Adolf Fleischmann: Ein abstrakter amerikanischer Maler?

The design is the determining factor

In 1955, the artist and author Will Barnet quite naturally presented Adolf Fleischmann as an "American painter" in his text "Aspects of American Abstract Painting"; and in 1966, Fleischmann appeared in Paul Cummings' "Dictionary of Contemporary American Artists" among the leading artists in the USA. What resonates in these statements from the milieu of New York painting in the 1950s is an assessment of his significance that has not yet been taken into account in all the literature on Fleischmann: the painter, who was born in Esslingen in Swabia in 1892 and only settled in the USA in 1952 at the age of 60, quickly became an original figure in the context of abstract painting inspired by Mondrian in the "Mecca" of American art on the East Coast. Adolf Fleischmann, represented in the Daimler Art Collection with a significant group of works, is one of the outstanding abstract painters in Germany and the USA after 1945. The Daimler Art Collection Berlin is now showing the first retrospective of the artist's work with around sixty works from three decades, including the main work created in New York in the years 1952-65, supplemented by representative paintings from the 1940s that were still created in Europe. The publication accompanying the exhibition is the first to provide a well-founded categorisation of Fleischmann's work in the context of American abstract painting of the time. It also publishes the early texts on the reception of Fleischmann's American work from the 1950s and 60s. This is also the first English-language publication on Fleischmann's painting, meaning that his work now also promises to be of interest to the public and museum institutions in the USA. The late work of Adolf Fleischmann - both in its astonishing coherence and in its painterly diversity and richness of facets - is thus waiting to be discovered and appreciated in the context of German and American art of the 20th century.

Exhibition:
Daimler Contemporary Berlin, 30/4 - 6/11/2016