Julius BISSIER

1893
born in Freiburg im Breisgau (Baden-Württemberg), Germany

– violin lessons as a child

1913
– high school diploma

– studied Art History at the University of Freiburg

1914
– begins to study art at the Academy of Art in Karlsruhe

– discontinued his studies due to being called up for military service (Freiburg Post Surveillance Office), where he met the painter Hans Adolf Bühler and the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

1919
the sinologist Ernst Grosse introduced Julius Bissier to Asian art

1920
solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Freiburg

1922
marriage with the weaver Lisbeth Bissier

second half of the 1920s
numerous solo and group exhibitions and national recognition

1928
– Painter’s Prize of the German Artists’ Association, Hanover

– Gold Medal Düsseldorf

1929
teaching position at the University of Freiburg, where he had his own studio

1934
– because almost all of his works burned in a fire at the university’s main building and his son also dies in the same year, Bissier withdraws from public life

– acquaintance and friendship with Oskar Schlemmer

1935 and 1937
travels to Italy, where he creates abstracted landscapes in ink

1937
his work is banned by the Nazis as “degenerate art”

1939
moves to Hagnau on Lake Constance, where he is hardly active artistically during the war. The family lives from the weaving of his wife Lisbeth Bissier. Julius Bissier did the correspondence and the bookkeeping.

1941
from now on collaboration with the ceramist Richard Bampi on some ceramics; Julius Bissier introduced Richard Bampi to the philosophy of Zen Buddhism

1956
design of a ceramic picture in collaboration with Richard Bampi for the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, also called “The Freiburg Ceramic Picture”.

1958
the art historian Werner Schmalenbach organizes his first major exhibition after the end of the war in Hanover; from then on Bissier received great international recognition.

1961
moves to Ascona, Ticino, Switzerland

– member of the Academy of Arts Berlin

– exhibitions in Brussels, Jerusalem, New York, Boston, Chicago

1965
died in Ascona, Switzerland