Grit Kallin-Fischer

Grit Kallin-Fischer was born as Margit Vries in Frankfurt am Main on 26 April 1897. She received her first art lessons, focusing on landscapes and still lifes, at a boarding school in Belgium. In 1910 she began studying painting in Marburg and then continued under Lovis Corinth at Leipzig’s Academy for Graphic Art and Book Trade. She developed tuberculosis during the First World War and suffered from the after-effects for the rest of her life. In 1919 Kallin-Fischer went to Berlin, where she met the Russian musician Marik Kallin. The couple married in 1920, lived in London and separated after six years. In the autumn of 1927, Kallin-Fischer enrolled at the Bauhaus in Dessau. She began taking pictures there and developed portrait studies in the style of the New Vision. She also attended László Moholy-Nagy’s metal workshop and was involved with the Bauhaus stage, creating numerous portraits of its members. In late 1928, she went to Berlin with the American Bauhaus member Edward Fischer and continued to shoot photographs there. Several of her designs were published in the monthly graphic-design journal “Gebrauchsgraphik” in 1930; one year later, her works were shown at the exhibition “Foreign Advertising Photography” in New York. She married Edward Fischer in 1934 and emigrated to the US with him. Grit Kallin-Fischer gave up photography after 1945 and turned her attention to sculpture. She died in Newton, Pennsylvania, on 17 July 1973.