Leo Marchutz

Leo Marchutz (1903–1976) was a German painter, lithographer, and art educator.

Marchutz was born in Nuremberg, Germany on August 29, 1903.

He began painting at the age of thirteen and soon rejected the formal training of several instructors.

Instead, he embarked on an independent study of masterpieces in the museums of Nuremberg and Berlin, where he first encountered the work of Van Gogh and Cézanne.

Throughout the 1920s, he travelled to several cities in Germany and Italy, where he worked from outdoor motifs, from memory, and from his imagination.

At every opportunity, he continued his practice of looking carefully at masterpieces in museums.

Most of his paintings from this early period have been lost; only a photograph of the Reinhardt picture (the Ascension) remains.

He completed his first album of lithographs in 1924, based on Plato's Symposium.

In the same year, he held his first solo exhibition at the home of prominent collector Karl-Ernst Osthaus.

Beginning in 1924, Marchutz embarked on several trips to Venice, Florence, and Rome, where he drew from architectural motifs and studied paintings in museums.

By 1925, he had sold works to several other collectors, including the director Max Reinhardt.

Recognizing a kindred spirit in Cézanne, Marchutz took an initial trip to the artist's native Aix-en-Provence, France in the summer of 1928 and emigrated there permanently in 1931.

For the next three and a half decades, he worked and resided at the Chateau Noir, a Provençal farmhouse several kilometers east of town.

Upon his first arrival in Aix in 1928, Marchutz primarily painted landscapes.

Three years later, after permanently relocating, he spent much of his time executing drawings of the town's streets, while continuing to produce paintings of the surrounding countryside.

The outbreak of World War II soon forced him to abandon those efforts.

For most of the following six years, he took occasional breaks from his poultry-farming chores to execute drawings of human figures in pencil, usually inspired by his reading of passages from the New Testament.

From 1934 to 1944, he earned his living as a poultry farmer, raising chickens in specially-constructed sheds on the grounds of Chateau Noir.

Because he was a German national living in France, Marchutz was placed in an internment camp in Les Milles in September 1939.

Under an agreement to serve as a prestataire in the French army, he was released in February 1940 and called into service in May of the same year.

Having been demobilized at the beginning of October, he moved back into the Chateau Noir, where he would spend the rest of the war in hiding.

Due to the difficulties of enduring this period, he only produced small drawings on poor-quality paper.

After the war, however, Marchutz reapplied himself to drawing and painting, in addition to developing a unique method of producing lithographs which he would refine for the rest of his life.

In 1954, the architect Fernand Pouillon became a patron, and in 1957, designed and dedicated a studio to the artist.

The Institute for American Universities (IAU College) hired him in 1959 to teach studio art classes.

Marchutz also played a central role in organizing the first major Cézanne exhibition in Aix, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the artist's death, as well as a second exhibition held in 1961.

Marchutz worked there continually for the rest of his life, and upon its completion in 1968, moved into the adjacent apartment.

In 1972 the IAU moved their art program to Avignon and thus Leo Marchutz and his two assistants Sam Bjorklund and William Weyman founded the Leo Marchutz School of Painting and Drawing as an independent 1901 French association -- and in 1974 a U.S. 501(c)(3) organization -- in Aix-en-Provence to administer Leo’s teachings to study abroad students.

After Marchutz’s death in 1976, Leo Marchutz's family sold the artist’s studio to the IAU in 1984.

Marchutz died on January 4, 1976, in Aix.

His work can be found today in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Louvre in Paris, France, the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, France, and in numerous other museums and private collections around the world.

Even at an early age, Marchutz concerned himself with spiritual subject matter, and his first forays into painting and lithography already display several characteristics that would become prominent in his later work.

Writing about a painting he had purchased, Max Reinhardt noted that "the principal agreement of the picture resides in the happy simplification and the configuration of the figures between themselves."

Marcel Ruff, writing about another painting from this period, saw "nothing showy in the treatment, but a freshness, an unusual purity."

In 2019/2020 the IAU decided to revamp its offerings, and change the name of its art school.

The Board of the Leo Marchutz School of Painting and Drawing decided to leave the IAU partnership at that time and is once again an independent entity preserving the legacy and teachings of Leo Marchutz.

Its programs include museum study tours in the U.S. and France, short-term painting/drawing workshops for adults, and summer and semester programs for adults and high school students.

Parallel to his own artistic endeavor, Marchutz became a specialist in the works of Cézanne and maintained close relationships with major art historians and scholars, including John Rewald, Lionello Venturi, Fritz Novotny, and Adrien Chappuis.

Both Rewald and Chappuis consulted him in preparing their catalogues of Cézanne's oeuvre, and Marchutz co-authored and published several articles with Rewald, including a photographic study of Cézanne's motifs.

The Marchutz School then ran its program there until 2020, growing its offerings to include an MFA program based on the vision of Leo Marchutz.