Edmund Daniel Kinzinger, Young Girl, 1938, 584 x 432mm, oil on board
Photo: Courtesy Heritage Auctions, U.S.A., Signature Texas Art Auction, December 2007 (#657), Lot #36351, https://fineart.ha.com/itm/paintings/edmund-kinzinger-1888-1963-young-girl-1938oil-on-artistboard23-x-17-inches-584-x-432-cm-signed-and/a/657-36351.s
Reproduced with the kind permission of Nancy Kinzinger
Edmund Daniel Kinzinger, Young Girl, Heritage Auctions, U.S.A., Signature Texas Art Auction, December 2007 (#657), Lot #36351
Edmund Kinzinger was a successful and notable modernist artist in Europe. He was director of the Hans Hoffman Schule für 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.
Edwards, Katie Robinson, Midcentury Modern Art in Texas, University of Texas Press, U.S.A., 2014, pp 41 and 306
Edmund Daniel Kinzinger was from Germany, a world away and a generation beyond most of the Dallas Nine. He trained at the Munich Art Academy and the Stuttgart Academy of Arts before spending four years as a German artillery officer during World War I. He cofounded a visually radical artist's group, the Üechte-Gruppe, with Willi Baumeister and Oskar Schlemmer, two significant avant-garde artists later included in the Nazis' notorious Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art") exhibition of 1937.49 By the time of that fateful and derisive Third Reich display, Kinzinger had immigrated to Texas, later becoming chair of Baylor University's Art Department in Waco, Texas.50 Kinzinger assimilated the southwestern feel into his art with quick efficiency, making one wonder whether he was reticent to return to his avant-garde works and their association with vitriolic political and ad hominem attacks in his native Germany. Kinzinger's Italian Shepherd and the Mexican or New Mexican figurative subjects he produced throughout the 1930s and 1940s bear little relationship to his works of the 1910s, such as the Die Brücke-style Expressionism one finds in Badende Am Strand (1911) or Cubist Figure with Green (1918). Although his personal style changed, Kinzinger imparted in his Baylor classes the same formal lessons he had taught at Hans Hofmann's Munich School of Art (1931-1932) before Hofmann was forced to shut it down.51 Eventually, North Texas became a pipeline for professors wanting to study during the summer in Provincetown at Hofmann's school or at others in that vital art colony, but Kinzinger was the only artist who had worked for the German master in his native country.52
49 For the Entartete Kunst, see Barron, Degenerate Art.
50 Edmund Kinzinger was in the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts exhibition of 1938 – "3 German Painters: Edmond [sic] Kinzinger, Carl Zerbe, and Josef Albers, February 1-28, 1938" – and had a solo show in June 1939, "Edmond [sic] Kinzinger: Pastels and Drawings." See the museum's exhibition history web page, accessed September 2011, http://dallasmuseumofart.org/Research/ExhibionHistory/index.htm.
51 Edmund Kinzinger filled in for Hans Hofmann in Germany and France in the summers of 1932 and 1933, when Hofmann was guest instructor at the Thurn School of Art in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Hofmann was expected to return to Germany, but his Munich school closed permanently in the fall of 1933. Thus began Hofmann's permanent residency in New York and Massachusetts.
52 Edmund Kinzinger (1888-1963) earned a degree at the University of lowa after arriving in the United States. He was allegedly shell-shocked during the war, a trauma that may have affected him for life. He chaired the Baylor University Art Department from 1935 to 1950. I have located one catalogue: Kagle and van Keuren, Edmund Kinzinger. In 2013, Baylor's Martin Museum of Art received a generous gift of Kinzinger's and his family's letters. [Note: this donation has not been able to be located and the Baylor University and Kinzinger family are unaware of such a gift, B. de Lange, 2024]