German artist Norbert Ernst Dolezich (1906—1996) lived a long life despite all the perturbations of the epoch. In 1929, he entered the Arts Academy in Königsberg. At the time it was already a well-known educational institution that had set itself the goal of developing original artists. The young artist’s teacher was Heinrich Wolff, one of the best graphic artists in the history of East Prussia.

Owing to a disease, Dolezich escaped being drafted to the Wehrmacht during the Second World War and taught graphics at his alma mater, and later worked as a drawing teacher at an ordinary secondary school. Teaching was the only source of income for Dolezich. It was only in the 1970s that he became truly famous as an artist and as an author, and that was due to his sombre surrealistic graphic works. At that time, German art galleries saw a comeback of abstract art; newest trends and ideas were dominant everywhere, and the artist’s post-war works proved very much to the point.

He drew ruins of gothic churches half-buried in the sand dunes, the kind of landscapes which today would be called post-apocalyptic. That was his way of illustrating the idea of the brevity of life. Dolezich’s writing themes were to a large extent concordant with his graphics. German author Hans Lipinsky-Gottersdorf noted that the language of his prose was reserved but sincere, insistent but at the same time quiet.

Regrettably, nearly all Dolezich’s pictures created in the pre-war period and dedicated to East Prussia were destroyed during the war. The graphic work My Studio at the Arts Academy in Königsberg of 1943 is one of the few surviving works.

Dolezich depicted the interior of an art studio. To make the work more expressive, the artist used fairly hard hatching. As a rule, an effect like that was achieved with the dry-point technique when an image was incised directly into a metal plate. For comparison, Heinrich Wolff, who was Dolezich’s teacher at the Academy, used a softer technique whereby a likeness to a watercolour was achieved. Dolezich, however, needed an image that was on a clearer and rather sharper side so that he could convey the inner tension accompanying the creative process. That is why his focus is on the figure of a woman in the foreground who is intently looking at the sketch.