Roelof Paul Citroen was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

-born Dutch artist, art educator and co-founder of the New Art Academy in Amsterdam. Among his best known works are the photo-montage Metropolis and the 1949 Dutch postage stamps.

Early life and works

Citroen was born and grew up in a middle-class family in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

. Both his parents were Dutch Jews. His father owned a fur shop. At an early age, Citroen began drawing, provoking strong support from his parents. He soon started to experiment with photography with Erwin Blumenfeld

Erwin Blumenfeld

Erwin Blumenfeld was a famous American photographer of German origin.In the 1930s, he published collages mocking Adolf Hitler. In 1936, he emigrated to Paris. With the German occupation, he was interned in a concentration camp in 1940 because he was Jewish...

 and studied art in Berlin.

In 1919 Citroen began studying at the Bauhaus

Bauhaus

', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...

, where he started taking lessons from Paul Klee

Paul Klee

Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...

 and Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...

 (part of Der Blaue Reiter

Der Blaue Reiter

Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and...

) and Johannes Itten

Johannes Itten

Johannes Itten was a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus school...

, who became one of his biggest influences. Around this time, he started Metropolis (1923), which became his best known piece. Citroen's Metropolis influenced Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang

Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...

 to make his classic film Metropolis

Metropolis (film)

Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film in the science-fiction genre directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of this context to explore the social crisis between workers and...

. Between 1929 and 1935, Citroen made many photograph

Photograph

A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...

s, clearly influenced by his work with Blumenfeld.

Later life

He soon started up the Nieuwe Kunstschool (New Art School) with Charles Roelofsz. It ran out of money and closed down in 1937. That year, Citroen became a scholar at the Royal Academy of Art

Royal Academy of Art (The Hague)

The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague is an art academy in the Netherlands. It is the oldest art academy in Europe. Known in Dutch as "Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, Den Haag" it was founded on 29 September 1682 when its predecessor, the Haagsche Teekenakademie was dissolved.- External...

 in The Hague

The Hague

The Hague is the capital city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. With a population of 500,000 inhabitants , it is the third largest city of the Netherlands, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam...

. Among his many students are Kees Bol

Kees Bol

Kees Bol was a Dutch painter and art educator. His work was exhibited in art galleries and museums throughout the Netherlands, as well as in Paris. In 1950 he was awarded the Thérèse van Duyl-Schwartze Prize and in 1982 he was made Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion.-Biography:Bol was...

, Madeleine Gans, Henk Hartog, and Jos Zeegers. He designed his monumental postage stamps in 1949. In 1960 he stopped teaching and started painting portraits as his main focus. He painted portraits of famous Dutch people, including a well-known portrait of Liesbeth List

Liesbeth List

Elisabeth Dorathea List, generally known as Liesbeth List is a Dutch singer, stage actress and television personality. She became popular during the 1960s and frequently collaborated with Ramses Shaffy...

 in 1979.

Paul Citroen died in 1983 in Wassenaar

Wassenaar

Wassenaar is a town in the western Netherlands, in the province of South Holland. A fairly affluent suburb of The Hague, Wassenaar lies 10 km north of that city on the N44 highway near the North Sea coast. It is part of the Haaglanden region...

.