Johannes Berthold Biography
1Johannes Berthold was born on 27 July 1898 in Greiz and was a famous German painter, graphic designer and sculptor. After learning the work of a lithographer from 1913 to 1917 in Greiz, Berthold attended the preliminary course of Johannes Itten and was also a student of Lyonel Feininger at the Bauhaus in Weimar. The expressionist sculptures created by Berthold in that period such as “Magische Aura”, are considered among the most important artifacts in the Bauhaus Dessau collection. From 1925 to 1930, Berthold studied architecture.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Berthold mainly created figurative sculptures, preferably in wood or marble in which emerged a "search for a perfectly pure line and a compact interior closure of the figures aimed at spiritualization, whose face showed a slightly hinted smile ". After the Second World War, in 1951, he returned to his hometown of Greiz, where he collaborated with Elly-Viola Nahmmacher. He created large sculptural compositions, in which he translated the horror of war. In the mid-1960s, Berthold created woodcuts, watercolors, and oils on canvas, which stand markedly apart from his previous works. In his compositions with mathematically refined lines and surfaces, the dominance of local colors and lines is noticeable and specific, clearly recognizable symbols develop on them. All the elements of the image, down to the smallest details, are shaped in a tension of harmonious variations in a totality of new meanings.
Berthold's works can be found, among others, in the collection of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin. A complete catalog of the works was created by the previous director of the Gera Museum of Applied Art, Peter Jacobson (1947-2020).
