Georg Schrimpf

Georg Schrimpf was born on 13 February 1889 in Munich, Germany. His formal education stopped at basic schooling; around 1902 to 1905 he completed a three-year apprenticeship as a pastry maker in Passau, a trade pushed on him by his stepfather. He had no academy training as a painter. Multiple biographical sources describe him as self-taught, learning by copying Old Masters, and his only recorded brush with formal art instruction was an eight-day stint at a painting school in Munich in 1913, which he did not complete.

He held his first gallery exhibition in 1916 at Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin and was associated with the Novembergruppe in the years that followed. In 1925 he participated in the exhibition Neue Sachlichkeit at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, the show that gave the New Objectivity movement its name and remains the clearest documented milestone of his career. He taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich from 1926 to 1933 and, from around 1927, at the Meisterschule für Dekorationskunst in Munich. Some sources, including Wikidata, attribute to him a residency stipend at the Villa Massimo in Rome around 1930, though this is not corroborated by the principal biographical references consulted for this profile and should be treated as unconfirmed.

In 1933 he was appointed professor at the Staatliche Hochschule für Kunsterziehung in Berlin. The National Socialist government later classified his work as "degenerate art," and he was dismissed from that post in 1937. He died on 19 April 1938 in Berlin, at age 49, of heart failure, according to Deutsche Biographie and other German biographical sources. He was buried at the Munich Waldfriedhof.

Schrimpf is consistently placed among the principal painters of New Objectivity, valued for cool, deliberate figuration of rural and domestic subjects, landscapes, and portraits of women and children, at a moment when much German painting was moving toward Expressionist intensity. Museum curatorial materials, including those at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, note that an early monograph on the artist, published in 1924, framed him as an important figure within a broader European turn toward a more mystical, exacting style of painting. His inclusion in the 1925 Mannheim exhibition that named the movement, and the later Nazi-era classification of his work as "degenerate," are the two events most consistently cited when critics and institutions describe his historical position.

Schrimpf's auction market is small and concentrated in German auction houses. The highest price documented in this dossier is EUR 287,500 for the painting Stillende Mutter, recorded in the Ketterer Kunst artist results index; the exact sale date for that result could not be confirmed from available sources and is left blank pending further verification. Ketterer Kunst also lists Mädchen mit Spiegel at EUR 225,000, and the Lempertz (Cologne) artist index lists Am Morgen at EUR 198,400 as its highest recorded Schrimpf result, with lower results including a second Am Morgen and a Stilleben. Other houses, including Van Ham and Bassenge, have sold landscapes and figure studies by him for lower prices. There is not enough public sales volume to describe a market trend with confidence; each result should be read individually.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Georg Schrimpf, so provenance and attribution should be checked against museum records and the artist indexes of established German auction houses rather than assumed from a single listing. His market is thin: the documented auction high of EUR 287,500 stands on limited comparable data, and no current gallery or estate representation could be confirmed, so buyers should expect to work primarily through the secondary market. Given his work was targeted under the Nazi "degenerate art" campaign, collectors should also give particular attention to wartime and postwar provenance gaps when evaluating any individual piece.