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Karl Hubbuch (1891-1979)
"Karl Hubbuch was born in Karlsruhe, where he was to remain for most of his life. His studies at the Karlsruhe Akademie (1908-12) and then to Emil Orlik's class at the school attached to the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum, were interrupted by the First World War, in which he served in the army. At the end of the War he fell seriously ill with malaria and spent two years recovering at his parents' home in Neuenberg. Only in 1920 did he resume his training with a year spent in Walter Coz's etching class in Karlsruhe. By 1921 he had developed his own unique mixture of phantasy and realism and found a patron who paid for two years spent in Berlin. In 1922 and again in 1924. Here his compositions adopted a less personal and more social and political note. In 1925 he was appointed to a teaching position at the Landeskunstschule in Karlsruhe, which he held until dismissed by the Nazis in 1933. He supported himself during the following years by piecework, painting clock faces and ceramics, until in 1947 he was again appointed to a teaching post. He retired in 1957.
Even in the 1920s Hubbuch was hardly a well-known artist, partly because he devoted himself to drawing and printmaking and made few paintings, and partly because of his strange and inscrutable compositions. In the Nazi years he was completely forgotten and was only 'rediscovered' in the late 1960s and 1970s. He made his first prints in 1919, and produced his best works between 1921 and 1924. After 1930 there is a gap of nearly twenty years in his printmaking: when he took up the medium again in 1949 he adopted a late Expressionist style which had nothing in common with his hard-edge Neue Sachlichkeit manner of the 1920s." (From The Print in Germany. By Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths)
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