WVG69, 1965

Rupprecht Geiger is an abstract painter and sculptor born in Munich, Germany in 1908. His paintings are of a high modernist style—mostly color fields of different geometric shapes using the variations of the color red. His father was a painter, so Geiger began painting at a very young age, accompanying his father on trips to Morocco and the Canary Islands. In the late-20s to mid-30s he studied and taught architecture at schools in Munich. Then, Geiger moved on to working at several architectural firms. Soon, he was drafted to fight on the Eastern Front of World War II in Poland in Russia. Geiger spent the later years of the war as an illustrator of the conflict in the Ukraine and in Greece. He started painting with an abstract style in 1948. In the years after World War II, Rupprecht Geiger went back to architecture. In the 1960s, however, he began as a professor of painting at the Staatlichen Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Rupprecht Geiger’s style features simple shapes like circles, ovals, and squares; and he often uses intense shades of sharply contrasting colors—most notably the color red. His work is displayed in many German museums. With his abstract style, Geiger is considered one of the most important modernist painters of the 20th century. He died in 2009. (Artist website)