Paul Wunderlich

Paul Wunderlich – Studies with Wille Grimm, work for Emil Nolde and Oskar Kokoschka

Paul Wunderlich was born on 10 March 1927 in Eberswalde. His childhood and youth were overshadowed by the National Socialist takeover and the Second World War in which Wunderlich had to serve as anti-aircraft warfare helper and eventually wound up a prisoner of war. After the war, Wunderlich moved to Eutin to join his mother where he graduated from the traditional Johann Heinrich vos Grammar School, followed by studies in art in Hamburg with Willi Tietze in his Freie Graphik (free graphics) class and it was at the Hamburg Art Academy that he met Reinhard Drenkhahn and Horst Janssen, amongst others. In 1951 he completed his studied with Willem Grimm and worked for a time as a teacher of etching and lithography. Lucrative print contracts for Emil Nolde (etching Der König und seine Mannen, 1951) and Oskar Kokoschka (graphics suite Ann Eliza Reed, 1952) enabled Wunderlich to undertake a three month stay in Ibiza. He was awarded a bursary by the Cultural Circle of German Industry in 1955.

Breakthrough as fantasy provocateur 

Whilst Paul Wunderlich primarily worked a realist style in his early years, in the 1960s he developed that unmistakeable pictorial language for which he would become famous. He drew inspiration from various art movements, especially Art Nouveau and Art Deco whereby he took pleasure in destroying his originals and grotesquely fusing the dismembered limbs into nightmarish visions. In his lithographic series qui séxplique, the public prosecutors considered he had gone too far, and his entire work was confiscated due to their indecent depictions; they were finally returned in 1985 without comment. Conversely, the rather prudish USA proved itself less sensitive: The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the complete cycle as well as the no less notorious series 20. Juli 1944 in which Wunderlich had artistically processed the failed Hitler assassination, illustrating it with mutilated bodies dangling from gallows. After his temporary but successful stay in Paris, Paul Wunderlich succeeded Georg Gresko as professor at the Art University in Hamburg in 1963. Influenced by Salvador Dali, he began creating bronze sculptures. 

Controversial in Germany, celebrated in the world

Paul Wunderlich received prizes and awards for his art, even when the critics sometimes accused him of sacrificing artistic depth for commercialism – after all, the artist also did not shy away from designing mundane things such as furniture of jewellery. Wunderlich himself freely acknowledged to having crossed the line between art and decorative art – an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the art critic. France was of a different opinion and admitted Paul Wunderlich to the prestigious Académie des Beaux Arts as its only German. In 1971, he married the photographer Karin Székessy and together they realised several projects; an artistic collaboration which Fritz J. Raddatz, a close friend of Wunderlich, documented in his book Corresponenzen.

Paul Wunderlich died following a short, severe illness on 6 June 2010 in Saint-Pierre-de-Vassols in the Provence.