A blind man assisted by another man (Fritz Wrampe). Drawing by Fritz Wrampe, 193-.

1930-1939

1 drawing : black ink with grey wash over pencil ; sheet 32 x 20 cm

Blinden

Michael Semff (ed.), Fritz Wrampe: Zeichnungen, Munich: Staatliche Graphische Sammlungen, 1993

Wellcome Collection 5119i

Fritz Wrampe (1893-1934) was a sculptor and draughtsman who was born and lived in Munich. His parents ran a haberdashery and textile business. He had no aptitude for school but received a professional art training at the art academy in Munich, where he also formed a relationship with a model, Anni Burghard. He became a figure sculptor, working in clay, stone and bronze. He also produced a large number of drawings. Some of them were ideas for sculptures, including pairs or groups of figures such as lovers or the blind man dependent on a dog or on a human helper. Others were produced as works in their own right, and these include studies of strollers in the Munich streets and sympathetic studies of animals observed in the Munich zoological gardens. Wrampe himself appears in many of them. His drawings can be authenticated by the material of their support: most of them were drawn on the backs of used sample cards discarded from his parents' textile business. He had two main drawing styles: one is characterized by a scratchy, nervous, etching-like manner, drawn with a fine pen and ink, while the other, drawn with the brush, uses bold, violent strokes to produce powerful silhouettes. Wrampe suffered from depression and from digestive problems thought to be of nervous or psychological origin. He never moved out of the family home. Many of his works express his generally pessimistic and despairing outlook. On 13th November 1934, Anni Burghard, jealous at Wrampe's relationship with another woman, invited him back to her house and murdered him with four blows to the back of the head with a blunt instrument. His works are represented in museums in Munich and Stuttgart, in the Wilhelm Lehmbrück-Museum, Duisberg, and in private collections in Bavaria. Outside Bavaria he is little-known, though the circumstances of his tragic death--the artist murdered by his model--make him a unique figure among the biographies of artists (information kindly supplied by the previous owner of the drawing)