Christoph Voll
His father died shortly after his son's birth, and his mother decided to leave him and his sisters for extended periods in orphanages run by nuns.
[citation needed] According to Voll himself, he already began expressing himself artistically in the orphanages, where he would make drawings and even small sculptures of dried bread.
In 1920, he joined the Dresdner Sezessionsgruppe 1919, a creative society of intellectuals and artists intent on recasting world orders according to a utopian form of socialism.
[1] Voll's participation in countless exhibitions (including those of Gruppe 1919) led to greater recognition as a major German artist, and in 1924 he won the professorial chair in plastic arts at the newly founded Schule für Kunst und Handwerk in Saarbrücken (at the recommendation of Sterl from the Dresdner Kunstakademie).
This status fostered a number of intense political ideologies, including a segregationist group intent on disassociating Saarland from both France and Germany.
Consequently, we know that his social circle included the painter Oskar Trepte, who he knew from his years in Dresden, and the art critic Arthur Binz, whom he sculpted in 1925–26 (sold from the Hoh Collection to Germanisches Nationalmuseum in 2008[3]).
Also included in his social circle was the African-American painter William Johnson (artist), whom he and his wife Erna Krake met in Cagnes-sur Mer in 1928–29.
His demanding approach to apprenticeship caused dismay and bruised egos among those that in his opinion were not dedicated or talented enough, and some of them would harbor enough resentment to later become key figures to feeding the national-socialist denunciation of Voll.
[citation needed] In Karlsruhe, Voll engaged with his colleagues (Hubbuch, Schnarrenberger, and Scholz) to formulate and execute a new style, and the academy became a major center of Realism in Europe.
While Voll was declared ‘Kulturbolschewist’, was interrogated, and was the subject of major ideological critiques, he escaped the initial wave of persecution, and was allowed to retain his position and continue his work.
[citation needed] While Voll seems to have been painfully aware of the consequences of his beliefs and actions, in the end, both his art and his person were simply too expressive to be tolerated by the Nazi regime.
[citation needed]At Voll's death, his status had deteriorated into a formal prohibition against exhibition issued by the Ministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda in Berlin.
Northern Europe's cultural elites had through the past years witnessed the destruction of unwanted art and literature in Germany with great apprehension.
For the duration of the war, Voll's æuvre was stored in the cellars of Christiansborg (the Danish Parliament) in Copenhagen, and in 1948 a formal exhibit of the collection was set up in the same place.
The new director of the Kunsthalle, Dr Kurt Martin, was eager to redeem Voll in Germany's eyes, and several of the large stone sculptures were placed in public spaces such as the Botanical Garden.
This reactionary view of the art was nevertheless temporary, and between 1960 and 1964 a federally organized memorial exhibition of Voll toured German museums (Baden-Baden, Bremen, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Munich, Pforzheim and Saarbrücken).
