Mathias Goeritz

Werner Mathias Goeritz Brunner was a well-known Mexican painter and sculptor of German origin. After spending much of the 1940s in North Africa and Spain, Goeritz and his wife, photographer Marianne Gast, immigrated to Mexico in 1949.
Mathias Goeritz spent his childhood in Berlin. He began studying philosophy and the history of art at Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität, now known as the Humboldt University of Berlin, in 1934. Goeritz received a doctorate in art history from this institution in 1940. His doctoral dissertation on the nineteenth-century German painter Ferdinand von Rayski was published as Ferdinand Von Rayski und die Kunst des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. During the course of his studies, Goeritz also trained as an artist at the Kunstgewerbe- und Handwerkerschule in Berlin-Charlottenberg, where he studied drawing with German artists Max Kaus and Hans Orlowski. Upon completion of his doctorate, Goeritz worked at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, now the Alte Nationalgalerie, under the supervision of nineteenth-century art specialist Paul Ortwin Rave. In early 1941, in the midst of the Second World War, Goeritz left Germany, settling first in Tetuan, Morocco.