Horst de Marèes
Horst de Marées (1896–1988) was a German painter whose work explored bold forms and shapes, blending classical influences with a modern sensibility.
His expression is unique for his era, distinguished by an unusual individuality.
Today, Sabatier is proud to own a big share of his colourful oeuvre.
Born in Weimar into a family of painters, de Marées was the son of the landscape painter Lothar de Marées and the painter Claire de Marées, and a distant relation of the celebrated nineteenth century painter Hans von Marées. Wounded in the leg during the First World War, he used his disability pension to fund his art studies, first at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar under Walther Klemm, then from 1919 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under Hugo von Habermann. Through the 1920s he built a considerable reputation as a portrait painter, a success that allowed him to move to Florence in 1927. The years he spent there deepened his engagement with classical form and refined his palette toward the lyrical, modern style that would define his mature work.
De Marées returned to Germany in 1933 and settled on a farm in East Prussia, near Gerdauen. A friendship with the French writer Jean Giono, begun in 1939, drew him toward rural life and landscape as central subjects. Yet the political climate of the Third Reich also touched his career directly: in 1937, a mural he had painted for the Museum Folkwang in Essen was removed and destroyed as part of the Nazi campaign against art it labeled degenerate. Drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943 and discharged the following year for health reasons, de Marées faced further loss when the Soviet advance through East Prussia in 1945 destroyed large parts of the work he had produced on his farms. He and his family fled west, and he resumed painting from his parents’ home in Thuringia.
“From Florentine restraint to landscapes charged with expressionist colour, a painter who found his freedom in vivid, modern brushwork.”
In the Soviet occupation zone and later the German Democratic Republic, de Marées found a measure of official recognition, much as he had, ambivalently, under National Socialism, yet he continued to face restrictions on where and how his work could be shown. In 1960, when East German authorities denied him permission to travel abroad for medical treatment, he fled to West Germany. He settled in Osterbruch, on the North Sea coast of Lower Saxony, where he continued to paint for nearly three decades, keeping a summer residence in Verdun-en-Lauragais in southern France. He died in nearby Otterndorf in 1988, at the age of 91.
“Look closely, and one silhouette returns again and again: Verdun-en-Lauragais, the small town in southern France he called his second home, a quiet constant beneath every colour he ever painted.”
De Marées’ surviving body of work, drawn from several thousand paintings and drawings, is held today in museums including the Lindenau Museum in Altenburg, the Angermuseum in Erfurt, the museum in Meiningen, the Museum Höxter Corvey, and the Kranichhaus museum in Otterndorf, alongside private collections across Europe. His work has been shown publicly since 1949, when it featured in the Second German Art Exhibition in Dresden, followed by exhibitions at the Altes Museum in Berlin in 1979 and in Erfurt in 1985, as well as posthumous retrospectives in Höxter, Altenburg, Erfurt, and Otterndorf through the 1990s and 2000s.
For collectors, de Marées offers a body of work that bridges tradition and modernism.
He was an artist who navigated one of the twentieth century’s most turbulent chapters without surrendering his own artistic voice.
“A life carried from Weimar to the North Sea coast, through war, exile, and two conflicting Germanys, distilled into an oeuvre of portraits and landscapes that grew ever bolder in colour, ever more his own.”
