Biography
Born in 1884 in Bernstadt, Silesia, Ludwig Meidner’s first artistic foray was as an apprentice to a stonemason. He also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Breslau, and at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he befriended Amedeo Modigliani. In 1912 he embarked on a series of landscape paintings, The Apocalyptic Landscapes, which showed Berlin in a state of catastrophe using an Expressionist style, anticipating the horrors of the First World War. After the war his work became concerned with religious themes, including a series of portraits of prophets. He was also a perpetual self-portraitist. Fearing the rising Nazis in Berlin, he moved to Cologne where he taught art at the Jewish School until 1939, when he fled to England. Unrecognized and impoverished, he returned to Germany in 1953 and exhibited in Recklinghausen and Berlin in 1963. He died in Darmstadt, in 1966, aged 82.
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