Fritz Winter

Vita

Signed by Paul Klee, he received confirmation of acceptance for the basic course in the winter semester of 1927/28. His professors in the first year were a.o. Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky. The maintenance was earned by painting tiles in a Dessau stove fitting company. In 1928 he worked in Oskar Schlemmer’s stage department and in Paul Klee’s painting class. Due to the certificates of Klee and Kandinsky, he received a grant from the city of Dessau. In 1929 he took part in the exhibition “Young Bauhaus painters” in Halle a. i.e. Saale, Braunschweig, Erfurt and Krefeld. In the same year, during the autumn holidays, he visited Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Davos for the first time, with whom he became close friends from then on. It was also Kirchner who arranged for him to have an exhibition in a bookshop in Davos in 1929. In the same year, Winter met the constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo during a lecture at the Bauhaus. In 1930 he was granted leave of absence from his studies at the Bauhaus and worked for three months in Gabo’s studio in Berlin. First solo exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery in Berlin. The museums in Halle, Hamburg, Mannheim, Breslau and Wuppertal acquired works from him. In the summer of 1930 he visited E. L. Kirchner in Switzerland for the second time. On September 10, he completed his studies at the Bauhaus and received a diploma with a positive assessment from Paul Klee, who in retrospect played the major part in his education. In 1931 Fritz Winter tried to set up his own studio, “Studio Z”, together with fellow artists who were friends of his. At the suggestion of his friend Hans-Friedrich Geist, a former Bauhaus fellow student, he came to Halle a.d. Saale to take on a teaching position at the Pedagogical Academy. Fritz Winter met the composer Christian Hellmuth Wolff through Geist. This introduced him to his later partner Margarete Schreiber-Rüffer. Another visit to E. L. Kirchner in the summer.