June 10, 2024 – The McMaster Museum of Art is pleased to announce that it has received a donation of 110 prints by German Expressionist artist Walter Gramatté (1897-1929) from the Winnipeg-based Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation.

The Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation formed in 1982, with the objective to promote the work of Walter Gramatté along with the music of his wife, Sonia Eckhardt-Gramatté, a pianist and one of Canada’s leading music composers.

Walter Gramatté was born in 1897 in Berlin and died in 1929 in Hamburg. Despite his short-lived artistic career, he was a prominent figure during the peak of the German Expressionist movement in the 1920s. Like many of his contemporaries, his work focused on individual and existential states of being. His personal experiences in the First World War and his poor health were also prevalent and became a defining feature of his work.

With the recent dissolution of the foundation, Gramatté’s work has been dispersed across North America and Europe, adding to collections in museums including Minneapolis Museum of Art (Minneapolis, MN), St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, MS), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, Germany) and others.

The 110 print donation to the M(M)A includes woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs dated from 1915 to 1927. The gift includes works from Gramatté’s series Der Mantel / The Coat, Der lebende Leichnam / The Living Corpse and Das Gesicht / The Face.

The donation builds upon the museum’s already substantial collection of German Expressionist prints, which includes work by notable artists such as Egon Schiele, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others. Many of these works including those by Walter Gramatté are available to view online via emuseum.

McMaster Museum of Art thanks the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation for this generous gift.

For more information, please contact:

Elyse Vickers
Communications Officer, McMaster Museum of Art
vickerse@mcmaster.ca