Maxim Kopf (born Maximilian Kopf; 18 January 1892 – 6 July 1958) was an Austrian-American painter, graphic artist and sculptor. He worked in Prague and was a prominent figure of German cultural life inCzechoslovakia in theinterwar period.[1][2] He was initially strongly influenced byExpressionism and later primarily created works with biblical themes as well as city and landscape images. He is also called a cosmopolitan painter because he created his paintings inGermany, Czechoslovakia, France,Polynesia and the United States. He traveled extensively and visitedItaly,Spain,Switzerland,Dalmatia,Bessarabia andCrimea, among other places.[3]
Maxim Kopf was born on 18 January 1892 in Vienna as the second of four children of the Austrian civil servant Emil Kopf (1863–1911) and his wife Louisa, née Jagemann (died 1865). He grew up in a German-speaking family and probably also had Czech roots through his grandmother Maria Truhelková. Starting in 1911, he studied under August Brömse,Franz Thiele,Vlaho Bukovac, andKarl Krattner at theAcademy of Fine Arts, Prague. During the war he was an officer in theJoint Army of Austria-Hungary. After the end of the war he chose Czechoslovakian citizenship and stayed inPrague. He was a member of the Metznerbund and in 1919, withAugust Brömse, co-founder of the artist group Die Pilger, an association of German and German-speaking artists inBohemia. The group initially included other students of Brömse such as Josef Hegenbarth, Emil Helzel, Norbert Hochsieder, Julius Pfeiffer and Leo Sternhell. Mary Duras, Walther Klemm, Moriz Melzer and Emil Orlik later joined the group, which existed until 1925. In 1920 he received a prize from thePrague Academy for the pictureThe Pilgrim. Thanks to a scholarship, he was able to continue his studies at theDresden Academy of Fine Arts underOtto Gussmann (1869–1926) from 1921 to 1923.
He then stayed in Paris and Montrouge and then lived again in Prague, where his first marriage was to the sculptorMary Duras in 1927, with whom he had already spent time in New York in 1923. In Prague in 1927 he founded the Young Art group, which had its first exhibition in 1928 and from which the Prague Secession emerged in 1929. In the same year he also stayed in theGiant Mountains.[5] In 1932 he traveled to Italy and stayed inTorbole onLake Garda. In 1933–34 he worked on the large ceiling fresco of the former German House in Prague. His marriage to Duras ended in divorce in 1933.[6] In 1936 he married the actressLotte Stein in Prague, but this marriage also ended in divorce in the 1940s.
At the end of the summer of 1934 he undertook his second voyage viaSuez,Ceylon,Singapore,Sydney andNew Caledonia toTahiti, which resulted in the pictures of the second South Sea cycle. He returned to Prague in the spring of 1935 viaMartinique. In 1936 he spent a month visiting countries on the Black Sea, including the USSR,Bessarabia,Sevastopol andYalta in Crimea. In May 1938 he traveled to Tahiti for the third time; he returned to Prague in autumn 1938. After the fall of Czechoslovakia, he fled from Prague via Germany and Holland to Paris in March 1939, staying in Czechoslovakia's Maison de la Culture until September. He was then arrested and interned as an enemy alien for five months. He then went to French Morocco as a member of theFrench Foreign Legion, but was interned again after France capitulated. His next stop was Martinique, where he was also interned, so that he spent a total of over two years in camps. It was not until 1941 that he was able to emigrate to the United States and came to New York.[7] In 1942 he receivedAmerican citizenship. In the summer of 1942 he met the journalistDorothy Thompson (1893–1961), who he portrayed in her home on the Twin Farms farm inBarnard, Vermont. About a year later, Dorothy Thompson and Maxim Kopf were married in Barnard.[8] In 1944 he exhibited at the American British Art Center.[9] In the summer of 1945 he visited Prague for the last time with Dorothy Thompson and her son.[10] His last trip to Tahiti took place in April 1952.
Kopf died on July 6, 1958, in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He and Dorothy Thompson were buried in Barnard Cemetery.[11]
Kopf created anEx Libris (bookplate) for Dorothy Thompson . It shows a female figure walking over a devil figure, carrying a book in her raised hands.[35]
^Walter Schurian (Editor):Hilde Goldschmidt. Hartmann, Munich 1983, pp. 9–11.
^Marek Nekula, Walter Koschmal and Joachim Rogall (editors),Deutsche und Tschechen. Geschichte - Kultur - Politik, C. H. Beck 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-45954-2, p. 246 et seq.
^Archived(Date missing) at dreyblatt.de(Error: unknown archive URL)
^Philip Hamburger,The Talk of the Town. Mr. Kopf, in: The New Yorker, 25 November 1944, p. 17
^Dorothy Thompson to Wed Maxim Kopf, Czech, in June, in:St. Petersburg Times, 13 April 1943, p. 4
Anna Habánová: Mladí lvi v kleci - Umělecké skupiny německy hovořících výtvarníků z Čech, Moravy a Slezska v meziválečném období (Young lions in the cage - artist groups of German-speaking artists from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia in the interwar period). Arbor Vitae Řevnice, Liberec Regional Gallery, 2013,ISBN978-80-87707-00-5, pp. 438 pages.
Anna Habánová: Dějiny uměleckého spolku Metznerbund v Čechách 1920–1945 (history of the Metznerbund art association in Bohemia 1920–1945), Technical University of Liberec, 2017,ISBN978-80-7494-322-5, 368 pages.
M. Knedlik: Head, Maxim . In: General artist lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 81, de Gruyter, Berlin 2014,ISBN978-3-11-023186-1, p. 295 f.
