Emil van Hauth

Portrait of Grit Hegesa, 1925

Emil van Hauth was born 1899 in the Rhineland, as Gustaf Emil Hoffmann. He studied art in Munich and was drafted for WWI. Around 1925 he moved to Berlin, where he married the dancer Grit Hegesa.
He was a part of the artistic and intellectual milieu of Weimar Berlin, where he often met other today legendary names of that era, like Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, George Grosz, Philipp Harth, Ernesto de Fiori and the actor Gustaf Gründgens. Among his colleagues and friends were also Karl Hofer, Emil Nolde, Leo von König. He began painting in a style between cubism and expressionism, and was later influenced by an artist from an earlier period : Paul Cézanne.
He was the last president of the Berliner Secession, dissolved by the Nazis in 1933. After that, he had to retire from his active artistic life for many years.
He died in 1974.

Van Hauth (right) with his wife Grit Hegesa, in the Berliner Secession ball of 1925