EDMUND KINZINGER (1888-1963). Young Girl, 1938. Oil on artistboard. 23 x 17 inches (58.4 x 43.2 cm). Signed and dated up...

Description

EDMUND KINZINGER (1888-1963)
Young Girl, 1938
Oil on artistboard
23 x 17 inches (58.4 x 43.2 cm)
Signed and dated upper left

Edmund Kinzinger was a successful and notable modernist artist in Europe. He was director of the Hans Hoffman Schule fur Buildende Kunst in Munich, and the Hans Hofmann Self-Study Course in California. Labeled as a "degenerate" artist in his own country by the Nazis, Kinzinger fled to the United States, eventually accepting a job as Chairman of the Art Department at Baylor University. During summers Kinzinger maintained a studio in Taxco, Mexico. He had a fascination for the native peoples of Mexico. From 1939 to 1942, Kinzinger attended summer sessions at the University of Iowa and his dissertation, based on a series of paintings on a Mexican theme, awarded him the first doctorate in fine arts conferred by the University of Iowa.

Kinzinger also painted a significant number of paintings with Negro subjects. He was a social liberal and his choice of Mexican peasant and American Negro subjects was his strong social statement that these people mattered. To an all white audience in the segregated South of the 1930s, painting's like this, from the chairman of Baylor's fine art department, would have been shocking and socially unacceptable. Portraits were supposed to be painted of the rich, the clergy, politicians, and otherwise "important" people. The painting of this young black girl was an antithesis to society's norms at the time, but Kinzinger had similarly been a victim of discrimination by the Nazis in Germany and his sympathy is clear.

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