947.

He was born in Dresden-Loschwitz and studied at the College of Fine Arts in Weimar from 1911 to 1913, where his instructors included Albin Egger-Lienz and Gottlieb Forster. From 1914–1917 he was in military service in World War I, where he was wounded. After the war he lived in Berlin until 1919, when Wollheim, Otto Pankok (whom he had met at the academy in Weimar), Ulfert Lüken, Hermann Hundt and others created an artists' colony in Remels, (East Frisia).

At the end of 1919 Wollheim and Pankok went to Düsseldorf and became founding members of the "Young Rhineland" group, which also included Max Ernst, Otto Dix, and Ulrich Leman. Wollheim was one of the artists associated with the art dealer Johanna Ey, and in 1922 he was taken to court over a painting displayed at her gallery. In 1925 he moved to Berlin, and his work, which always emphasized the theatrical and the grotesque, began a new phase of coolly objective representation.

Immediately after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 his works were declared degenerate art and many were destroyed. He fled to France and became active in the Resistance. He was one of the co-founders of the artists' federation, the Union des Artistes Allemandes Libres, an organization of exiled German artists founded in Paris in autumn 1937. In that same year, he became the companion of the dancer Tatjana Barbakoff. Meanwhile, in Munich, three of his pictures were displayed in the defamatory Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937.

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