Featuring some 75 paintings and works on paper, “Fritz Ascher: Expressionist” is the first retrospective for the German Jewish artist who survived the Holocaust and continued working in the postwar years.

Tom L. Freudenheim reviews Fritz Ascher: Expressionist for the Wall Street Journal.

You have probably never heard of Fritz Ascher, a passionate and peculiar painter who, nearly 40 years after his death, is finally getting a smidgen of renown at New York’s Grey Art Gallery. Ascher belonged to a generation of German artists the Nazis hounded into hiding — or worse — leaving a chapter in the history of art truncated and brimming with might-have-beens.

Televised news segment about Fritz Ascher: Expressionist on Channel Thirteen's NYC-ARTS program.

Fritz Ascher: Expressionist is the first-ever retrospective of an overlooked but significant German artist. Characterized by the Nazis as “degenerate” (along with other artists who were banned and persecuted), Fritz Ascher (1893–1970) survived two world wars, and then remained in Berlin where he lived and worked. In addition to painting and drawing, he turned to writing poetry later in life. Organized by the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art, Inc., the exhibition comprises some 75 paintings and works on paper, ranging from early academic studies and figural compositions to the artist’s late colorful, mystical landscapes devoid of human presence.

Fritz Ascher: Expressionist is the first American solo retrospective to showcase this artist’s bold, colorful oeuvre, which features early academic studies and figural compositions as well as late mystical landscapes devoid of human presence. We hear our contributor Irene Javors who reviews this exhibition for Museum Edge.

The artist Fritz Ascher (1893–1970) suffered through a horrific period of time from 1933 through 1945 in which he was prohibited from producing art.  No one will leave the exhibit without thinking what if the artist had not been denied the freedom to work for twelve years - a period that  impacted profoundly the rest of his life.