Fritz Eichenberg

Who was Fritz Eichenberg?

Fritz Eichenberg was a German-American illustrator who worked primarily in wood engraving. His best-known works were concerned with religion, social justice and nonviolence.

Eichenberg was born to a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany, where the destruction of World War I helped to shape his anti-war sentiments. He worked as a printer's apprentice, and studied at the Municipal School of Applied Arts in Cologne and the Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig. In 1923 he moved to Berlin to begin his career as an artist, producing illustrations for books and newspapers. In his newspaper and magazine work, Eichenberg was politically outspoken and sometimes both wrote and illustrated his own reporting.

In 1933, the rise of Adolf Hitler convinced Eichenberg, a public critic of the Nazis, to emigrate with his wife and children to the United States, where he settled in New York City for most of the remainder of his life. He taught art at the New School for Social Research and at Pratt Institute and was part of the WPA's Federal Arts Project. Eichenberg also served as the head of the art department at the University of Rhode Island and laid out the printmaking studios there.