Fred Thieler
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Fred Thieler was born in Königsberg as the son of the school principal Richard Thieler and the housewife Lina, née Miserowitz. In 1937 he enrolled at the Albertina in Königsberg to study medicine, but was soon drafted for wartime service in Poland and France. Because his mother was Jewish, he was discharged from army service in 1941 and forbidden to continue his medical studies. Persecuted by the National Socialists, he enrolled in Hein König's private painting school in Munich. He then had to go underground and worked with the White Rose circle and the painter and resistance fighter Mac Zimmermann. He illegally brought his mother to Munich and got her through the war period in one piece. He also hid a prisoner who had escaped from the military prison in Nuremberg in February 1945.
After World War II, he attended Karl Caspar's class and studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1946 to 1950, where he painted his first abstract pictures. In May 1952 Thieler was officially accepted into the group ZEN 49, which he had been close to since its founding and participated as a guest in their first joint exhibition in Munich in 1950. From 1951 to 1953 he lived in Paris, where he worked with Stanley William Hayter. There he also met Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages and Serge Poliakoff, among others. In 1953 he became a member of the Neue Gruppe München, and in 1954 he was accepted into the Deutscher Künstlerbund. In 1958 his daughter G. L. Gabriel-Thieler was born. From 1959 to 1981 he held a professorship at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin. In 1972 and 1973 he held a visiting professorship at the College of Art and Design in Minneapolis. From 1976 to 1983 he represented the Federal Republic (International Society of Fine Arts (IGBK) as German National Committee) in the International Association of Art (IAA), where he was elected Vice President in 1979. In 1978 Thieler became a member of the New Darmstadt Secession and the Academy of Arts, of which he was vice president from 1980 to 1983. In 1989 he created a ceiling painting in the Residenztheater in Munich.