Karin van Leyden
Karin van Leyden, born Elisabeth Frieda Johanna Erna Kluth (Berlin-Charlottenburg, Germany 1906 – Lugano, Switzerland 1977), was a painter widely known during her life, in Europe as well as America. She married (in 1932) the Dutch painter Ernst van Leyden (Rotterdam, Netherlands 1892 - Versailles, France 1969) with whom she had a son, Ragnar.
Biography[edit]
Karin was one of three daughters of Walter Julius Kluth, who claimed to be a linear descendent of Johann Friedrich Böttger and Gertrud Johanna Bach.[1]
Between 1925 and 1927 she attended the ‘’Kölner Werkschule’’ (School of Fine Arts in Cologne) where she became a student of Richard Seewald (1889-1976) for painting and drawing, and of Johan Thorn Prikker (1868-1932) for mosaic and stained glass techniques. She met Ernst van Leyden in a village near Ascona and travelled with him to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Italy before before taking mural painting classes at the Florence Academy. Through Ernst van Leyden she met Piet Mondriaan, Theo van Doesburg, and Willem de Kooning, to whom he was close.[2]
Until 1932, with Ernst van Leyden, she divided her time between Loosdrecht, Netherlands and Paris where they moved in circles of writers and artists, such as Marc Chagall, Jules Pascin, Tsoguharu Foujita, Ossip Zadkine, Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Picabia, Christian Bérard and Man Ray, who photographed her for the cover of the magazine ‘’Paris Montparnasse’’.[3][4] (The original negative is in the collection of the Centre Georges-Pompidou).
After getting married in 1932, Karin and Ernst van Leyden moved to Cintra (Portugal), until 1936, after which they lived for a while in Capri (Italy) before subsequently moving to London.
Just before World War II they moved back to Loosdrecht, but soon after emigrated to the United States as a result of the outbreak of the war. They first lived in New York, and in 1941 travelled west, eventually ending up in Hollywood, where they became part of the artistic milieu that included Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, Henry Miller, Bertolt Brecht, Salvador Dalí , Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schönberg, Arthur Rubinstein, Charles Laughton, Charlie Chaplin, Max Ernst, Eric Mendelsohn and Frank Lloyd Wright, Karin gained notoriety, becoming a portraitist and painter of murals of the "All Hollywood" villas. She painted, with Ernst, a portrait of Charie Chaplin's fourth wife, Oona.[5] On several trips to Mexico the couple met Diego Rivera whose portrait she also painted. Her Mexican travels infused her figurative art with an influence of cubism.
Karin and Ernst continued to travel back and forth between the United States and Europe, until after the death of Ernst van Leyden in 1969, when she moved close to her younger sister Charlotte in Lugano, where she died in June 1977.
Notes and references[edit]
This article has been partially translated from the existing French Wikipedia article fr:Karin van Leyden; see its history for attribution.
- ↑ Karin & Ernst van Leyden, 1999, Arts et Animatio, Haarlem, Netherlands, ISBN 90-5349-305-0 Search this book on
.
- ↑ For ’’Ernst van Leyden, see the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, 1999, volume 8 page 620.
- ↑ Photo of Karin by Man Ray (Source: listal).
- ↑ Paris Montparnasse ', edition of November 15, 1929.
- ↑ Artist couple Ernst & Karin Van Leyden create a portrait of Oona, 1947 [1]
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