Werner Gilles

Remarkable artist, studied at the Bauhaus under Oscar Schlemmer and Lyonel Feininger. His works are most influenced from his first trips to Italy (1921-24), where he discovered the landscape as motif, and in France (1927-28), here by the cubism, Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. He belongs to the so-called “verschollenen Generation” (Forgotten Generation), which describes a generation of young German artists born between 1890 and 1905. Artists who didn’t have the possibility of continuous working and neither to exhibit consistently, because their lifes and creation was influenced by the difficult circumstances of two World Wars. Mainly of the Nazi Regime, they became victims of the denunciation of ‘“Degenerate Art“. Their early work was often destroyed or torn apart and so they fall into oblivion. Until several newer publications and exhibitions, which reminded on their first successes, drawn a wide attention from museums and privat collectors to them. Recently many artists of this generation been revalued and continue to climb in value. They are also called „Expressive Realists“.