Bernhard Heisig

(b Breslau [now Wroclaw, Poland], 31 March 1925). German painter, printmaker and teacher. His father, Walter Heisig (b 1909), a painter and printmaker, inspired him towards painting. He attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Breslau (1941-2). After his military service, completed in 1945, he worked as a graphic artist in the office of information and propaganda in Wroclaw until 1947. Heisig studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Leipzig (1948-9) under Walter M?nze (1895-1978) and at the Akademie f?r Graphische K?nste in Leipzig (1949-51) under Max Schwimmer (d 1960). In his early years he was indebted to the 19th-century Realists such as Gustave Courbet, Il'ya Repin, Adolph Menzel and Wilhelm Leibl, but he increasingly looked to the art of 20th-century German painters, for example Lovis Corinth, Oskar Kokoschka and Max Beckmann. Early in his career Heisig showed his commitment to socially concerned painting that dealt with contemporary problems. The 19th-century hierarchical ranking of paintings was anchored in his consciousness: the figurative painting carrying a thematic message had greater merit than the portrait, the landscape and the still-life. Questions relating to the past, present and future of human development were always linked in Heisig's mind with the quest for truth. They were closely associated with a search to establish the relationship in the struggle for freedom between the desire for power on the one hand and tolerance on the other, between social aspiration and illusion, between intrepid courage and fear. He has looked for pictorial means of expressing these concerns in large-scale pictures. Where the message made it appropriate he often used the triptych as a form. He quoted historical subjects as parables.

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