Francis Bott (German, 1904-1998)

Biography

Francis Bott was a German artist from Frankfurt am Main who gained recognition in Paris as part of the Seconde École de Paris. His style evolved from expressionist representative art to surrealism through a close friendship with Francis Picabia. From the late 1940s onwards Bott surged into abstraction. He is most known today for his heavy-handed impastos created with a palette knife and showing a spectacular grip on colour and composition. Many of the works in our collection represent Bott’s initial venture into abstraction, from 1948 to 1960. 

Bott was very politically motivated a spent many years as a vagabond supporting left-leaning initiatives all over the world from Czechoslovakia to Mexico. In 1937 he settled in Paris and after the German invasion fought with the anti-Fascist resistance in the South of France. Bott was friends with and exhibited alongside some of the biggest names in the postwar School of Paris, including the Surrealists like Picabia, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp and the French Informel school like Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages. With his work already reaching high demand in the 1950s, Bott exhibited internationally showing with Ben Nicholson in Zurich and at the important Zwemmer Gallery in London (including one of the paintings available below). Bott was included in important École de Paris exhibitions, showing alongside Serge Poliakoff and Nicholas de Stael, his peers to whom Bott’s style is most comparable from the 1960s onwards. While still exhibition in Paris and internationally, from the 1970s Bott spent most of his time working in Ticino in Switzerland.

Related artists

André Lanskoy / Pierre Dmitrienko / Youla Chapoval / Serge Charchoune / Jeanne Coppel / Anna Staritsky / Ben Nicholson

Available works

Please see below the selection of available original artworks by Francis Bott.