Ballet, 1952
Alfred Ziethlow

Alfred Ziethlow was born on 18 June 1911 in Samotschin, in the district of Kolmar, Province of Posen, where he lived with his family until 1920. He received his artistic training at various institutions: After finishing school in Herne (Westphalia), he first attended the School of Applied Arts in Dortmund from 1930 to 1933, then the Folkwang School in Essen from 1933 to 1935, and finally the Bremen University of the Arts from 1935 to 1936, before going on to study for a year as a master student under Professor Heinrich Nauen at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.

Following his father’s death, the young artist moved to Münster in Westphalia with his mother and brother. Ziethlow earned his living working as a freelance artist and commercial artist. After the outbreak of war, he was conscripted as a soldier and stationed in Russia from 1941 to 1943. However, this posting was interrupted in 1942 due to illness, and Ziethlow lived for a time in Munich, where he took up residence in a studio on Sendlinger Straße. During the major bombing raid on the city, all the artist’s works stored there were destroyed by fire. After returning to his birthplace, Samotschin, he eventually fled from there to Horn/Lippe in 1944.

Between 1945 and 1950, he worked as a freelance painter and ran his own advertising studio, playing an extremely active role in the local art scene. He was a member of the ‘Lippischer Künstlerbund’, the ‘Werbefachverband Westfalen’ and the ‘Landesberufsverband bildender Künstler Nordrhein-Westfalen’. In 1949, he was one of the founding members of the “Freie Gruppe” (Free Group), an association of artists who presented their works in group exhibitions. Artists such as Emil Schumacher, Karl Otto Götz and Thomas Grochowiak took part in these exhibitions. In 1950, Ziethlow moved back to Münster, where, in addition to his freelance artistic work, he worked as a specialist teacher of art and advertising at the Municipal Commercial Colleges. He lived and worked in Bad Salzuflen, Westphalia, until his death at the age of 92.

Ziethlow’s body of work as a freelance artist comprises numerous oil paintings and watercolours, as well as a number of graphic works, etchings, lithographs and serigraphs. The artist always set the highest standards for the quality of his materials, ensuring that the works have lost none of their colour vibrancy to this day.
 

His exceptionally thorough training is reflected throughout the artist’s body of work. Ziethlow clearly belongs to the category of ‘classicists’ and ‘traditionalists’. He felt little urge to join the frantic drive of the avant-garde and remained unaffected by the American movements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Although there are some abstract compositions, on the whole he remained committed to figurative art.

Alfred Ziethlow always painted out of passion, driven by a deep connection to art and art history, without ever questioning them. This outstanding painter and watercolourist drew inspiration from his numerous travels. On location, he created sketches and watercolours with a spontaneous yet confident brushstroke, rendered in minute detail and rarely reduced to a sketchy form. The artist’s great mastery is evident in the spontaneous, irreversible nature of watercolour painting. In this way, Ziethlow sought to capture landscape and architectural impressions, as well as moments of everyday human activity on streets and squares, in order to later translate these into oil on canvas in his studio. The result is a body of work that continues to captivate today through its diversity of motifs, its genuine artistic language of form and its high technical quality. Idyllic landscape paintings, colourful still lifes, psychologically sensitive portraits, the bustling lives of modern city dwellers, harbour scenes and street scenes — images of life that can only be understood as a whole. In both the lighter watercolours, painted wet-on-wet, and the bold, impasto-style oil paintings, the focus is on the colour composition. Colour fields placed side by side, colourfulness stripped of any referent, colour as a constructive element — ‘pure’ painting, so to speak — these are the characteristics that sum up Ziethlow’s compositionally complex works as a whole.