Helmut Kolle was a German painter whose pseudonym was Helmut vom Hügel. He was one of only a few German painters in the 1920s to prevail on the French art market.
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Born as the second son of the bacteriologist Wilhelm Kolle, Helmut Kolle received painting lessons as a child. From 1906 the family lived in Bern, from 1917 to 1918 in Frankfurt am Main. There he met the more than 20 years older homosexual Wilhelm Uhde, who also became his mentor, and lived with him until his death.

In 1918 Helmlut took short lessons in Frankfurt with Erna Pinner. From 1919 to 1922 he lived with Uhde at Lauenstein Castle in the Franconian Forest. From 1919 to 1920 he worked on the magazine published by his friend Die Freude. There he also began with oil painting and signed first with his pseudonym. In 1922 he was diagnosed with endocarditis; this year he and Uhde moved to Berlin. Already in 1924 he was able to organize his first solo exhibition in Dresden at the Kunstsalon Richter.

In 1924 he followed Uhde to France, where Uhde promoted the painting of his former cleaning lady Séraphine Louis. In Paris Kolle was able to sell almost all of his paintings at an exhibition in the Bing Gallery in 1926. From this point on he signed under his real name.

Through Uhde he met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Rousseau. Picasso discovered in his paintings "great vitality". In 1928 Uhde and he moved to Chantilly, where he, already seriously ill, discovered, among other things, the subject of the Mounted Algerian Sipahis.

In 1929 he exhibited in the Paris gallery Georges Bernheim and 1930 in the London Wertheim Gallery. In 1931 Kolle died in his place of residence. Uhde established him in 1932 in the Parisian gallery Bonjean a memorial exhibition.
Until the great retrospective in the Lenbachhaus 1994/1995, curated by Hartig Garnerus, Helmut Kolle has little fame in the German public, which might be due to his early death and the resulting small number of pictures, but also that only a few of his paintings were made in the Inventory of German museums are located.

The exhibition in the Lenbachhaus met with an international response and had 40,000 visitors, a breakthrough for a hitherto unknown artist. The catalog of the exhibition was the first basic published research work on Kolle. The text of his mentor Wilhelm Uhde The painter Helmut Kolle, the portrait of an early completed person (Zurich 1935) was reproduced in the catalog as well as Klaus Mann's text The Painter Helmut Kolle (1936).
In 1995, Deutsche Post honored Helmut Kolle with a special stamp. As a result of the exhibition in the Lenbachhaus, two permanent loans by Kolle (Great Male Nude with Crossed Arms [1925] and the Suicide [1930]) were shown. The suicide was transferred in 2003 to the museum from the Hartwig Garnerus collection. The State Gallery of Modern Art, Munich, as well as, as a result, the Pinakothek der Moderne, occasionally exchange permanent loans from the Garnerus Collection.

Kolles work has been shown in four exhibitions:

1952/1953 in the Kestnergesellschaft Hannover, the Hamburger Kunstverein and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt,

1970 Osthaus Museum Hagen

1994/95 in Munich Lenbachhaus

2010/2011 in the Museum Gunzenhauser in Chemnitz the Public presented. This exhibition in Chemnitz was titled "Helmut Kolle - A German in Paris" and showed 90 exhibits including numerous loans. As of May 2011, this exhibition (slightly different) was shown in the Ernst-Barlach-Haus in Hamburg (May 29 to September 25, 2011). [3]

2014: Forgotten Body: Helmut Kolle and Max Beckmann, Cabinet Exhibition at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. [4]
In France, his works hang in the Musée de Grenoble, the Musée d'Art in Senlis and the castle museum of Vitré.



Source:
Wikipedia, Jan. 2019

Helmut Kolle was the partner of the German art historian and writer Wilhelm Uhde (1874-1947), whose aesthetic views influenced him significantly. With the support of Uhde Kolle belonged to the circle of friends around Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso.

He succeeded as a young German painter in Paris to take the 1920 foot and there regularly exhibit and sell. His friend commented on his art: "He was a painter by nature. Paint was not exerting a profession, but the passionate expression of an instinct for him. There are few portraits of women, many portraits of men, many self-portraits. "

This work is among the few portraits of women at the factory and shows a seated lady with hat in lush, kurzarmigem, pink dress with small black dog on his lap in a for Kolle typical neutral hold space. When the sitter might be to Madame de Lompré itself.