Wilhelm Kreis

Wilhelm Kreis was an influential and prolific German architect and teacher active during the first half of the twentieth century. Spanning the Wilhelmina Era, Weimar Republic, Third Reich, and Federal Republic, Kreis’s career exemplifies German architectural practice under fluctuating national political conditions. Exhibiting a wide design range, spanning residential and public to commercial and industrial buildings, Kreis is primarily known for his public monuments and memorials. He maintained ties with the art world as a colleague, mentor, friend, and collector throughout his professional life.

Kreis received his education from several institutions including the Technische Hochschule in Braunschweig where he passed the state exam in 1897. While working for the architect Paul Wallot in Dresden, Kreis began participating in architectural competitions. In 1899 his design Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), which proposed a freestanding tower topped with a fire pit, won a competition for a monument to commemorate the recently deceased German Chancellor Otto van Bismarck. By 1914 Kreis had executed fifty-eight Bismarck monuments, forty-seven of them based on his winning design. During the same period, Kreis designed a bridge, private houses, and department stores. He also began to participate in national and international fairs and exhibitions as a designer of displays and pavilions, as well as an occasional exhibitor of his own architectural designs. For example, in August/September 1919, Galerie Alfred Flechtheim in Düsseldorf exhibited fifty of Kreis’s architectural renderings in a group show that included paintings by Max Hünten and Maurice de Vlaminck, and sculptures by Manolo.

In 1907 Kreis—who had been involved in the German Arts and Crafts movement as a member of the Dresdener Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst—co-founded the Deutscher Werkbund, an influential association of architects, designers, and industrialists. In parallel to his architectural practice, Kreis pursued a teaching career in Dresden, at the Kunstgewerbeschule, and then Düsseldorf, at the Kunstgewerbeschule, where he replaced the architect Peter Behrens as the school’s director. At these progressive arts and crafts schools, Kreis taught and supported such emerging avant-garde artists as Max Pechstein and Erich Heckel. In Düsseldorf, one of his protégés was the sculptor Arno Breker; the two cultivated a lasting friendship.

Kreis’s interest in art extended to collecting. He purchased Pablo Picasso’s The Tragedy (1903; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) at the famed 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, and loaned it the following year to the artist’s 1913 retrospective exhibition at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich; the work left his collection by 1927. His collection also included works by the French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne and by his students and school colleagues, among them Otto Dix, Oskar Kokoschka, and Max Pechstein. Kreis owned, for example, Kokoschka’s Man with Doll (ca. 1922; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin).

After World War I Kreis designed several notable commercial and public buildings, among them the high-rise office building Wilhelm Marx Haus (1922–24) and planetarium Rheinhalle (1925–26), both in Düsseldorf, and the Deutsches Hygiene Museum (1930–31) in Dresden, which included a mural by Dix. He also continued to teach upon returning to Dresden. From 1920 to 1926, Kreis taught at the Dresden Kunstakademie before heading the architectural department at the Dresden Staatlichen Kunstakademie. From 1928 to 1933, Kreis headed the Association of German Architects (ABD). In October 1933, the architect joined the Nazi Party and built a successful career in service of the regime. Within a few years, he was working on prestigious state commissions for Albert Speer, the chief architect and urban planner for the Nazi regime. Kreis leaned on his expertise in monumental commemorative architecture to design war cemeteries, memorials, and mausoleums. He held a number of offices, among them the Generalbaurat für die Gestaltung der deutschen Kriegerfriedhöfe (Building Officer General for German Military Cemeteries) and Reichskammer der bildenden Künste (President of Reich Chamber of the Visual Arts). Following the war, Kreis was implicated in the denazification process and classified as a Nazi follower. During the last years of his life, he participated in the post-World War II reconstruction of Germany.

What happened to Kreis’s art collection after 1933 is subject to various conjectures in the literature. In the architect’s own postwar testimonies, Kreis stated that the collection was confiscated or looted while on deposit at the Kunstakademie in Dresden. Other sources suggest that the architect voluntarily relinquished it through sale and/or exchange.