1889 Munich – 1938 Berlin

Georg Schrimpf was self-taught and at the same time one of the most important painters of the New Objectivity.

After completing an apprenticeship at the urging of his father as a confectioner in Passau in 1905, he went on a journey through Germany, Belgium and France and earned his living as a waiter, coal shovel and baker. In 1913 he moved on to Switzerland and northern Italy, spending a few months in Ascona / Ticino on Monte Verità.

In 1915 Schrimpf moved to Berlin, where he initially worked in a chocolate factory, but also began to paint intensively. He soon found the attention of the art expert, gallery owner and publicist Herwarth Walden, who successfully exhibited Schrimpf’s first oil paintings (Sturm 1916).

With woodcuts, Schrimpf worked for the magazines “Die Aktion” and “Der Sturm”. Art historians and critics Franz Roh and Werner Haftmann were also among his early supporters.

In 1917 he married the painter and graphic artist Maria Uhden, and in the same year they moved to Munich. His wife died in August 1918 as a result of the birth of their son Markus.

Schrimpf exhibited regularly at the Munich New Art Gallery since 1918. As a member of the “Action Committee of Revolutionary Artists” he was actively involved in the Munich Council Republic. He became a member of the “November Group”, in whose exhibitions he took part in 1919, 1920, 1924 and 1929. In 1920 Schrimpf exhibited for the first time at the “Neue Sezession” in the Glaspalast in Munich and shortly thereafter became a member.

From 1926 to 1933, he taught at the Munich School of Applied Arts. In 1932, alongside Theo Champion, Adolf Dietrich, Hasso von Hugo, Alexander Kanoldt, Franz Lenk and Franz Radziwill, he was a founding member of the group “Die Sieben” (The Seven).

In 1933 he was appointed as an extraordinary professor at the State University for Art Education in Berlin-Schöneberg. His teaching career ended in 1937. The reasons given were that Schrimpf belonged to the Communist Party in 1919 and to Red Aid close to the KPD in 1925/26. As a full member of the German Association of Artists, Schrimpf still took part in the last DKB annual exhibition at the Hamburger Kunstverein.

Schrimpf was under increasing pressure under the Nazi regime. He was considered a “red” and therefore automatically “degenerate”. 33 works by Schrimpf were removed from German museums. At the same time, some Nazi leaders were among the collectors of Schrimpf paintings, such as the Reich Ministers Heß and Darré. The year before his death, he was defamed again in July 1937 in the Nazi exhibition “Degenerate Art”.