Timeless Encounters. Fritz Krampe, a painters life in Africa, - Peter Strack

The artist Fritz Krampe, and more specifically Fritz Krampe the draughtsman and painter par excellence, does not conform to any of the recognised art styles of the 20th century. In his biography Timeless Encounters. Fritz Krampe, a painter’s life in Africa, Peter Strack introduces this extraordinary man.

2007 first edition with 183 pages new and unused. R60 postage in SA.

Fritz Krampe, born on December 12, 1913, at an early age was fascinated by animal behaviour as some of his forceful drawings of gorillas and elephants in the Berlin Zoo testify. He studied painting up to 1939. In between he revelled in a free and adventurous life amongst animals in their wild state. The Siberian polar regions offered ample opportunity for studies of bears, seals, whales, reindeer and birds. In World War II he saw service in North Africa with the German Afrika Korps. Taken prisoner-of-war, he was sent to Australia where he tamed and trained hawks. On his return to Germany he passed Ceylon. This made him long for India, the home of the wild elephant. In 1951 he emigrated to South Africa as an ordinary house painter. Soon afterwards he came to South West Africa where he decorated farm houses with colossal friezes. In a short time he became the painter of wild animals and native life. In Johannesburg in 1965 the STAR wrote of his exhibition, "big view, big painting, big painter, big subjects." As an individual he was a wonderful companion, at home everywhere, an accomplished pianist and a game sportsman. His trip to India, at last realised, proved fatal. A rogue elephant put an untimely end to this gifted artist near Ootacamund/Nilgiri on July 28, 1966. From the beginning "modern" art was characterised by a stylistic pluralism which virtually provoked artistic individuality. Fritz Krampe was a loner in every respect. His preference for the figurative and his almost exclusively monochrome palette were determining factors for his nonconformist approach at this difficult period of his life. His "retreat" to the African continent from 1951 to 1965 is undoubtedly understandable, considering the hardships in postwar Germany in 1947. It was also a contributory factor towards his nonconformism as an artist. is retreat to Africa alienated and at the same time liberated him from the artistic debates which took place in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. The wave of abstraction, which permeated the artistic styles of Europe at that time, passed him by like the evening breeze. It was his attitude towards his own work, liberated from all constraints, dogmas and philosophies of the avantgarde, which brought the quintessential artist in Krampe to the fore.