(b Schönbrunn bei Landshut, 17 Aug 1878; d 1971). Painter and printmaker. He was a pupil of Franz von Stuck at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich (1902–5). After travels in Spain, Italy and Tunisia, he taught in Munich at the Kunstgewerbeschule (1920–23). From 1928 to 1933 he was a professor at the Staatlichen Akademie für Graphik und Buchkunst in Leipzig and, after World War II, at the Akademie in Munich (1945–51). Geiger was never formally aligned to any specific 20th-century movement. During the years of the Weimar Republic (1919–33) he rejected the programmatic, attempting to develop a figurative style that was clear and workmanlike. Like those of George Grosz and Otto Dix, his subjects were often gruesome: he frequently painted attacks on the devastation brought by war and militarism. Works such as Spanish Worker’s Leader (1925; Berlin, Neue N.G.) are characterized by an expressive force that is informed by the verism of Dix, rather than the imagery of German Expressionism. The influence of Goya was particularly important, and Geiger’s enthusiasm for grim realism led him to illustrate the work of such writers as Honoré de Balzac (1924), Dostoyevsky (1924), Kleist, Lev Tolstoy and Wedekind (1920–23). Working in Munich from 1943, Geiger began a folio of prints, including the etching War II (1943; see exh. cat., no. 63), which depicted his account of fascism. His series of pen-and-ink drawings of 1944–5, A Reckoning and Twelve Years (e.g. General Staff, pen and ink, c. 1945; see exh. cat., no. 79), published in Munich as prints in 1947, are among the first and most powerful artistic documentations of life in Germany under Hitler’s regime. His later work, while still figurative, combines simplified forms and symbolic colour in a surrealistic, visionary way.

Part of the Geiger family