| Christoph Driessen |
DUSSELDORF (dpa) – With his blond hair, blue eyes and slim figure, you might think Leon Loewentraut is the kind of teenager who plays sport in the afternoons and hangs out with his friends in the evenings.
But you’d be wrong – the 17-year-old schoolboy spends all of his free time in his studio near the German city of Dusseldorf painting.
And he’s so good at it that people are already paying several thousand euros for each picture and the media keep christening him with ever more flattering names; “world star”, “wunderkind” and “the new Picasso”, to name but a few.
His interview with dpa took place at his father’s flat in Dusseldorf, because there are two of his paintings there – all the others have been sold.
Loewentraut’s pictures are big, bright and reminiscent of Picasso’s. One of those at his father’s is called Saint Tropez.
Leon Loewentraut holds paintbrushes during a photo shoot in his studio in Dusseldorf, Germany. PHOTOS: DPA
“I use very bright and light colours to spread a bit of cheer,” says Loewentraut. And it’s true – Saint Tropez really is a cheering picture.
Loewentraut comes across as charming, yet having a high opinion of himself.
“I have a vision. One day I’d like to belong to the greats and hang on museum walls,” he says, without batting an eyelid.
“Picasso is my absolute role model because I think he was one of the first who really dared to introduce expressionism to modern art. But also the colours that he used; very strong colours, they inspired me to choose even stronger colours.”
Leon has not left his career to chance.
“When I was 10, I used to ring up newspapers and tell them about myself. ‘If you want a really cool story, you should write about me,’ I used to tell them. When I look back now I was either really brave or completely crazy.”
In any case, it worked, because the local press was writing about him years ago.
“At one point I went round the galleries in London and said, ‘Don’t you want to do an exhibition of my pictures?’ And one gallery actually did. I think I’m the first 17-year-old from Germany to get their own exhibition in London.”
At an exhibition in Hamburg, all 13 of his pictures were sold.
Obviously there are lots of people who like Leon’s colourful pictures. But that doesn’t mean that the professional art world has accepted him as a serious artist.
Leon Loewentraut poses for a photo at an exhibition of his paintings in Hamburg, Germany
Leon Loewentraut poses for a photo in his studio in Dusseldorf, Germany
Art historians at leading museums prefer not to make any comment on him. That includes Markus Heinzelmann of Leverkusen’s highbrow Morsbroich Museum of modern art.
But he does explain what criteria he uses to decide the quality of any artwork.
Whether a picture is “pretty” or “light,” isn’t important, he says. What does matter is its “communication skills”. By that he means that it should pose questions. Does it tackle a question about society? Is it current? Does it create an impact that can take people further?
A second criteria for him is “media specificity”.
“Art has to develop social debates with media that only art can use.”
Inevitably this hardly applies to art made in the style of an earlier period or of a long-dead artist such as Picasso.
“It may well be that somebody can paint like Caspar David Friedrich, but that doesn’t have anything to do with art – it’s applied art at best,” says Heinzelmann.
Loewentraut doesn’t argue with that.
“I paint for myself and for the people who like my art,” he says.
But he also knows that he’ll have to develop as an artist if his success is to continue.
“I definitely want to study at an academy of fine art,” he says. “Criticism is definitely a part of being successful. I definitely have to learn to deal with that and how to talk with the critics of the future on a professional level.”
Because of one thing he’s sure, “Painting is everything to me!”
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