[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/metzkes.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tHarald Metzkes, the so-called \u201cC\u00e9zannist of Prenzlauer Berg\u201d who made classically indebted and symbolically rich paintings following Germany\u2019s surrender in World War II, died last Thursday in Brandenburg at the age of 97. His death was confirmed to the German Press Agency by his son, the sculptor Robert Metzkes.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cMetzkes became particularly well-known in East Germany because he had no interest in socialist realism,\u201d wrote Monopol<\/em>, which asserted that he created his own \u201cworld theater\u201d in work that wriggled free of East German strictures. The magazine quoted Robert Metzkes saying, of his father, \u201cHe wasn\u2019t concerned with implementing cultural policy demands.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tMetzkes was born in 1929 in Saxony, Germany, and in 1949 started studying painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1959 he moved to East Berlin, where he established a distinctive painterly style that \u201ccombined poetic imagery, references to classical modernism, and deeply symbolic visual worlds,\u201d according to the Neue Nationalgalerie.<\/p>\n \n\tThat museum is currently showing Metzkes\u2019s Removal of the Six-Armed Goddess <\/em>(1956) in an exhibition titled \u201cExtreme Tension. Art between Politics and Society Collection of the Nationalgalerie 1945\u20132000.\u201d In an Instagram tribute to the artist posted on Tuesday, the institution wrote: \u201cPainted shortly after his studies in the GDR and influenced by the atmosphere of the first documenta, as well as artists such as Max Beckmann and Pablo Picasso, the work unfolds as a powerful scene between beauty, violence, fragility, and loss.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/harald-metzke-german-painter-dead-1234786357\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/metzkes.jpg?w=1024″] Harald Metzkes, the so-called \u201cC\u00e9zannist of Prenzlauer Berg\u201d who made classically indebted and symbolically rich paintings following Germany\u2019s surrender in World War II, died last Thursday in Brandenburg at the age of 97. His death was confirmed to the German Press Agency by his son, the sculptor Robert Metzkes. \u201cMetzkes became particularly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1946217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1946217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1946217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1946217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1946217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1946217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}