Fred Thieler valuation
German Informel painter of poured, dripped and layered fields, and an influential Berlin teacher.
Fred Thieler was born in Konigsberg in 1916 and began studying medicine there in 1937; after war service he was discharged in 1941 because his mother was Jewish, barred from continuing his studies, and later went into hiding.
What a work by Fred Thieler is worth
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Bio
Fred Thieler was born in Konigsberg in 1916 and began studying medicine there in 1937; after war service he was discharged in 1941 because his mother was Jewish, barred from continuing his studies, and later went into hiding. He turned to painting after the war, studied in Munich, spent time in Paris among the Informel painters, and became one of the central German exponents of that manner — large canvases built from poured, dripped, sprayed and layered paint, with the physical action of the pouring left plainly legible. He taught at the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin for twenty years and died in 1999.
A market principally in Germany, where he is a significant post-war figure with substantial museum representation. The large canvases of the 1950s to 1970s lead. Thieler poured and layered thinned paint on absorbent grounds, so surfaces are matt and unvarnished, staining is permanent, and any previous varnish is both visible and difficult to reverse. Works on paper in gouache and mixed media are numerous and form the accessible part of the output. Signature and date are usually on the reverse, and a foundation in his name supports the archive.
At a glance
- Born
- 17 March 1916, Königsberg
- Died
- 6 June 1999, Berlin
Munich, ZEN 49 and Hayter
In Munich during the war Thieler enrolled at Hein König's private painting school and then went underground, working with people around the White Rose and with the painter and resistance member Mac Zimmermann, and he brought his mother safely through the war. He studied painting at the Munich academy from 1946 to 1950.
He joined the group ZEN 49 in 1952, and from 1951 to 1953 lived in Paris, working with Stanley William Hayter and meeting Hartung, Soulages and Poliakoff. He was vice-president of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin from 1980 to 1983, and since 1992 the Berlinische Galerie has awarded the Fred Thieler Prize for painting, which he endowed, each year on his birthday.
Karl Caspar, Minneapolis and the Residenztheater ceiling
Thieler was the son of a school director, Richard Thieler. In February 1945 he also hid a prisoner who had escaped from the military prison in Nuremberg. After the war he joined Karl Caspar's class at the Munich academy, where he painted his first abstract pictures, and he showed as a guest in the first exhibition of ZEN 49, in Munich in 1950.
He joined the Neue Gruppe München in 1953 and the Deutscher Künstlerbund in 1954. His Berlin professorship ran from 1959 to 1981, and in 1972 and 1973 he was a visiting professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. From 1976 to 1983 he represented West Germany in the International Association of Art, which elected him vice-president in 1979, and in 1978 he joined the Neue Darmstädter Sezession and the Akademie der Künste. In 1985 he received the Lovis Corinth Prize and the Federal Cross of Merit, first class, and in 1989 he painted a ceiling in the Residenztheater in Munich.
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