Friedrich Schroeder-sonnenstern Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (1892 - 1982) Born in 1892 in East Prussia, he coped with difficulty until, at the age of twenty-six, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to a sanatorium. A year later he showed up in Berlin, where he soon found considerable fame as a "naturopath", quack doctor, magnetist and "road prophet". Read the full biography

Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (1892 - 1982) Born in 1892 in East Prussia, he coped with difficulty until, at the age of twenty-six, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to a sanatorium. A year later he showed up in Berlin, where he soon found considerable fame as a "naturopath", quack doctor, magnetist and "road prophet". This career path was interrupted by the Nazis' ban on occult practices, and after being confined in mental institutions and a penal camp, Schröder-Sonnenstern resurfaced in 1944, collecting firewood in the bombed-out German capital. Only towards the end of the fifties, in 1949, did he begin to draw, using colored pencils to create allegorical grotesques with a personal iconography of round breasts and equally round buttocks, snakes, horses, small smiling suns, angel wings, eyes that they float free, rainbows and spirals. Although his art was rarely shown, he was supported in surrealist and art brut circles; Jean Dubuffet and Hans Bellmer were among his admirers, and some drawings were included in Marcel Duchamp and André Breton's 1959 "Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme" in Paris.