ART BASEL PARIS 2026
Robert Michel
After crashing his aircraft in 1916 while serving as a test pilot, the nineteen-year-old Robert Michel found refuge at the Weimar School of Fine Arts, where he recovered from his injuries. Surrounded by artists during his convalescence, he began to paint. His first landscapes, which drew on his flying experience, are among the earliest in art history to adopt a bird’s-eye view, emphasizing a brutalist vision of the city. Inspired by the Futurist way of representing movement and by his own passion for speed and modern technology, his work from then on was full of mechanical references.
From 1918, he developed a highly personal, almost psychedelic and fantastical mode of expression. He painted three-dimensional, unrealistic landscapes with intricate compositions that combine huge gear wheels with all kinds of means of transportation, from trains to aircraft and from racing cars to boats. In 1919, after the uprisings that led the emperor to abdicate, the new German Republic took shape in Weimar. Politically engaged and close to the new Social Democrat president Friedrich Ebert, Michel was getting married and expecting his first child. He witnessed the creation of Gropius’s new Bauhaus school and, together with the artist Johannes Molzahn and his wife Ella Bergmann, founded the Weimar section of Dada. In contact with most of the movement’s key figures, he lived in the most excitingly modern environment an artist could dream of. Walter Gropius invited him to take part in a four-artist exhibition announcing the imminent opening of the Bauhaus.
For the next two years, the artist created a body of a few dozen works that conceal ever more mysteries. Still inspired by mechanics, but also by fairy tales, Bauhaus ideas about architecture and superstition, the paintings and drawings Robert Michel executed between 1919 and 1921 rank among the most enigmatic modern works one can find. The human figures resemble disjointed or mechanical puppets, set in industrial landscapes in axonometric perspective and surrounded by black cats, measuring instruments, curtained windows, horses, mustaches, letters, numbers and kabbalistic symbols that have yet to reveal their secrets.
Following the agreement signed between the gallery and the artist’s estate, we have appointed two young German art historians to research the inner meaning of Robert Michel’s imagination between 1919 and 1921. We will be able to offer visitors to Art Basel Paris a fully illustrated The collection of about 20 works we are presenting in the Premise section of Art Basel Paris 2026 is the result of more than 20 years of dedication, research and acquisitions. Works of comparable quality can only be seen at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Sprengel Museum Hannover.
ART BASEL PARIS
Grand Palais, Paris 8e
Booth O.P11
From 23 to 25 October 2026
artbasel.com
// Robert Michel
// Press release
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