The painter and graphic artist Willem Grimm is one of the most important and most characteristic representatives of Hamburg Modernism.
Willem Grimm, who was born in Darmstadt, studied at the Hamburg State School of Art as of 1924 and joined the renowned Hamburg Secession in 1929. The artist soon found his typical topics and motifs: Landscapes and still lifes, but particularly multi-figure compositions with masked people in carnival scenes or similar events dominate his oeuvre - Willem Grimm had taken part in the Basel carnival in the early 1930s, which would become a source of inspiration for his art. The "Rummelpott", a northern German tradition, was a regular subject in his works. In terms of genre, Willem Grimm preferred drawings and prints, but also woodcuts in colors, which contrast a relatively small oeuvre of paintings (mostly in egg tempera).
The Hamburg Kunsthalle honored Willem Grimm with a retrospective in 2004.