After his military service, he studied at the Weimar Academy with Walther Klemm. A few years later, he joined the Bauhaus movement, becoming a student of Lyonel Feininger and friends with Oskar Schlemmer and Gerhard Marcks. After his studies, he made several trips to Italy where he was seduced by the beauty of the island of Ischia, which became one of his favorite subjects to paint. He later lived in Düsseldorf and Berlin as well as Paris. In the early years of his career, his painting style was inspired by the expressionists of Wasilij Kandinskij and Franz Marc’s Der Blaue Reiter movement. Later, in the late 1930s, he developed a more academic, classical style and then returned to more stylized painting in the post-war years.
