Julius Bissier (1893–1965) continued the German Romantic tradition during the early twentieth century, a time of great social upheaval. He sought adequate pictorial forms for contemporary ideas and visualized a metaphysical world view in his work. The artist passed through a variety of phases over the course of his almost fifty-year career, which he himself ordered into three chief categories: the early years, in which he made reference to medieval panel painting “in order to arrive at a present-day form of mysticism”; his move towards contemporary artistic trends in the late twenties; and his return to mysticism via the tradition of Far Eastern ink painting after about 1930.
This book traces Julius Bissier’s artistic development with many previously unpublished paintings, drawings, watercolors, temperas, India ink drawings, and prints. It is thus the first comprehensively devised retrospective to be published in the German-speaking world in which all of the artist’s creative periods are depicted together.
 
Exhibition schedule: Kunstmuseum Bochum, July 26–October 5, 2008 · Museum Liner, Appenzell, November 9, 2008–February 15, 2009 · Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano, March 14 –June 14, 2009