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BORN IN ROMANSHORN, Switzerland, from where a car ferry crosses Lake Constance over to Friedrichshafen.
Son of Hans, a teacher and Margaretha Zäzilia Bilgeri, a trained tailor and amateur painter. He inherits a northerly orientation. He's exact, reserved, persevering, slow to make up his mind but method personified when once the decision is taken.
Spends his childhood in a neighbouring village. No other component of his artistic personality deserves more attention than does his early experience along the lake.
Shows a preference early on for drawing. Draws sheep and cows. He has private drawing lessons and attends art classes at the Polytechnic Institute of Athens in 1899.
He
is exposed to the architecture of farms and detached houses.
Becomes a server in the local Catholic Church.
He is taken into the workshop of a local carpenter and cabinet-maker. His master introduces a new style based on a new-found three-dimensionalism that is derived from classical art.
Restlessness
during the first half of his life he moves in anti-bourgeois circles,
infected by Marx's early romantic-revolutionary writings including the
Communist Manifesto of 1848 and the first volume of Das Kapital, published
in 1867; aristocratic socialists and nihilistic anarchists on the model
of Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin's theories and the culture of punk.
They hate the suffocating narrowness of the middle classes.
Trip to Moscow and Peking. Witnesses military oppression during the cold
war.
Lives
for three months in a monastery in the south of Germany. Decides that
he is agnostic but travels to Assisi to see the Basilica di San Francesco.
St Francis' life appears in the panels by Giotto as a kind of imitatio
Christi. Events in the saint's life are interwoven with events in the
life of Christ.
1489 (early anatomical drawings, e.g. skulls).
He is taught a love of curves and other forms in which his innate sense
of rhythm can most easily find expression.
Spends many days quietly drawing and contemplating nature, the only sounds
coming from the leaves and the birds.