Book, Karl Hermann

Lawyer, painter, graphic artist

Born: 26.06.1901 in Marggrabova, East Prussia (today Olecko, Poland)

died: 11.08.1988 in Wiesbaden

Buch studied law and then worked as a court assessor in Königsberg and in the East Prussian city of Allenstein (Olsztyn). Due to the political situation under National Socialism, however, he did not want to become a judge, so he devoted himself entirely to painting.

From 1933, he attended courses at the Königsberg Academy of Art. His teachers were Fritz Burmann, Eduard Bischoff and Alfred Partikel. He initially earned his living as a lawyer. In 1937, he became Bischoff's master student and received a teaching assignment for painting technique.

In 1942, he was finally drafted as a lawyer to the military district administration in Königsberg, where he came into contact with the Goerdeler circle. Two years later, he was transferred to Stuttgart. After suffering life-threatening injuries in a streetcar accident there in 1946, he retired to Eisenharz (now the municipality of Argenbühl) in the Allgäu region.

In 1950/51, Buch studied at the Stuttgart Art Academy under Karl Rössing, after which he moved to Wiesbaden in 1952, where he founded the gruppe real with Franz Theodor Schütt, Bruno Reinbacher and Erika Kohlhöfer-Hammesfahr in 1963. Friends with the two painters Schütt and Reinbacher, who had also been expelled from the East, they positioned figurative painting as a contrasting program to concrete art.

Buch's focus was on people, as survivors of the world wars, as professionals or as people scarred by life. The nudes and widow paintings form a separate group of works. He enhanced his realistic painting by inserting glass eyes, artificial teeth, hair and collaged fragments of clothing. His portraits took on repulsive and grotesque traits. He prepared large figure paintings in plan squares with meticulous drawings.

From 1968 onwards, Buch traveled to his studio in Spain every year, and it was only there that he created landscape paintings. He worked sand into the canvas to reproduce the karst landscapes. In Spain, windswept bushes, gnarled trees, pine forests and eucalyptus groves inspired him to create a series of prints.