A solo exhibition at the prestigious Berlin gallery of Wolfgang Gurlitt should have been a breakthrough for the painter Eric Isenburger in early 1933. The public response was great and the press was full of praise. A few weeks later, however, the Nazis were in power and now Isenburger’s art was labelled – because of its modern style as well as his Jewish origin – “degenerate”. After the public denunciation of his works in the right-wing magazine Die Jugend, Gurlitt suggested to him that he should leave Germany. He helped Eric and Jula Isenburger obtain passports and visas. They left Germany on 31 March 1933.

After arriving in Paris, Isenburger, after an initial creative crisis, continued his work and broke new ground stylistically by freeing himself from the influence of Viennese Expressionism and its resistance to sgraffito and mezzotint and hereafter considered himself a Neo-Impressionist.

After Eric Isenburger was interned twice in the Les Milles camp, in 1941 the couple managed – via Spain and Lisbon – to escape to America. Here Isenburger became a multi-award-winning artist and was exhibited by several museums and galleries in the United States until the end of the 1950s. After opportunities to exhibit his art began to decline he accepted a teaching position at the National Academy of Design in New York. He worked as a painter until a few years before his death. Isenburger’s oeuvre contains landscapes, still lifes, interiors, and in particular, portraits.