John Anthony Thwaites
John Anthony Thwaites ( born January 21, 1909 in Kensington, London County, † November 21, 1981 in Leienkaul ) was an English art critic and author, who worked in West Germany since 1946.
Life and work
John Anthony Thwaites studied history at the Universities of Lausanne and Cambridge. 1931 to 1949 he was in the British Foreign Service. Until 1943 he worked as a British vice-consul in Hamburg, New York, Chicago, Katowice, León (Mexico) and Panama. In 1946 he was transferred from London to the British Consulate in Munich.
As an art critic Thwaites worked since 1933. He began to collect that are now counted among the masters of classical modern works by artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Henry Moore. This activity took in 1939 with the German invasion of Poland and the hasty evacuation of the British diplomats there a premature end when he had to leave his entire collection in his private apartment in Katowice.
In 1949 he resigned from the diplomatic service, and devoted his life from then on the emergence of modern art in West Germany with the means of publicists and lecture speaker. Together with the painter Rupprecht Geiger, he initiated the artist group ZEN 49 As a correspondent of English and American magazines, he sought the German art after the war to gain the international status of their deserved his view. Working since 1955 in Dusseldorf Thwaites supported the artists of the group 53 and group ZERO. In the 70s he was a freelancer for the West German Radio and seminar leader at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.
Thwaites saw art as a mirror of the world of experience of each epoch. Good artists for him were those who interpreted this reality truly and original. Against others, which he held for copyists and imitators, he pulled contrast to journalistic field; as against Joseph Beuys, in which he saw no artist, but a demagogic seducer of youth, he eventually also compared with Adolf Hitler.
Thwaites was a strict moralist as a critic. In 1961, he wrote in the German Newspaper:
- I hate modern art. Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1960.
- Norbert cricket. Thames and Hudson, London 1964.
- The double standard. Adam Silk, Frankfurt am Main 1967.
- Hans Kaiser. Cologne 1979.