Max Bruning Biography
Max Brüning (Delitzsch, 1887 - Lindau, 1968) was a 20th-century German artist, known for his mastery of diverse artistic styles and mediums.
He exhibited his first original paintings and prints in 1910, which featured stylistic elements of Art Nouveau and Symbolism. After the First World War, Bruning concentrated on expressionism and art deco, devoting himself above all to themes of physical desire.
He attended the Leipzig Academy of Art at fifteen, studying both painting and printing techniques. After his studies, he contributed drawings to the periodical “ex libris” in 1910 and exhibited his art in Munich the same year. During World War I, Brüning was a commissioned war artist. After the war ended, he settled in Berlin, but later moved to the Tyrol mountains in Austria to escape Nazi expansion.
Brüning made many watercolours, reproduced as "bad" postcards and advertising images in the 1920s. However, his most serious artistic talent was devoted to the creation of original etchings and dry etchings, some of which were finished with extra layers of hand-applied colors.
During the Second World War, his engravings suffered serious damage due to the Allied bombings of Berlin. After the end of the war in 1945, Brüning, a German citizen, had to leave Austria and settled in Lindau the following year to open a studio. Most of his art from this period consists of landscape paintings and watercolors.
