Josef Urbach

German painter Josef Urbach studied at the School of Applied Arts in Düsseldorf. After a stay in Paris, he turned away from the commercial art field and then dedicated himself to outdoor painting. As a result, Josef Urbach took up studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. After World War I, Urbach was a member of the “Young Rhineland” and entered the “Rheinische Sezession” in 1929. With his paintings, Urbach followed the traditions of Expressionism with a Rhenish imprint. In 1923, he was named professor at the Folkwang School in Essen. Urbach took over classes for sketching, nude and portrait painting. In addition to his educational work, he received numerous orders from industry and commerce.

As Urbach’s images were classified as “degenerate” by the Nazis in the 1930s, they were removed from the Folkwang Museum. A bomb attack destroyed his studio in 1943 and destroyed all of his previous works. From 1950-68 he then produced a variety of watercolors, sketches, and lithographs, while finishing only a few paintings in oil and acrylic. Some of his watercolors of the Racecourse in Neuß were created only after the war. Surviving from the pre-war period is, for instance, an oil painting entitled Derby or Horse Racing from 1926.