John von Wicht German-American, 1888-1970

Johannes (John) von Wicht (1888-1970) was born in Malente, in northern Germany. As a teenager, he apprenticed with the painter F.W. Adels and was mentored by the German artist Gerhard Bakenhaus before attending the Royal School of Fine and Applied Arts in Berlin. There, he studied lithography, mosaics, and stained glass and was influenced by the city's burgeoning avant-garde art scene. He then served in Germany's WWI effort and, being unable to find a job as a craftsman at the end of the war, emigrated to the US in 1923, settling in Brooklyn, New York. 

In New York, he found employment with printmakers and design houses, eventually becoming an independent mosaic contractor and accepting private commissions from the city's elite. During this time, he developed a signature painting style that combined geometric abstraction with vibrant color. In 1937, he created his "Force" series of watercolors, which featured colorful geometric shapes inspired by Wassily Kandinsky. Two years later, von Wicht debuted his first exhibition at Theodor Kohn Gallery in New York, followed by shows at The Artist Gallery and the Kleeman Gallery. In 1941, his works were included in a group exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, marking his entry into a privileged stratum of New York's art scene.

During World War II, von Wicht took a hiatus from his art career to serve as a local ferry captain, an experience that later led to the incorporation of maritime themes in his paintings. By 1950, he returned to painting full-time, evolving his work from colored geometric abstractions to more progressive forms. He also returned to drawing and was influenced by Far Eastern calligraphy, which led him to adopt a more vertical format. His new works received critical acclaim during his 1951 exhibition at the Pastel Gallery, and he subsequently undertook his first of twelve residencies at an artist colony in New Hampshire, where he experimented with works on Japanese rice paper.

He continued to exhibit in New York and participated in printmaking shows alongside other artists in the medium. In 1959, he debuted his first set of works overseas through a traveling exhibition organized by the Galerie Internationale d'Art Contemporaine in Paris, which also toured Brussels and Liège. He used his annual residencies in New Hampshire to create monumental, brightly colored works on canvas. Today, von Wicht's artwork is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the d'Artey Museum in New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.