The STAR Theatre has received a gift of 10 original watercolors that have not been seen in decades by renowned artist, Carl Heidenreich, from collector Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia J. Recendez.
Carl Heidenreich (1901-1965) was at the center of Germany’s avant-garde. He was a student in the first school of Modern Art opened by Hans Hofmann in Munich in 1915. Hofmann moved to New York in the early 1932 and in 1941 helped Heidenreich escape the Nazis just before the outbreak of WWII. Most of Heidenreich's early works, left behind in Germany, were destroyed during the war, but the artist returned to painting after establishing himself in New York.
Heidenreich's surviving works "tell a tale of a man who lost everything — family, possessions, and all of his art in the escalating progress of war — struggling to replace and recuperate his loss." Heidenreich's efforts to absorb and come to terms with the traumas in his life are evidenced in abstract compositions in which effects of space, illumination, and other phenomena combine to set up an internal dynamic flow (what he called "pictorial motion"), in which recognizable images and forms emerge, recede, and at times disappear completely, spiraling through layers of colors and marks. Today Heidentreich's work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. The UC Berkeley Art Museum, which was founded by Hans Hoffman, has several of Heidenreich’sworks in its permanent collections.
Emanuel L. Wolf "Manny" is an avid collector of Heidenreich’s paintings. Emanuel L. Wolf as head of Allied Artist Pictures was responsible for many major films including Cabaret ( 8 Oscars), Papillon, The Betsy, and The Man Who Would King.
