After only a few months he left the Weimar Academy, where his teachers were Fritz Mackensen and Albin Egger-Lienz, and went on a study trip to the Netherlands with Werner Gilles.

With Otto Dix, Gert Heinrich Wollheim, and Adolf Uzarski, among others, he was one of the painters championed by the art dealer Johanna Ey.

Subsequently, 56 of his pictures were seized from museums, some of which were included in the infamous exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), mounted by the Nazis in Munich in 1937.

Following the war (from 1947 to 1958) he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, where Günter Grass,[1] Gotthard Graubner[2] and Günther Uecker[3] were among his students.

Pankok's pictures show humans, animals and landscapes, realistically and expressively, often depicting people at the edge of society.