Joseph Kutter

Biography

In 1930 Kutter stopped showing his paintings in Luxembourg. Exhibitions in his home city brought him nothing, while in Paris and Belgium he was received well.

He was born on 12 December 1894 in Luxembourg City. His father, Paul Kutter, was a photographer, one of the city’s early ones. Joseph wanted to become an artist and first went to a trade school, then, from 1911 to 1914, studied at schools of decorative art in Strasbourg and Munich. In 1915 he spent two months working for a glass painter in Cologne. From 1917 to 1918 he studied at the Munich Academy, where he went, as the accounts have it, on the advice of Wilhelm Leibl; there he was introduced to a manner of painting going back to Leibl.

He stayed in Munich until 1924 and married in 1919. From that year he showed his work at the Secessionist exhibitions in Munich, and at that time Cézanne influenced him strongly; the German Expressionists were added later. Expressionist motifs in his landscapes and flower still lifes are noticeable from 1918: dense colours, heavy, swelling lines.

In 1924 Kutter returned to Luxembourg and received the Grand Duke Adolphe Prize. In the same year he took part in the salon of the Artistic Circle but found almost no response. At home his work, nudes especially, was criticised, and in Munich he went on exhibiting until 1932. From 1925 he became interested in Flemish Expressionism, which was flourishing in Belgium and France. The Belgian critic André de Ridder, an ardent supporter of Expressionism, encouraged him, and in 1926 Kutter showed paintings at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. The first favourable reviews in Belgium appeared the same year. Among the artists said to have influenced him are Maurice de Vlaminck, Constant Permeke and Gustave De Smet.

In 1927, together with Nico Klopp, Claus Cito, Auguste Trémont and others, he founded the Luxembourg Secession; the group’s first exhibition took place that year. The Salon d’Automne in Paris became a regular venue for him. In France and Belgium he was widely known, in Germany much less so. From 1933 he was classed in Germany among the “degenerate” artists, the label the Nazi authorities applied to modern art, and he stopped exhibiting there, but in Paris, Brussels and Antwerp his work continued to be shown.

The human figure was the centre of his attention. Objects in his paintings are often pushed into the foreground, as if photographed (the son of a photographer, I would note, may have absorbed this in childhood, but there are no documents about it). His portraits are painted with broad brushstrokes, and the figures have disproportionately large noses. He often showed people as sad, despairing clowns; the “Clowns” series is dated to 1936–1937. His other works include “The Man with the Cut Finger” (1930), “The Champion” (1932), a portrait of the Luxembourg racing cyclist Nicolas Frantz, and “The Wooden Horse” (1937). These, like much else, are in the National Museum of History and Art in Luxembourg.

In 1936–1937 Kutter painted two large pictures, “Luxembourg” and “Clervaux”, for Luxembourg’s pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris. In the first, the city is shown with its rising tiers of terraces, the cubic volumes of the houses and harsh defensive walls that stress the strength of the fortifications.

He died on 2 January 1941 in Luxembourg City.

Retrospectives were held in Luxembourg and Brussels (1946), Amsterdam (1948), Paris (1951 and 1986), Leverkusen (1953), Trier (1961), Berlin (1995) and again in Luxembourg (1994–1995 and 2007).