Eduard Bargheer

(German, 1901–1979)

Eduard Bargheer was a German painter best known for his mosaic-like watercolors of Italian and North African cityscapes. Influenced by the works of Paul Klee, Bargheer used painterly shorthand and patchwork colors to describe light, form, and space. Born on December 25, 1901 in Hamburg, Germany, he was trained as a school teacher at the College of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg-Lerchenfeld, where he decided instead to pursue a career as an artist. In 1925, Bargheer traveled to Florence, where he was profoundly influenced by the culture and sites. He later became a member of the Hamburger Sezession, a group of artists and intellectuals that developed out of Expressionism and included the art historians Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky. Bargheer found refuge and inspiration on the Italian island of Ischia in 1935, where he lived and painted for the next several years. It was during this time that his paintings took on the abstraction and diffuse light for which he is now known. The artist died on July 1, 1979 in Hamburg, Germany. Today, his works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Hamburg Museum, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.