Kurt Badt

He started his career as an assistant at the Kunsthalle Bremen, but most of his life he was an independent scholar teaching privately, as his family was wealthy and he did not need an academic job in order to earn a living.

His writings include studies on Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Eugène Delacroix, Nicolas Poussin, Jan Vermeer, John Constable, Paul Cézanne, Raphael, Vincent van Gogh, Paolo Veronese, Ernst Barlach and attacks on the methodology of the "second Vienna school" of art history dominated by Hans Sedlmayr.

He did not see the artistic process as a mere fabrication technique, but as a method making visible to our general understanding the essence of what is to be represented.

For instance, Geoffrey Grigson said, "Painting is a difficult subject to write about, and searching books on particular painters are as rare as unicorns... One of them, and how welcome, is Dr Kurt Badt's The Art of Cézanne.

[7] According to Robert Hobbs, "Badt's study is particularly helpful in articulating certain aspects of [Malcolm] Morley's overall program that has definite affinities with Cézanne's.

Badt defines artistic simplicity as 'the wisest ordering of means based on insight into the essentials, to which everything else must be subservient.'