OTTO GREINER

Otto Greiner was born in 1869 in Germany. In Leipzig, Greiner studied lithography and etching and in Munich he attended the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst.

In 1891, Otto Greiner went to Rome where he was influenced by Max Klinger, a German symbolist painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer as well as Käthe Kollwitz, née Schmidt, a German painter, printmaker and sculpture maker.Greiner returned to Germany and worked in Munich and Leipzig between 1892 and 1898, when he returned to Rome, where he used Klinger's former studio, and lived until 1915, when he was forced to return to Germany because Italy sided with France and England in World War I.

Greiner made 112 paintings, the majority of them devoted to antique and fantastic subjects and portraiture. 75 of his drawings have sold at auction since 1987; a sanguine self-portrait reached a high of $34,000 at Sotheby's Munich in 1996. There is a study of his drawings in the Meister der Zeichnung (Masters of Drawings Series), by Hans W. Singer, Zeichnungen von Otto Greiner (Leipzig: Baumgärtner's Buchhandlung, 1912). A drawing very similar to ours, signed by Greiner and also dated "Sept 1896"is in the Kupferstich Kabinet in Dresden. See also Julius Vogel, Otto Greiner (Leipzig: Seemann, 1903) and Otto Greiner: Graphische Arbeiten in Lithographie, Stich und Radierung (Dresden, 1917).

"The nude was central to his interests: like Klinger he saw it a the epitome of beauty in nature and believed that it should be the basis for all stylistic formation."

Sepp Kern
Grove Dictionary of Art