Leo Marchutz

Leo Marchutz
In his studio in Aix, 1974
Born	Leo Marchutz August 29, 1903 Nuremberg, Germany
Died	January 4, 1976 Aix-en-Provence
Nationality	German, French
Education	Self-taught
Known for	Drawing, Painting, Lithography
Notable work	L'Evangile Selon Saint Luc (1949)
Patron(s)	Fernand Pouillon

Leo Marchutz (1903–1976) was a German painter, lithographer, and art educator.

Marchutz was born in Nuremberg, Germany on August 29, 1903. He began painting at the age of thirteen and soon rejected the formal training of several instructors. Instead, he embarked on an independent study of masterpieces in the museums of Nuremberg and Berlin, where he first encountered the work of Van Gogh and Cézanne.

He completed his first album of lithographs in 1924, based on Plato's Symposium. In the same year, he held his first solo exhibition at the home of prominent collector Karl-Ernst Osthaus. By 1925, he had sold works to several other collectors, including the director Max Reinhardt.

Throughout the 1920s, he travelled to several cities in Germany and Italy, where he worked from outdoor motifs, from memory, and from his imagination. At every opportunity, he continued his practice of looking carefully at masterpieces in museums.

Most of his paintings from this early period have been lost; only a photograph of the Reinhardt picture (the Ascension) remains.

Recognizing a kindred spirit in Cézanne, Marchutz took an initial trip to the artist's native Aix-en-Provence, France in the summer of 1928 and emigrated there permanently in 1931. For the next three and a half decades, he worked and resided at the Chateau Noir, a Provençal farmhouse several kilometers east of town.

From 1934 to 1944, he earned his living as a poultry farmer, raising chickens in specially-constructed sheds on the grounds of Chateau Noir.

Because he was a German national living in France, Marchutz was placed in an internment camp in Les Milles in September 1939. Under an agreement to serve as a prestataire in the French army, he was released in February 1940 and called into service in May of the same year. Having been demobilized at the beginning of October, he moved back into the Chateau Noir, where he would spend the rest of the war in hiding. Due to the difficulties of enduring this period, he only produced small drawings on poor-quality paper. After the war, however, Marchutz reapplied himself to drawing and painting, in addition to developing a unique method of producing lithographs which he would refine for the rest of his life.