Hermann Gross, A Descendant of the German Expressionist Movement, Who Made his Home in the North of Scotland

This paper presents a brief biographical account of the life and work of Hermann Gross – a German Expressionist artist – who was born in 1904 in Lahr, Baden-Württemberg. The nature and extent of his professional training with a succession of distinguished teachers are outlined. With the outbreak of WW2, he was conscripted in January 1941 and joined a Luftwaffe propaganda unit. Attention is drawn to a number of sketches drawn by Gross, which were discovered long after the end of the war, and which appear to show a series of subversive messages. In the latter stages of WW2, Gross was transferred to the Russian front and was involved in the subsequent and calamitous retreat of the German army. This latter experience proved deeply traumatic for Gross and from which he did not fully recover for two decades. Partly in an attempt to address his impaired mental health he emigrated to the USA with his wife. Although he had two exhibitions of his work at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, where his work was highly commended by a number of leading American art critics, he never truly settled and returned to Germany to live a quiet and undemanding life. Then in 1966 he was invited by Dr Karl König, founder of the Camphill community in Scotland, to come to Aberdeen and to act as an artist-in-residence. For the next two decades, with his artistic drive and enthusiasm fully restored, Gross was actively engaged in a wide range of artistic work: none of which he chose to publicly exhibit beyond the Camphill community. He died in 1988 and is buried in Maryculter kirkyard, Aberdeenshire.