Charles Crodel

Charles Crodel (September 16, 1894 – November 11, 1973) was a German painter and stained glass artist.

Life

Crodel was born in Marseille, he studied in 1914 with Richard Riemerschmid, one of the founders of the Deutscher Werkbund, at the Munich Kunstgewerbeschule and since 1915 at the University of Jena, while he became painter and lithographer. He was a member of the Berlin Secession and of the executive board of the Jena art-union and became a close friend of Gerhard Marcks. In 1923, the German National Gallery of Art at Berlin and later the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris bought first his woodcuts and lithographies. A mural in the University of Jena, another in the Weimar Schlossmuseum, bought by Wilhelm Köhler, and a third in Erfurt remain of that time.

From 1927 on, Crodel taught printing and monumental painting at the "Burg Giebichenstein", the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Halle until 1933 when he was dismissed, but he continued to teach in a private circle at the house of Paul Frankl. In these years, Crodels murals in Halle and the murals dedicated to Goethe in 1932 at Bad Lauchstädt were destroyed in summer 1933 and had been ejected from the gleichgeschaltet (Nazi sympathetic Arts organisation) group for creating Degenerate art. At this time many refugees brought Crodels paintings and prints, which now are found at Louisville, The North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Luther College, Decorah.

The following years Crodel found new fields of work. He designed glass decoration in Industry (together with Wilhelm Wagenfeld), and he explored pottery decoration together with Hedwig Bollhagen, while Elisabeth Crodel completed embroidery.