Hamburger Kunsthalle

From the Bauhaus to the Mediterranean
16 June – 22 September 2013

Born in Lüneburg in 1910, Jean Leppien studied under Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the late 1920s. After a short period in Berlin, he emigrated to Paris in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution. When the French capital was occupied he fled to the South of France, where in 1944 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison as a member of the French Resistance movement. All of Leppien's work up to 1945 was either lost or destroyed during this period. As a result of his experiences he never returned to Germany; from then on he lived and worked in Paris and on the Côte d'Azur. From 1946 onwards he devoted himself entirely to painting, creating a substantial body of work until his death in 1991. His art owed a great deal to the abstract style of his Bauhaus teachers, and in turn influenced the abstract paintings of the post-war École de Paris.
The exhibition in the Kuppelsaal presents around 40 paintings from every phase of the artist's career.