George Brecht

George Brecht began his career as a chemist

George Brecht was born George Ellis MacDiarmid in New York City on 7th March 1926. His father, a professional flautist who toured with John Philip Sousa's (1854-1932) brass band and settled in New York to play for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, died of alcoholism when George Brecht was ten years old. George Ellis MacDiarmid chose his new name ‘Brecht’ during his military service when he was stationed in the Black Forest. He did not - as is sometimes rumoured - allude to the German writer Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), but chose a name that he liked the sound of. After the Second World War, George Brecht studied chemistry at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy & Science and then worked first for Charles Pfizer & Co. and then for Johnson & Johnson. During this time, he applied for five US patents and two co-patents.

Precursors and representatives of the Fluxus movement

George Brecht developed a growing interest in art under the influence of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008). He felt particularly close to the Fluxus movement founded by George Maciunas (1931-1978), in which the idea rather than the work took centre stage. He himself took part in the first Fluxus happenings as early as 1959, and together with Robert Watts (1923-1988), whom he had met in 1957 following an exhibition at Douglass College, organised the Yam Festival in New York in the 1960s, which is regarded as an important precursor of Fluxus. Together with Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), George Brecht attended John Cage's (1912-1992) class at the New School for Social Research in New York, and in 1965, moved to France and joined the European Fluxus artists. In Villefranche-sur-Mer, he ran the shop La Cédille qui sourit (The Laughing Cedille) with Robert Filliou (1926-1987), where the artists sold jewellery, games and Fluxus objects. 

Interest in Buddhism and participation in Documenta

Zen Buddhism had a lasting influence on George Brecht; he learnt Chinese and translated the ancient Buddhist text Hsin-Hsin-Ming into English. He taught at the College of Arts and Design in Leeds from 1968 to 1969 and moved to Düsseldorf in 1970. George Brecht received prizes and honours for his art, including the Berlin Art Prize in 2006, and took part in Documenta in Kassel three times (1972, 1977, 1987). Brecht stopped working as an artist in the 1980s and in the last three decades of his life, only permitted two retrospectives.

George Brecht died in Cologne on 5th December 2008.