Early Life

Fritz Ascher was born into an educated, wealthy upper middle class Jewish family in Berlin. Ascher’s father left the Jewish community officially in 1899; Fritz and his two younger sisters were baptized in 1901. In 1909, the sixteen-year-old Ascher was recommended to the progressive Art Academy Königsberg by Max Liebermann, the influential president of the Berlin Secession and later head of the Prussian Academy of Arts.

Career Beginnings

Back in Berlin by 1913, Ascher created symbolic and narrative art with themes and motifs that stem from both Christian and Jewish cultures. His work shows expressionist sensitivities, with non-naturalistic figurations, dramatic color juxtapositions, depicting states of experience beyond the visual. His figures often have grotesque features and fierce expressions, his colors are saturated and a little acidic and his compositions are compressed.

During the Weimar Republic, a period that fostered an atmosphere of change, Berlin grappled with the legacy of the First World War. Ascher depicts wild scenes of violence and figures with their faces contorted in fear.

Twelve Years of Persecution

After Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich on January 30, 1933, Ascher felt persecuted immediately. He assumed that he had been denounced to the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) as politically and artistically suspect. He began to constantly change his place of residence and was forced to abandon painting and drawing altogether.

He had reserved a sea passage to Shanghai that was confirmed in July 1939 but his plans were thwarted by the Gestapo and the tax office. He was put under police surveillance for six months. Every second day he reported to the police, until the officer warned him of his imminent deportation.

From June 15, 1942 Ascher was hidden by family friend Martha Grassmann in the cellar of a partially bombed-out building in the Grunewald neighborhood in Berlin. In his hiding place, immobility and loneliness, hunger, fear of betrayal and discovery, torture and death never left him. Here, he composed poems about love and the divine, and tributes to his artistic role models. Other poems evoke nature as a place of refuge and a spiritual home.

Painting Again

After his liberation from his hideaway on May 8, 1945, Ascher, now aged 52, immediately began to paint and draw again. At first, he began by reworking or adding to existing pictures. It is significantly his alter ego, the sad Bajazzo (Clown) of 1924, that, early on, he overpaints, or rather, completes.

Artwork after 1945

Ascher then turned to nature painting in the broadest sense: landscapes, forest scenes, portraits of trees, flowers and wide landscapes, all inspired by hours of walking in the nearby Grunewald forest. He works with renewed immediacy and urgency, dramatically simplifying forms and medium. His thick, bright pigments suggest both vibrant, life-affirming joy and, in the rough-hewn nature of his brushstrokes, a dark, inner anguish transformed into light. Especially the trees, singly or in rows, in groups of two or three, become standing figures that confront us, each as unmistakable as each individual.

Recently a series of head studies in ink on paper has been discovered.

These portraits are frontal, confrontational, forthright forms that all-but fill the entire page, intimate and provocative, just like their surrogate forms in nature, the trees and flowers, which we can read as celebrations of the survival and continuity of nature even in the face of cataclysm.

Fritz Ascher died in 1970, only months after a large solo exhibition at the legendary Rudolf Springer gallery in Berlin.