1936. Oil/fibre board, 52 x 40 cm, lo. ri. sign. Franz Kaiser, on the reverse on label titled and sign. again. - Literature: Cat. rais. G 83. - German painter and sculptor, one of the most original minds of German modernism. K. began his career in construction, but was already working as an architect before World War I. After his deployment to the front, he worked as an architect for Peter Behrens and others until 1917 and collaborated on several mansions in Berlin. After working as a lecturer in Königsberg, he became a freelance artist in 1920. A short bourgeois existence with wife and son was followed by an anarchic phase in which K. travelled through Germany with the 'inflation saint' Ludwig Christian Haeser. In 1929 K. founded an art school in Hamburg, working with found objects. He exhibited these under the title 'Harat a Unrat' ('Hoehold effects from rubbish'), which led to purchases for the Meum für Kunst und Gewerbe. Repression by the National Socialists, which began as early as 1933, forced K. to lead an unsteady and poor life. Since the 1950s, Helmut and Hannelore Schmidt weremitted to the artist. K. took inspiration from European and non-European art and created apletely independent oeuvre with inexhatible creativity and ever new artistic techniques. Lit.: Der Neue Rump; M. Bruhns: Kaiser ohne Thron, Ast.-Broschüre 2018.