BIOGRAPHY 1

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BIOGRAPHY

Gerard Wagner

Painter *April 5, 1906 Wiesbaden, Germany

†October 13, 1999 Dornach, Switzerland

Gerard Wagner was born in 1906 in Wiesbaden, Germany, the youngest of three brothers.  When he was two years old his father died, and so in 1912 his mother returned with the family to England, close to Manchester, where she had grown up.  Thus he spent his school years in England.

He showed artistic talent at a very young age.  In 1923, at 17, he went to the small but well-known artists’ colony in the fishing village of St. Ives, in Cornwall on the west coast of England, to study with the respected post-impressionist painter John Anthony Park ROI (1878-1962).  He continued his studies a year later at the Royal College of Art in London and finished in the summer of 1926.

He then set off for France, where he intended to paint, but on the way visited Dornach, a village near Basel in Switzerland, and quite spontaneously decided to remain there.  In Dornach he was surrounded by the artistic legacy of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) which interested him immensely; he was inspired by the unique architecture of the impressive second Goetheanum building, and by the many new artistic impulses he was able to experience.