Anton Räderscheidt

Anton Räderscheidt biography

Having attended the Cologne School of Applied Arts and the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, Anton Räderscheidt's first works in his career were influenced by Expressionism and Constructivism. After serving in the First World War, his spent a brief period as an art teacher but then turned to full-time freelance work as an artist. He maintained close contacts with other artists of the Rhineland avant-garde, the Cologne “Progressives” and the circle of Cologne Dadaists. Räderscheidt soon developed his own characteristic style of Magic Realism.

In 1925 he participated in a pioneering exhibition in Mannheim, called "New Objectivity". His depictions of individuals are symbols of isolation and objectification of modern man, and his still lifes exude a cold sobriety. From the late 1920s, however, he returned to the expressive imagery of his early period. In 1936 Räderscheidt fled to Paris, and in 1942 to Switzerland. During the war he developed his own revival of figurative modernism, and he did not return from his Swiss exile to Cologne until 1949. To make a living, he created numerous portraits and cityscapes, which are popular with collectors, but also continued to paint in his own reduced style which increasingly approached pure abstraction and met with more and more recognition.