Otto Freundlich

Otto Freundlich was born in Stolp / Pomerania, Germany, in 1878. He trained as a merchant and worked in Hamburg in the lumber trade. In 1902 he briefly studied dentistry and was then accepted as a student of art history, but broke off his studies after three semesters. After that came study trips to Italy between 1904 and 1907. In 1907 he began training as a sculptor in Berlin. Freundlich lived in Paris from 1910 to 1914 and became acquainted with Pablo Picasso. In 1914 he returned to Germany, where he came into contact with Cologne’s Dada movement. At the same time, he published texts in Expressionist journals. He moved to Paris for good in 1925, and in 1931 joined the artists’ group Abstraction-Création. In 1937 the National Socialists pictured Freundlich’s sculpture The New Man on the title page of the Degenerate Art exhibition guide. After two internments and failed attempts to secure exit visas to the United States, Freundlich went into hiding with a farming family in Saint-Martin-de-Fenouillet, France, in 1942. A year later he was deported to the concentration camp Lublin-Majdanek and was murdered the day he arrived.