Adolf Richard Fleischmann

Adolf Fleischmann (1892-1968) was a German painter whose long, wandering artistic journey culminated in a distinctive body of geometric abstractions that place him among the important European precursors of Op Art and Minimalism. Born in Esslingen, Germany, he began his training at the Kunstakademie Stuttgart and continued his studies in Munich and Paris. His early work engaged with German Expressionism, and he would move through a series of stylistic and geographic transitions over the following decades, absorbing along the way the lessons of Constructivism, Cubism, and Concrete art.

Fleischmann's life was marked by the political upheavals of twentieth-century Europe. He was injured in the First World War, and during the Second World War he was interned as an enemy alien in France. In 1952 he emigrated to the United States, where he settled in New York and developed the mature geometric vocabulary for which he is now remembered. His most important New York years produced rigorous vertical and horizontal grid compositions in which finely calibrated bars of color are arranged into shimmering, optically active fields. The paintings anticipate the concerns of Op Art and share a family resemblance with the Concrete work of his younger European contemporaries.

Fleischmann became associated with the American Abstract Artists group and exhibited in New York during his years there. In 1965 he returned to Germany, and he died in Stuttgart in 1968. For many years his work was overlooked outside a small circle of specialists, but his reputation has grown steadily in recent decades, as curators have restored his importance within the transatlantic story of postwar geometric abstraction. His paintings are held in major German museums as well as in significant American public and private collections, where they remain vital documents of one of the more distinctive careers in postwar European abstraction.