Adolf Hölzel’s Writings on Art Theory

Adolf Hölzel Archive - Pioneer of Abstraction

In 1997, with the aid of the KulturStiftung der Länder (The Cultural Foundation of the Federal States of Germany) and a private donor, the Staatsgalerie was able to purchase Adolf Hölzel’s writings on art theory from the artist’s granddaughter Doris Dieckmann.

Adolf Hölzel was a native of Austria who lived and worked in Stuttgart from 1905 until his death in 1934. For the development of modern art in Germany, he was of a significance similar to the Blaue Reiter circle around the much younger Wassily Kandinsky in Munich. A gifted theoretician and teacher as well as an artist in his own right, within the context of his professorship at the Art Academy of Stuttgart Hölzel attracted a large circle of artists who would later become quite influential themselves, among them Max Ackermann, Willi Baumeister, Johannes Itten, Ida Kerkovius, Otto Meyer-Amden and Oskar Schlemmer. Through his pupils Itten and Schlemmer, both of whom were later appointed to the Weimar Bauhaus, Hölzel’s trailblazing doctrine on pictorial representation and his colour theory found their way into the Bauhaus curriculum.