artist/ Leppien

France

Jean Leppien was born Kurt Johannes Leppien on 8 April 1910 in Lüneburg into a family of industrialists. From 1929 to 1930, he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau with Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.
He represented the geometric abstraction of post-war modernism. An artist in exile, Leppien drew on both his time at the Bauhaus in Dessau and his encounters with abstract art in Paris.
Jean Leppien’s work can be divided into different phases.
The paintings of the 1940s and 1950s show a pictorial surface structure characterised by lines and fields of colour. Through the amorphous, curved and straight lines and coloured elements, an expressive rhythm is generated by emotional impulses. In the next phase, the manner of painting changed, colour took on a material character and irregularly bordered surfaces dominated. Between 1967 and 1976, Leppien worked on the UFO series, showing circular discs with concentric rings on horizontal coloured bands. At the same time, from 1970 to 1976, Leppien produced works in which the cruciform dominated. At the end of the 1970s came the predellle paintings, which structured the pictorial space into a top and a bottom. Around 1980, the artist used textiles and a language of tachist forms for his collages of images. His later work is characterised by the extreme reduction of coloured surfaces to isolated accents.He became a Bauhaus expert after translating Kandinsky’s writings, while remaining in close contact with Nina Kandinsky. In 1953, he obtained French nationality and was appointed Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture in 1987. Jean Leppien died in Paris on 19 October 1991 and is buried in Roquebrune-Village.