Werner Scholz was born in Berlin on 23 October 1898, the son of architect Ehrenfried
Scholz, a student of Martin Gropius. The experiences of the First World War and the
social misery of the big city characterise his early work. In 1920, after studying painting,
he left the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts and moved into his own studio. He became
interested in the ‘Brücke’ painters and Emil Nolde helped him to organise an exhibition at
the Märkisches Museum in Witten. His first solo exhibition took place in 1925 at
Ferdinand Ostertag's book and art shop in Berlin. Around 1927, he created socially
committed oil paintings with motifs from the urban milieu. This is followed by a series of
triptychs, the majority of which have been lost. In 1930, the Nationalgalerie Berlin and the
Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne acquired works by the artist. From 1933, public
exhibitions were made more difficult or prevented by the National Socialists, and in 1937
Scholz was banned from exhibiting. When his Berlin studio was destroyed by bombs in
1944, he moved to Alpbach in Tyrol. There he created pastel cycles, including
‘Apocalypse’, ‘Old Testament’ and several cycles on Greek mythology. After 1946, his
works were shown again in Germany. Scholz constantly pursued the artistic path he had
taken in the 1920s: his painterly language, rooted in German Expressionism, found a
serious and often melancholy undertone in a dark colouring. In 1954/55, he was
commissioned by Krupp to paint the ‘Steel Triptych’, which was followed by numerous
motifs from the industrial world of the Ruhr region. From 1957 onwards, he created large-
format landscape paintings as a result of frequent journeys through South Tyrol and
northern Italy. His last paintings - people, nudes and landscapes - were created in 1978 in
the studio of a former monastery in Rott, near Wasserburg am Inn. (Source: Wikipedia)