Portrait painter gunter rittner has died

Gunter rittner, one of the most important german portrait painters of the present day, has died. He died peacefully at the age of 93 in a munich retirement home, as his son confirmed on thursday.

The artist had painted famous people such as heinz ruhmann, curd jurgens, walter scheel or franz josef straub. His portraits of ludwig erhard and his successor kurt georg kiesinger hang in the chancellor’s gallery.

The people whose faces he painted had troubled lives. But for him they stopped and sang in silence. "I have the gift of empathizing with people and accepting the essence of others – for a while," the silesian-born politician told the german press agency on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Birthday told.

After a serious illness, he took it easy in his last years. Only for chancellor angela merkel would he gladly make an exception, he had revealed on his round birthday. "That was his dream, but unfortunately it didn’t work out anymore," said his son.

But even so, rittner left behind many lasting "pictures of people" – he published 75 portraits in a book of the same name, and created more than a thousand pictures before his death last monday.