Jean Leppien

Jean Leppien studied at the Bauhaus Dessau from 1929 to 1930. He attended the preliminary course with Josef Albers and studied with the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Leppien left the Bauhaus in 1930 and moved to Berlin, where he studied photography with Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy until 1933. In March of the same year, Leppien emigrated to Paris together with Suzanne Markos-Ney (1907 - 1982), a former Bauhaus student and his future wife. As an opponent of the Nazi state, he is arrested in 1944 and sentenced to long prison terms. His wife was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the liberation in 1945, Jean and Suzanne Leppien met again in Paris and initially lived in Nice, after which Roquebrune-Village and Paris became their centres of life. In 1946 Jean Leppien became a member of the Paris Salon des Réalités. Two years later he was awarded the Prix Kandinsky as Prix d'encouragement alongside the main prize-winner Max Bill. Through numerous exhibitions in France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, he also became internationally known. In 1952 Leppien became a French citizen and was appointed Officier de l' Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1987. Jean Leppien died in 1991 and was buried in Roquebrune-Village.