From the Black Forest to the California Desert: The Life and Work of Fritz Faiss

Fritz Faiss was an artist born on March 6, 1905 in the small town of Furtwangen, located in southwestern Germany in the Black Forest.

As a young boy, he quickly became interested in art; he would often travel around the countryside with his bicycle and sketchpad, letting himself be inspired by the scenery of the region. Throughout his career, nature remained a prominent theme among his pieces.

Following his release for internment, Faiss was offered and accepted a position teaching at the Städelschule Frankfurt, a small and competitive art academy in the Hessian capital.

He lectured on encaustic painting, an artistic process in which dry colored pigment is mixed with heated beeswax and painted onto a heated canvas. The color then seeps into the heated material and is "burned in" with another layer of heat, until the surface is sealed off.

The encaustic technique is ancient, but Faiss' modernized technique used electricity to heat the palette and the canvas. Though the encaustic method of painting was well-known in Germany and France in the mid-20th century, it was almost unheard of in the United States.

His first exhibition after the war, in Pforzheim in 1947, sponsored by the American Government, later enabled him to secure a travel visa with which he emigrated to the United States.

Because his passport had been revoked by the Nazis, he needed documentation and references before being allowed to emigrate.