Otto KÜPPERS

Otto Albert Friedrich Ignatius Küppers (* May 13, 1888, in Bonn; † October 7, 1986, there) was a German landscape painter associated with the Düsseldorf School, earning a reputation as a painter of the Eifel region.

Küppers, the son of the Bonn sculptor and art professor Albert Küppers and his wife Angela Maria Elisabeth, née Offenberg, displayed artistic talent from an early age. He studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1907 to 1912 under the landscape painter Eugen Dücker. In 1913 and 1914, he continued his studies for a year at the Kunstakademie Berlin in Charlottenburg. After participating in World War I, he worked as a restorer in his father’s sculpture workshop in Bonn. He soon set up a painter’s studio in a small house at the Poppelsdorf Palace and undertook study trips to Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Küppers spent his winters in the Eifel, renting the caretaker’s apartment of the “Bonn Academic Ski Club” and inviting artist friends such as Emil Krupa-Krupinski and August Sander.

Shortly after World War I, Küppers became a member of the “Bonn Artists’ Association,” which held its first exhibition in 1919 at the Städtischen Museum Villa Obernier in Bonn. He participated in the association’s annual exhibitions. His artistic breakthrough came with two solo exhibitions in the Villa Obernier titled “The German Forest” and “Winter in the Mountains.”

In his later years, Küppers suffered from declining eyesight. He passed away at the age of 98 in Bonn and was buried at the Poppelsdorfer Cemetery.