Paul Citroen

Personal

Vocation

German-born Dutch artist, art educator and co-founder of the New Art Academy in Amsterdam. Among his best-known works are the 1923 photo-montage Metropolis and the 1949 Dutch postage stamps. As a painter, he was a Dadaist. As a visual artist in photography, he used the Bauhaus Style of physical portraits, many times with the subject peering intensely into the camera. In 1919 Citroen began studying at the Bauhaus, where he started taking lessons from Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (part of Der Blaue Reiter) and Johannes Itten, who became one of his biggest influences. Around this time, he started Metropolis, which became his best-known piece. Citroen's Metropolis influenced Fritz Lang to make his classic film Metropolis. Between 1929 and 1935, Citroen made many photographs, clearly influenced by his work with Erwin Blumenfeld. In 1937, Citroen became a scholar at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Among his many students are Kees Bol, Madeleine Gans, Henk Hartog, and Jos Zeegers. He designed his monumental postage stamps in 1949. In 1960 he stopped teaching and started painting portraits as his main focus. He painted portraits of famous Dutch people, including a well-known portrait of Liesbeth List in 1979. Paul Citroen died on 13 March 1983, aged 86, in Wassenaar. Link to Wikipedia biography