Otto Nebel

Personal

Vocation

Notable

German-Swiss abstract expressionist painter and poet who co-founded the artist group Der Krater in 1923 together with Hilla von Rebay and Rudolf Bauer. Nebel spent World War I on the German Eastern and Western Fronts. In 1918, during his 14-month war imprisonment in Colsterdale, England, he wrote his expressionistic poem Zuginsfeld, a 6,000-verse work condemning the war. In 1919, he returned to Berlin and became friends with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Georg Muche, Kurt Schwitters, and their art. He joined the circle around Herwarth Walden and his wife Nell Walden. Nebel married Hildegard Heitmeyer, the assistant of Gertrud Grunow, in 1924. He met Hildegard at the Bauhaus in Weimar. They stayed in Weimar until 1925 where they painted, wrote poems and acted. In 1933, when the National Socialists disparaged his work as degenerate art, he left Germany for Switzerland, first in Muntelier, and later in Bern. Nebel had financial problems because he was not allowed to work in Switzerland. Thanks to the effort of Kandinsky, he could regularly sell some of his paintings to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation between 1936 and 1951. The German Federal Republic awarded Nebel the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1965. He died on 12 September 1973 in Bern, Switzerland, aged 80. Link to Wikipedia biography