Lot 800 R

Max Ackermann, born in Berlin, later grew up in Illemenau in Thurinigia and at an early age became a student of Hanry van de Velde in Weimar. In 1911, after years of study in Dresden and Munich, he moved to the Art Academy in Stuttgart where, after the First World War, in 1919, artists such as Adolf Hölzel, Oskar Schlemmer and Paul Klee fought together against the rigidities of the academy. In the Stuttgart art building Schlemmer opened an exhibition staged by Herwarth Walden with works by the Sturm artists, Stuttgart saw exhibitions with French cubists, Italian futurists and the Blue Rider as well.
In 1921 Ackermann opened a “training workshop for new art”, the program was based on the teaching of Adolf Hözel and his own ideas about “abstract, objectless prototypes, the irrational, abstract picture as a further development of rational pictorial means, the synthesis of pictorial means and nature.” (Dieter Hoffmann, in: Max Ackermann zum 100. Geburtstag, Stuttgart 1987, p. 179)
In the following years Max Ackermann had numerous exhibitions, held speeches and founded a seminar for „absolute painting“, worked as a sport draftsman for a Stuttgart newspaper and traveled, among other places to Paris. In 1932, through friends, he became acquainted with his later wife, the violinist and gymnastic teacher Gertrud Ostermayer. A year later she opened a holiday home at which musical and artistic courses and sport training were included in the program, conducted by professionals such as a Montessori teacher and Max Ackermann himself. Their marriage lasted 21 years, they divorced in 1957, and it is from these years that the following small, representative selection of works, formerly collection of Gertrude Ackermann, derives, including both representational and non-objective works in various techniques.