Kurt Löwengard was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1895, to parents of partial Jewish descent. A successful freelance artist and member of the Hamburg Secession, he was banned from exhibiting by the Nazis in 1935 and had several works confiscated in 1937 as examples of 'degenerate art'. Löwengard fled to London in 1939 with the intention of emigrating to the USA shortly after, but died from poor health in London in 1940.
Painter Kurt Löwengard was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1895. His father was the well-known Hamburg architect Alfred Löwengard and his mother, Jenny (née Kanitz), who came from Vienna, was of Jewish-Italian descent, although Kurt and his siblings were baptised. Between 1912 and 1914 Löwengard studied under Arthur Siebelist, a member of the Hamburg Artists' Club. His artistic career was interrupted by the First World War and from 1916–18 he served in the German army in both Russia and at the French front and was twice decorated. In 1919 he resumed his studies, joining the Bauhaus in Weimar. Afterwards, he travelled in southern Europe, particularly Spain, France and Italy, returning to Hamburg, where from 1922 onwards he earned his living as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator, producing vignettes, frontispieces, etchings, wood engravings and poster designs, as well as teaching. From 1923, he regularly participated in the exhibitions of the progressive 'Hamburg Secession', becoming one of its best-known members. In this period, he was among the artists photographed by German-Jewish photographer Ursula Wolff-Schneider, who later fled to the USA (where her photographs are held in the Milne Special Collections, University of New Hampshire). In May 1933, however, his exhibition of watercolours at the Hamburger Kunstverein (Hamburg Arts Society) was closed by order of the Nazi authorities, the group was disbanded, and from April 1935, he was forbidden from exhibiting altogether. Löwengard's work was included by the Nazi authorities in the so-called Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, mounted in Munich in 1937; after which two of his watercolours in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg Art Gallery) were confiscated.
Following the Kristallnacht pogrom on 9 November 1938, Löwengard found refuge with his university professor Bruno Snell, who hid him for several months until, eventually, he made his way to England in May 1939 (intending to settle afterwards in the USA). In London, he lived with Jewish relatives and friends for seven months and exhibited with the Freier Deutscher Kulturbund [Free German League of Culture], a politically inspired organisation, founded the same year in Hampstead, which offered cultural support to anti-Nazi German refugees in Britain throughout the war. Dogged by anxieties over money, his reduced circumstances (he found it almost impossible to sell any work and was forced to give up his plans to emigrate), his difficult experiences as a refugee weakened him both physically and psychologically. In the summer of 1940 he was admitted to a London hospital, where after being diagnosed with terminal bone marrow anaemia, he died, aged only 44, without having had an opportunity to re-establish his reputation in his new host country. Most of Löwengard's work is considered lost, although some of his woodcuts and posters are held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Kurt Löwengard]
Publications related to [Kurt Löwengard] in the Ben Uri Library