Richard Ziegler (not to mix up with his namesake Adolf)

An evening at the cabaret Scala - 1927

Richard Ziegler was born on May 3, 1891 in Pforzheim, near Calw, like other  artists of that time. He attended the secondary school and then went to Great Britain for a year. After he returned to Germany, he studied philology and received his doctorate in 1919. Though art had played no important role in his studies, he decided to become a painter. Ziegler produced book illustrations, woodcuts, and oil paintings, settling in Berlin as a professional artist in 1925.

Initially a student of philology, Ziegler was already working as a translator for a Swiss publisher when he took up art, at the age of 29. Without formal instruction, he became proficient in etching and other graphic mediums, and by 1925 he was in Berlin. There he joined ''Novembergruppe,'' which, founded by the Expressionists at the end of World War I, attracted the Berlin Dadaists and subsequently became part of the Weimar Bauhaus. The Novembergruppe, generally leftist in its politics, exerted some influence on the New Objectivity Movement, which included George Grosz. 

Grosz's effect on Ziegler is clear: bourgeois lounging at cafe tables abound in this exhibition; so do prostitutes and other declasse professionals. Still, no matter how satirical its intent, his art is without the fanaticism that was Grosz's stock-in-trade: the capitalists and clergy are not bloated enough; the proletariat is neither lumpen nor idealized; and the loose women are cuter than they are carnal.

(from New York Times, June 14th 1985)

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Ziegler left Germany. He lived on the island of Korcula in Croatia until 1937. He attempted to deal with the political events in Germany in three series of monotypes. He lived in England from 1937 until the end of the war and went to Spain in 1963, where he produced his late expressive-realistic work. In his last years, Richard Ziegler returned to his hometown of Pforzheim. He died there on February 23, 1992, at the age of 101. 

(Richard Ziegler had absolutely nothing to do with Adolf Ziegler, a nazi painter and one of the organizers of the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937).