Kinzinger's career runs in close parallel to the larger story of European modernism's transplantation to the United States in the 1930s — a process by which the studio cultures of Munich, Stuttgart, and Paris were dispersed by political crisis and re-rooted, in his case, in the American South.
Kinzinger's education brought him into contact with most of the major schools and figures of early twentieth-century European painting. His Munich training gave him his first formal grounding, the state academies of Munich and Stuttgart deepened it, and his work in the Stuttgart studio of Adolf Hölzel placed him directly within the lineage of German color theory that would shape so much of subsequent German modernism. His subsequent study in Paris with Léger and Matisse exposed him to the Cubist and Fauvist developments of the French avant-garde at first hand.
The First World War interrupted that trajectory and reshaped him, as it did so much of his generation. After his artillery service he returned to advanced study and to teaching, and through the 1920s and into the early 1930s he developed a body of work that fused Cubist construction, Futurist energy, and Expressionist color into the disciplined synthesis later writers have described as his particular contribution to interwar German modernism. By the late 1920s he was a recognized figure within German painting and a working colleague of Hans Hofmann.
The decisive turn came when Hofmann, by then increasingly under Nazi pressure, asked him to take over the direction of the Hans Hofmann School of Art in Munich. Kinzinger ran the school until political conditions forced its closure, and his own work was then officially classified as degenerate by the Reich. He left Germany for the United States with no plan to return.
His move into American life took its definitive form when he was appointed chair of the Art Department at Baylor University in Waco — a position he would hold until the early 1950s, and from which he became one of the most influential modernist teachers in the postwar Texan and broader Southern art worlds. His students and colleagues carried his combination of European academic discipline and modernist conviction into the next generation of American painting, and his own teaching was a significant route by which the Hofmann tradition entered American art outside the New York and California centers in which it is more often discussed.
His parallel academic career produced one further distinction: a dissertation built around a series of his own paintings on Mexican subjects, undertaken through summer sessions at the University of Iowa, earned him that institution's first Doctor of Fine Arts. He continued to paint and exhibit through the postwar period and the 1950s, and his work is now read both as a contribution to interwar European modernism in its own right and as a significant link between that tradition and the American art world that received it.