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 inclusion

Francis Bott (* March 8, 1904 in Frankfurt am Main; † November 7, 1998 in Lugano, Ticino; actually Ernst Bott) was a German painter and a representative of the “Second École de Paris,” i.e. the French “Informel.” His artistic work shows two seemingly opposing emphases: surreal, fantastical figuration and tachist, geometric abstraction. His oeuvre comprises paintings, stained glass, drawings by hand, watercolors, gouaches, sculptures, and objects; he has also worked as a stage designer.

Francis Bott came from bourgeois circumstances, yet from an early age his restless youth took him with his family 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 the Max Ernst circle. Attempts to work as a cook or in his father’s office failed.
Influenced by conversations with the Cologne Progressive artists and their anti-war sentiment, Bott developed an anarchist worldview. He felt a strong urge for individual freedom, which led him, after his father’s death in 1921, to adopt a wandering life as a left-wing politically engaged vagabond in the so-called Vagabond scene, during which he traveled to Berlin and to the USA and Mexico as a stowaway or ship’s cook.
In Berlin Bott met Herwarth Walden and the circle around Sturm in 1924. In the same year he encountered his future wife Maria Gruschka (“Manja”) in Dresden, a daughter of a rabbi born in Poland. Back in Berlin, Bott developed an interest in theater in 1925 through his contact with Bertolt Brecht.
In 1926 Bott and Manja moved to Vienna. He earned his living 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 party colleagues, but by 1932 they were back in Vienna. Bott was sentenced in absentia to fortress imprisonment in Frankfurt am Main for his political activities there, arrested in Nuremberg in 1933, but he managed to escape back to Vienna. Even there he was detained, and he was to be deported to Germany, but he was taken to the Czech border, allowing Francis Bott and Manja to reach Prague.
Here he came into contact with the Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. He was persuaded by Kokoschka that he was a painter, and Bott thereafter turned more and more to art.
In 1936 Bott and Manja had to leave Czechoslovakia and, via Zagreb (Yugoslavia) and northern Italy, reached Paris in 1937, where Bott personally met Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso. After a brief participation in the Spanish Civil War in the Thälmann Battalion, Paris became the couple’s life center.
In 1938 Francis Bott became a cofounder of the “Free German Artists Association.” At the outset of World War II on August 1, 1939 he was interned; he volunteered for the French Army but was initially sent to various camps. In 1940 Bott was assigned to a unit of the British Army and thus went to Toulouse, where Manja had already arrived. After the fighting ended, Bott was listed among 87 German resistance fighters who, under the terms of the armistice, were to be handed over to the Nazis. 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 stemmed. When on November 11, 1942 German troops occupied “Vichy France,” Francis and Manja Bott moved to Aurillac in the Cantal department (central France), and Bott joined the resistance group the Francs-tireurs et partisans. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Bott and his wife returned there, and Bott supported himself through occasional work. In 1946 Bott and Manja established a studio on Montparnasse. France remained his chosen homeland. In 1961 Manja died of illnesses she had contracted during the period of persecution.
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