Richard Riemerschmid

Richard Riemerschmid (20 June 1868 – 13 April 1957) was a German architect, painter, designer and city planner from Munich. He was a major figure in Jugendstil, the German form of Art Nouveau, and a founder of architecture in the style. A founder member of both the Vereinigte Werkstätte für Kunst im Handwerk (United Workshops for Art in Handcrafts) and the Deutscher Werkbund and the director of art and design institutions in Munich and Cologne, he prized craftsmanship but also pioneered machine production of artistically designed objects.

Riemerschmid was born in Munich, the sixth of nine children of Eduard Riemerschmid, who headed the Munich distillery founded by his father Anton Riemerschmid, and his wife Amalie. After completing his Abitur at the Wilhelmsgymnasium in 1886 and military service in the army, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich under Gabriel Hackl and Ludwig von Löfftz from 1888 to 1890 and then worked as an independent artist and architect.

He began as an Impressionist and Symbolist painter. He produced advertising of various kinds on commission, including series of pictures for albums for the Stollwerck chocolate company of Cologne, one called "The Seasons" (Jahreszeiten) for Album No. 4 of 1899.

He was a co-founder of the Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk (United Workshops for Art in Handcrafts) (1897 or 1898, originally Dresdner Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst, later Deutsche Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst and now Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau) and the Deutscher Werkbund (1907), which he headed from 1920 to 1926. From 1913 to 1924, he was director of the Munich Kunstgewerbeschule (which merged with the Academy of Fine Arts in 1946), and from 1926 to 1931 was a professor at and the director of the Kölner Werkschulen (an art and design college which was a forerunner of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne). He played an important role in the 1922 German Handcrafts Exhibition in Munich. He published books on art education.

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