Background
He was born in Mülheim on the Ruhr.
painter sculptor university professor
He was born in Mülheim on the Ruhr.
Afterwards (1914), he spent two months in Paris, where he attended the Académie russe and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
In 1912 he began his formal training as an artist at the Art Academies in Düsseldorf and Weimar. Between 1914-1917 he was a soldier in France in World War I.
With Otto Dix, Gert Heinrich Wollheim, and Adolf Uzarski, among others, he was one of the painters championed by the art dealer Johanna Ey. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Pankok was declared a degenerate artist.
Subsequently, 56 of his pictures were seized from museums, some of which were included in the infamous exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), mounted by the Nazis in Munich in 1937.
Following the war (from 1947 to 1958) he was a professor at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, where Günter Grass was among his students. Except in the years of the Nazi regime, Pankok traveled extensively and painted on his journeys.
He died in Wesel.