Albert Adam Windisch was the son of the court baker Georg Windisch, who supplied the Hessian court and the royal family when they were in Germany. The residential and commercial building at Usagasse 14 in Friedberg still houses a bakery today. [1]
After he had left the secondary school in Friedberg in 1895 with the primary school, Windisch first attended the Royal Art School in Berlin from 1895 to 1898 , where he took the Prussian drawing teacher examination. After a year of private study with Adolf Schlabitz , he studied at the Academy of Arts in Berlin and from 1901 in Munich for a year at the Academy of Fine Arts [2] and at the Technical University , and in 1903 also completed the Bavarian drawing exam. From 1905 he taught commercial graphics as a full-time municipal civil servant at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Frankfurt and was in contact with the art historian Fritz Wichertfrom the Städel, whose correspondence has been preserved to this day. In 1922 he founded the Frankfurt Gutenberg Press , which also included Carl Nebel, Hugo Kühn and Ernst Rehbein . He founded the typography and bookbinding department at the Kunstgewerbeschule in 1924 with Philipp Albinus and Rehbein, and in 1925 he transferred the management of this department to Fritz Wichert, [3] with whom he also promoted the integration of the Kunstgewerbeschule into the Städelschule. Windisch's students included the artists Kurt Scheele [4] , Moritz Coschell and Fried Stern , who were later defamed as "degenerate" , as well as the typographer Herbert Postand Max Waibel . When Willi Baumeister's professorship had to be sacrificed to the politically motivated austerity dictates of the Nazis, Windisch also took over part of his courses at the Städelschule .
Windisch had been a member of the German Werkbund and a member of the Weimar Society of Bibliophiles since 1913 at the latest . From 1921 he belonged to the Bund Deutscher Nutzgraphiker (local group Offenbach) and in June 1926 he became the first chairman of the Rhein-Main group of this association. He also held this position after the synchronization in 1933 [5] , and is named as such in the publication of a speech by Joseph Goebbels to the Reich Chamber of Culture on November 15, 1933 in the imprint. It should be noted that an exit would at least have resulted in an occupational ban. Windisch was also a lifetime member of the Gutenberg Society . From 1949 he was in contactTheodor Heuss . [6]
Until the 1960s Windisch taught at the Städelschule. His private studio was at Adickesallee 11 in Frankfurt and his house was at Kaiserstraße 150 in Friedberg . In 1958, Windisch donated drawings by Wilhelm Konrad Kalb from his property to the Frankfurt Artists' Society.
The Frankfurter Rundschau wrote an extensive review of his life's work in 1958 on his 80th birthday, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on his 85th birthday.
