Ulfert Wilke

Who was Ulfert Wilke?

Ulfert Wilke was an internationally recognized painter, calligrapher and art collector connected to the abstract expressionism movement. He was born in Bavaria, Germany, and immigrated to the United States in 1938. He is best known for his large canvas paintings and highly detailed lithographs that were inspired by calligraphic writing. Wilke was deeply intrigued by the written language, and much of his work was derived from his abstract interpretation of the shapes, colors and meanings of writing that he found in all languages and forms, including the poetry and ancient engravings of Asia and the Middle East. He was an avid art collector, particularly of tribal art, and was the founding director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

Wilke studied art at Harvard on a Carnegie scholarship before being drafted into the US Army in 1942. In 1947, he completed his Masters degree in Art at the University of Iowa. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Wilke was an art teacher and director at several universities and museums. He received the Guggenheim Fellowship twice, which he used to travel to work and study first in Munich and Rome, and later Kyoto, Japan where he lived in monastery and studied Japanese Zen calligraphy under the monks.