Will Küpper

After attending painting classes with the artist Max Ernst from 1907–13, the German draughtsman and painter Will Küpper studied painting under Robert Seuffert at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Cologne. A visit to the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912 had a lasting impression. Küpper’s work was first shown in a solo exhibition at the Leopold-Hoesch Museum in Düren even before World War I.

After the war, during which he was badly wounded, Küpper studied at the art academies in Düsseldorf and Munich. In 1924 he became Heinrich Nauen’s master pupil in Düsseldorf. He had a studio very close to Otto Dix and Jankel Adler and became a member of the ‘Rheinische Sezession’ and the ‘Rheingruppe.’ Küpper came to terms with what he experienced in the war in his Expressionist, socio-critical depictions of human suffering and misery from 1919 onwards.

It was at this time that Will Küpper came to Alfred Flechtheim’s attention. Flechtheim exhibited 14 paintings and 30 drawings by the artist in his gallery in Cologne in 1923. However Küpper declined Flechtheim’s offer to become one of the gallery’s artists.

In the mid 1920s Küpper adopted the simplified pictorial language of New Objectivity. In his still lifes of individual parts of the body, some of which are seemingly macabre, and in his other works, he turned to so-called Mystic or Magic Realism in the years that followed.

After the Nazis came to power Küpper faced animosity. His regime-critical paintings and other works were confiscated from museums in 1937. After World War II Küpper was involved in the renewed founding of the ‘Rheinische Sezession’. He later led a withdrawn life in Oberkassel.