Kurt Weinhold

Kurt Weinhold, sometimes recorded under the fuller name Louis Kurt Weinhold, was born on 28 September 1896 in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He received no formal academy training and was instead taught privately by his father, the painter Carl Weinhold. He was encouraged by the painter Carl von Marr to continue at the Munich Academy but chose to remain self-taught.

He took part in the 6th exhibition of the Stuttgart Secession in 1929 and exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1930. In 1922 he married and settled in Calw, in what is now Baden-Württemberg, where he lived for the rest of his life. A portrait of his daughter Cora was later held by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. In 1934 he received the Rompreis (Rome Prize) of the Prussian Academy of Arts, followed by a study residency at the Deutsche Akademie, Villa Massimo, in Rome and in Florence from 1935 to 1936. In 1937 he took part in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Munich, the state-sponsored annual exhibition of the Nazi era, held at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst; the same year, according to the Baden-Württemberg state archive, he was also classified as a "degenerate artist" (entarteter Künstler), though without a formal ban on painting.

After the war he exhibited with the group Rote Reiter and with the Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg into the early 1960s, continuing to work chiefly as a portrait painter. Kurt Weinhold died in Calw on 2 September 1965, at age 68.

Weinhold is consistently classified in German biographical and museum sources as a painter of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the same current associated with Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Rudolf Schlichter, alongside whom his work was shown in a 2019 Calw exhibition. Museum texts, including the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart's own collection notes, describe his work as shaped by that movement's cool, precise figuration. Regional institutions in Baden-Württemberg, notably the Hermann-Hesse-Museum in Calw and the Städtische Galerie Böblingen, have continued to mount exhibitions built around his portraits, most recently a portrait of his daughter Cora acquired for the state of Baden-Württemberg's collection. No verbatim assessment from a named critic in a major international outlet could be confirmed in current sources, so none is quoted here.

Weinhold's auction market is small and concentrated among a handful of international and German specialist houses. The highest documented price is GBP 121,250, paid for the oil painting Mann mit Radio (Homo Sapiens) at Christie's London on 5 February 2009. Two further results at Ketterer Kunst in Munich follow: Meine Frau mit Grammophon for EUR 106,250 on 18 July 2020, and Selbstbildnis II (mit Jacke) for EUR 58,560 on 6 December 2013. Other traceable results are far lower, including a 1957 forest landscape that sold for EUR 300 at a Düsseldorf auction house and further works recorded around EUR 500. No pattern of additional high-value or international day-sale results has been documented, and no gallery currently lists itself as representing the artist or his estate.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Kurt Weinhold, and no gallery or foundation currently represents his estate; authentication relies on provenance research and on auction house records, chiefly Christie's and Ketterer Kunst. His market is thin, with a small number of verifiable results ranging from roughly EUR 300 to a GBP 121,250 high, so any single sale should be read as a data point from a shallow pool rather than as evidence of a broader trend. Collectors should also expect his work to surface almost exclusively at German or, occasionally, London auction houses rather than at major international day sales, consistent with his standing as a well-documented but locally rooted figure of the New Objectivity.