Edmund Kinzinger was a German-born American modernist painter who carried the disciplines of the Munich and Stuttgart academies, and a direct working knowledge of Hans Hofmann's pre-war teaching, into the United States, where he became one of the most consequential modern art educators of the postwar South.
Edmund Daniel Kinzinger (1888–1963) was a German-born American painter, draftsman, and influential teacher of European modernism in the United States. Born in Pforzheim in the Grand Duchy of Baden, he trained at the Knirr Schule in Munich and at the State Academies of Munich and Stuttgart, where he became a master pupil of Adolf Hölzel, the leading German theorist of color and form in the early twentieth century, before continuing his studies in Paris under Fernand Léger and Henri Matisse. His first career was interrupted by nearly five years of artillery service in the German Army during the First World War, after which he resumed advanced study and entered teaching.
In the early 1930s he served as director of Hans Hofmann's School of Art in Munich, and was the only artist who worked for Hofmann inside Germany itself before the school was forced to close. Branded a "degenerate" artist by the Nazi regime, he emigrated to the United States in 1934, and from 1935 he chaired the Department of Art at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, for nearly two decades. He was awarded the first Doctor of Fine Arts ever conferred by the University of Iowa, on the basis of a dissertation built around a series of his own paintings on Mexican subjects.