The Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig pays tribute to the painter, graphic artist and sculptor Gerhard Kurt Müller, whose life and work are inextricably linked with the Leipzig School. He passed away on 16 October 2019; on 1 October this year, he would have turned 100.
Gerhard Kurt Müller was born on 1 October 1926 in Leipzig-Probstheida. His life was cast into the shadow of the Second World War from an early age: At the age of 17, he volunteered for the Luftwaffe, served as a paratrooper in Normandy and the Ardennes, and was taken prisoner by the French in March 1945. These experiences shaped his outlook on life and found their way into his artistic work throughout his life. After five and a half years, he returned to his hometown of Leipzig and, in the same year, applied to the Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Design. He studied at the HGB Leipzig under Prof. Elisabeth Voigt and Prof. Kurt Massloff. In 1954, he began teaching at our academy; from 1961, he took up a professorship as Head of the Department of Free Graphic Art, as well as Head of the Class for Free Graphic Art and Illustration, a post he held until 1968. In addition, Müller served as Rector of the HGB Leipzig from 1964 to 1966 and, in this capacity, organised the academy’s bicentenary celebrations. In 1968, he left academic service to work as a freelance painter and graphic artist in Leipzig.
As an artist, he revitalised the technique of wood engraving, which he had been using since 1954 to produce illustrations for works by Friedrich von Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Heinrich von Kleist, Nikolai Gogol, Honoré de Balzac and Bertolt Brecht. From the 1960s onwards, he developed monumental historical paintings, such as the ‘Hamburg Trilogy’, created in 1979 and 1980; he had been creating wood sculptures since 1973.
He thus belonged, alongside Bernhard Heisig, Werner Tübke and Wolfgang Mattheuer, to the first generation of artists who laid the foundations for the ‘Leipzig School’. Important paintings and sculptures are held in museums, such as the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden, the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, the Angermuseum in Erfurt, the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg – Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, as well as in private collections. In 2004, Gerhard Kurt Müller and Ilse Stein founded the foundation named after him, which houses a permanent exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints.
To mark his milestone birthday, the Leipzig Museum of Local History in the Old Town Hall is exhibiting Müller’s early works from the 1950s.
A comprehensive retrospective is being presented by the Saxon Regional Social Court in Chemnitz. Further information on the events, including the ceremony on 1 October 2026, can be found at www.gerhard-kurt-mueller.de.