Fritz Neumanns are a dime a dozen. The Berlin address book for 1964 alone lists 63 of them, including 2 painters, 1 technical draughtsman and 1 graphic artist. It is the latter who painted the watercolours offered here.

Above all, the company Meibohm Fine Arts near Buffalo on Lake Erie traded his works in the USA, sometimes under his real name, sometimes under the pseudonym RIC, then preferably maritime, e.g. sailing boats, but also animal motifs. Behind both signatures is the same Fritz Neumann, who is listed in the Berlin address books as living in Siemensstadt, at Gartenfelder Str. 132 h, until 1979. The motifs of the watercolours offered here are grouped around this place of residence, which in many respects are strongly reminiscent of the works of the well-known Berlin architectural painter Alfred-Karl Dietmann and are in no way inferior to them.

Fritz Neumann’s etchings are usually stamped ‘JCB’ by the Lübeck art publisher Josef Carl Blumenberg, through whom they found their way to the USA. If the works are signed ‘Neumann’, the spelling corresponds to that on the watercolours; if, however, they are signed ‘RIC’, it becomes clear, especially from early examples, that the pseudonym is not a new invention, but a derivation from the peculiar spelling of the first name Fritz, which can also be seen on the watercolours.

I know Fritz Neumann’s biography from Jürgen Derschewsky’s ‘Biography of Oldenburg Artists’. However, this painter seems to have little more to do with Berlin than the fact that he was born there on 27 October 1928. After school and the war, he worked as a trainee stonemason on the restoration of the war damage to Minden Cathedral in 1948/49. From 1949-53 he studied at the Braunschweig School of Art (sculpture department) and from 1954-57 at the Pedagogical College in Oldenburg, including work as an art teacher. In 1971 he joined the Oldenburg regional group of the Association of Visual Artists (BBK). 1972 First participation in an exhibition in Nordenham, which was to be followed by many more in Oldenburg and the surrounding area, most recently a retrospective of drawings, paintings and sculptures in February/March 2001. Fritz Neumann died in Oldenburg on 23 March 2014, and his wife died there five years later.

The clear focus on Oldenburg raises doubts as to whether this biography actually matches the Fritz Neumann who, at least until 1979, still had a suitcase in Berlin and to whom we owe the Berlin motifs offered here. J. Derschewsky apparently only analysed local sources when reconstructing the biography, which is why he probably missed the artist’s two-track career with a foothold in Berlin. There is a gap of more than a decade in his biography, especially around the 1960s, when I would date the Berlin watercolours, but the etching of two fishing boats as an otherwise missing link is a sure indication that the very Fritz Neumann who painted the Berlin motifs offered here also fished in Oldenburg.