Fritz Kunz
Sibylle
1903
Current location
Stadthaus, Gubelstrasse 22, 6301 Zug, 1. OG, Sicherheit und Verkehr
Fritz Kunz (Johann Friedrich Kunz) is born in Einsiedeln in 1868, where he completes an apprenticeship as a decorative painter and altar-maker in his father’s workshop. He attends the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich and Munich, and, following his father’s death in 1890, decides to become a painter. He finds a patron in Albert Kuhn, an art historian and priest from Einsiedeln, and pursues his studies at the Kunstakademie in Munich. Following this, he receives his first commissions for churches in Central Switzerland and repeatedly takes up work in Rome. Early on Kunz’s artistic practice is influenced by the Nazarene movement and Historicism which he is exposed to both in Einsiedeln and during his studies in Munich. Thus, the refined Munich Neo-Baroque painting style is evident in his first major commission for ceiling paintings in the Katholische Kirche Arth. A series of portraits and landscape paintings follow around the turn of the previous century, revealing influences from other stylistic movements.
From 1919 onwards, Fritz Kunz lives in Zug, where he dies in 1947. Alongside Melchior von Deschwanden and Ferdinand Gehr, he is regarded as the most important and prolific church painter in the Catholic and German-speaking part of Switzerland. His works can be admired, amongst other places, in the Klosterkirche Disentis, the Institutskirche Menzingen, the Pfarrkirche St Michael and the Museum Burg Zug, as well as in the Liebfrauenkirche in Zurich.
Genre
Material / Technique
Dimensions
Frame dimensions: 89.3 x 78.3 cm
Object-related numbers
KS 85