Carl Heidenreich

Carl Heidenreich (1901–1965) was a German American exile artist and an important contributor to the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York. 

Heidenreich studied art in the National Arts School in Munich, later becoming a student of Hans Hofmann at his private art school, considered the most progressive in Germany. In 1922, Heidenreich moved to Berlin, where he supported himself as a scene painter in the UFA studios in Babelsberg. In the mid-1920s, Heidenreich began exhibiting actively, including exhibitions at Berlin Secession and Berlin Academy of Arts. Around this time, Heidenreich became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Heidenreich was deemed a degenerate artist and his upcoming solo exhibition in Munich was abruptly canceled. He was imprisoned by the SS at Berlin’s Moabit prison, used as the detention center by the Gestapo.

After his release in 1934, Heidenreich escaped to France, leaving behind nearly 300 works, most of them destroyed and lost. During the Spanish Civil War, Heidenreich joined the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) to fight against Franco and fascism. He was incarcerated in 1938 and tortured in Barcelona’s Modelo prison. A number of paintings and works on paper, documenting this period of Heidenreich's life, survived in private collections. Among them are a series of prison sketches.

After the end of the Spanish Civil War, Heidenreich returned to Paris, where he stayed until the outbreak of World War II. In 1941 he fled to the United States via Marseille, Casablanca, and Martinique. An important group of watercolors records his impressions of the island’s Caribbean landscape while awaiting his U.S. visa.

Heidenreich settled in New York, where he was welcomed by the cultural and intellectual community of German and German Jewish refugees, including Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher. In 1949, Heidenreich became a U.S. citizen and had his first major exhibition at the Harry Salpeter Gallery. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Heidenreich exhibited regularly; his work was widely collected and he made significant contributions to Abstract Expressionism, both as a painter and watercolorist. His works are included in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1965, Heidenreich returned to Germany for the first time in 30 years to attend his exhibitions in Frankfurt and Berlin. Already suffering from a serious illness, he died in Frankfurt on September 6, 1965. Hannah Arendt wrote the introduction to the catalog of the artist’s 1971 memorial retrospective exhibition in New York. 

A significant number of artworks left behind in Heidenreich’s New York studio have been cared for by family, friends, and collectors, primarily Richard M. Buxbaum and Emanuel Wolf, who have maintained the artist’s legacy through continued exhibitions, publications, and the establishment of the Carl Heidenreich Foundation. In 2004, Heidenreich’s work was shown along with his teacher Hans Hofmann’s at a major exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. In the same year, the Goethe-Institut in New York presented a retrospective of Heidenreich’s New York work and published a catalog by Gabriele Saure with essays by Peter Selz and Alla Efimova. In 2023, the Carl Heidenreich Foundation published the book Carl/Karl: Three Takes on Heidenreich with new and historical essays by Hannah Arendt, Kathryn Barulich, Alla Efimova, Rachel Schreiber, Monica Smith, Christopher Squier, Jackie Valle, and Anne Wagner.