Francis Bott (1904-1998) - Abstrakt

Early work by Francis Bott

Signed and dated 1960
Size 46x37
Photos are part of the condition description.
Frame is a complimentary accessory

Francis Bott (born March 8, 1904 in Frankfurt am Main; died November 7, 1998 in Lugano, Ticino; actually Ernst Bott) was a German painter and a representative of the "Deuxième École de Paris," i.e., the French Informel. His artistic oeuvre shows two seemingly opposite focal points: surreal, fantastical figuration and tachist, geometric abstraction. His work consists of paintings, glass paintings, hand drawings, watercolors, gouaches, sculptures and objects; he has also worked as a stage designer.

Francis Bott came from bourgeois circumstances, yet an unsettled youth with his parents led him early to France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. From 1910 he attended various, mostly French-speaking schools and boarding schools in Switzerland and Belgium. In 1918 the family returned to Germany (Cologne), where Bott met Anton Räderscheidt and joined the circle around Heinrich Hoerle and Max Ernst. Attempts to work as a cook or in his father’s office failed.
Influenced by conversations with the Cologne Progressives and their anti-war sentiment, he developed an anarchist worldview. His urge for personal freedom led him to embark after his father’s death in 1921 on a nomadic life as a left-political, engaged vagabond, during which he traveled to Berlin and as a stowaway or ship’s cook to the USA and to Mexico.
In Berlin Bott met 1924 with Herwarth Walden and the circle around Sturm. In the same year he met his future wife Maria Gruschka ("Manja"), born in Poland, the daughter of a rabbi. Back in Berlin, Bott developed an interest in theater in 1925 through his contact with Bertolt Brecht.
In 1926 Bott and Manja went to Vienna. He earned his living thereafter as a street singer, occasional actor and postcard painter. His connection to Bertolt Brecht did not fade, and in 1928 Bott and Manja joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The 1930s Great Depression forced the couple to move from Vienna to Frankfurt am Main to fellow party members, but in 1932 they were back in Vienna. Bott was sentenced in absentia to fortress confinement in Frankfurt am Main for his political activities, arrested in Nuremberg in 1933, but managed to escape back to Vienna. Even there he was arrested again, and deportation to Germany seemed imminent, but he was taken to the Czech border, and thus Francis Bott and Manja reached Prague.
Here he came into contact with the Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. He convinced him that he was a painter, and Bott was thus prompted by him to devote himself to art from then on.
1936 Bott and Manja were forced to leave Czechoslovakia and, via Zagreb (Yugoslavia) and Northern Italy, reached Paris in 1937, where Bott personally met Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso. After brief participation in the Spanish Civil War in the Thälmann Battalion, Paris became the couple’s life center.
1938 Francis Bott co-founded the "Freier Deutscher Künstlerbund" (Free German Artists’ Association). With the outbreak of war on August 1, 1939, he was interned; he volunteered for the French army, but was initially placed in various camps. In 1940 Bott was assigned to a unit of the British Army and thus arrived in Toulouse, where Manja had already arrived. After the fighting ceased, Bott was included in a list of 87 German resistance fighters to be delivered to the Nazis under the terms of the armistice. He went into hiding and worked as a woodcutter in Couiza south of Carcassonne in the Corbières.
On October 14, 1940, Francis Bott married Maria Gruschka, a concession to the bourgeois world from which he originated. When German troops occupied “Vichy France” on November 11, 1942, Francis and Manja Bott moved to Aurillac in the Cantal department (central France), and Bott joined the resistance group Francs-tireurs et Partisans. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Bott and his wife returned there, and Bott earned his living through occasional work. In 1946 Bott and Manja took an studio on Montparnasse. France remained his adopted homeland. In 1961 Manja died from illnesses she had contracted during the persecution period.
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