Biography
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Biography

"As a painter he gained strong influence, because his oeuvre that had been strongly influenced by Matisse became a lesson to the colourism which had been neglected in Germany, and because he had elaborated his judgment of art with a rare deeper insight. He was a thinking artist, but he did not think conceptionally, but using his senses. What made his person and his words impressive was his learned skill to reduce art to the basics. Without having a teacher personality, everything he did and said was didactic. Even when he failed, his failure was still instructional and full of character.

He had learned the trade of a decorative painter at his father's business in the Palatinate, had been Stuck's pupil in Munich and had learned the key issue in Paris. His talent was discovered by Carl Voll in Munich. In Germany, he was not a common artist, because he thought strictly in terms of form and did not care about contents and view; but nevertheless he took the concept „form“ very seriously and included full life in it. His appearance had something insistent about it, due to the intensity of its expression. His head attracted attention everywhere, without knowing him one could say about Purrmann only this: this man can only think essentially. Nobody else was so lucky in browsing antique shops, he always found a rare or unknown valuable object. Of course he deserved the luck. Only like a few other people, he had perceived the whole art culture of that time and time before and could understand the artists' souls of all times."

(Karl Scheffler, "Die fetten und die mageren Jahre", Leipzig/ Munich 1946, p. 213 f.)

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