The second oldest of five children of a prosperous bakery shop-café owner, Pawel Kontny (Paul Kontny, Pawel August Kontny) began sketching and drawing Indians based on Karl May's popular Western novels which he read as a youngster growing up in Europe. Initially designated to take over the family business, Kontny's father finally accepted his son's interest in art. After relocating the family to Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia (today, Gliwice, Poland) in 1936, he engaged an unemployed artist, Michael Uliga, to provide Paul some initial art instruction. In high school Kontny received additional encouragement and direction from Professor Pautsch. While still a student he was commissioned to paint a large image of St. Anthony for the family's parish church in Gleiwitz.

In addition to formal instruction, Kontny's father financed Paul's trip to the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden (the home of his aunt) and to the Silesian Fine Arts Museum in Breslau (now Wroc?aw, Poland). The trip provided him a firsthand introduction at age thirteen to painting and drawing by European masters and to the work of some of the German Expressionists, soon afterward banned as "degenerate artists" and removed from museums throughout Germany by the Nazi regime.

After graduation from Emperor Wilhelm State High School in Gleiwitz, Kontny briefly studied at the local mechanical engineering and metallurgy school, addressing his parents' concern about the economic prospect of his earning a decent livelihood as an artist. In 1940 he transferred to the technical college in Breslau where he studied architecture until being drafted into the German army in 1941. His first choice had been the Breslau Art Academy, but the Nazi authorities closed it down in 1932. After 1940 he had no other formal art training.

During World War II his army unit served on the Eastern Front in the former Soviet Union. He documented his wartime experiences there and elsewhere in Eastern Europe with sketches and drawings which he temporarily stored in his gas mask canister until mailing them to his parents in Gleiwitz. Captured in northern Italy by Allied forces at the end of the war, his talent impressed General Wade H. Haislip of the 7th Army and the Western Military District in Germany who dispatched him under armed guard on a private sketching trip to northern Italy, including Venice.

After his release from captivity, Kontny initially lived with his cousin's family in Eberhardsbühl, Germany, before being hired to help build the new European publishing center of Stars and Stripes, the American military newspaper, in Altdorf near Nuremberg, Germany. During his free time, he bicycled and sketched the small, historic Bavarian towns near Altdorf. His involvement with the Stars and Stripes project and his postwar village reconstruction work in Bavaria earned him an architect's card and membership in the Nuremberg Architects' Association in 1946. One of eleven architects on its working team, he helped design new housing in the city's residential areas destroyed by Allied bombing during the war. In the late 1940s he also designed the building for the Giesenhagen insurance company and the interior of the Schrafft Delicatessen in Nuremberg, and with two other colleagues a private home in Bavaria influenced by the International Style in architecture.

After completing his work with the architects' association in Nuremberg where he also painted urban landscapes of the bombed wartime ruins, he returned to Eberhardsbühl where he began depicting the local residents and the landscape in a modernist style. In 1949 his work was introduced to the public in a lecture at the Amerika Haus in nearby Sulzbach-Rosenberg by art critic, Janheinz Jahn. His encouragement prompted Kontny to relocate to Nuremberg where he joined the Association of Independent Professional Nuremberg Artists and participated in its 1949 exhibition.

His early success in Nuremberg led to solo shows at the Galerie Schröder and Galerie Stenzel in Munich, as well as at the Alioth Gallery in Basel and Saint Moritz, Switzerland. He also had a solo show at the Little Studio Gallery in New York in 1957 and at the Pogzeba Gallery in Denver in 1958. His participation in the all-German "Iron and Steel" exhibition at the Dusseldorf Museum in 1952 enhanced his reputation as an artist outside of Bavaria.

The money he received from the sale of his work at that exhibition financed his first trip to France, Spain and North Africa. His urbanscapes of cities in North Africa reflect the influence of the earlier color-block compositions of Paul Klee, one of his favorite artists. Another influence was J.W.W. Turner whose work he studied at the Tate Gallery in London on a summer trip to England and Ireland in 1953 with Professor F.W. Schoberth of the Academy for Economics in Erlangen, Germany. Kontny did a number of sketches of people he observed during his trip, as well as watercolors and pastels of the various locations he visited.

In the early 1950s his painting style showed the influence of the Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905 who had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the twentieth century in Germany. By the middle of the decade his style incorporated more referential abstraction and total abstraction, resulting in part from his study of Hans Hartung, a German artist based in Paris who exhibited his gestural abstract work in Germany. Kontny also benefitted from his contact with Karl Dahmen, a German abstract painter artist in the Rhineland. His friendship with Dahmen led him to experiment with marble dust for added texture in his work.

Along with his painting, he produced lithographs of figures and urban vignettes for about five years beginning in the mid-1950s. At the same time he also sculpted in bronze and stone which he continued into the following decade. In the early 1950s he also did a number of drawings of authors, musicians and artists for the Nürnberger Nachricten (Nuremberg News), and illustrated the writings of German authors, Wolfgang Borchert and Hans Pflug-Franken.

In 1960 the president of the Schaefer Pen Company, a collector of Kontny's work, invited him and his family for a summer trip to the United States that included New York, Chicago and Denver. Kontny visited the Metropolitan and Guggenheim Museums and the New York galleries, acquainting himself firsthand with the postwar developments in American art. He traveled with his family to Chicago to see the Marshall Fields Gallery where he had exhibited in 1957, and then on to Denver to meet gallery dealer John Pogzeba who had arranged his first solo show in the Mile High City in 1958. Pogzeba took the Kontnys to Taos and Santa Fe whose Native American and Hispano cultures provided Paul with abundant subject matter after relocating to Denver, Colorado, in 1962. He facilitated shows of Konty's work at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, and the Maxwell Galleries in San Francisco.

In Denver Kontny refined his marble dust technique during the 1960s, producing various grades shifted through his wife's pantyhose. He switched to masonite for his painting surface after discovering that traditional canvas could not adequately support his gessoed marble dust mixture. He used the mixture to sculpt the image on the masonite, then allowing it to dry before applying oil glazes. His marble dust technique easily lent itself to depicting the architecture of Paris, Naples, and Dubrovnik, as well as the multistoried tribal pueblos in northern New Mexico and Arizona. His initial encounter with Native Americans in New Mexico extended his search for subject matter to the Plains Indians in Wyoming and Montana whom he had read about in Karl May's adventure novels and whom he chose to depict in oil, watercolor and pastel.

He also applied his marble dust technique to three non-representational series he pursued until the end of his life ? Cosmos, inspired by the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 and Carl Sagan's Cosmos television series in the 1980s; the Age of Technology, symbolizing his admiration for modern technological achievement; and Ancient Memories, synthesizing his life-long interest in the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Babylon, as well as those of the Aztecs, Mayan and Incas of the Western Hemisphere.

Although based in Denver, Kontny remained an inveterate traveler. His frequent trips to Europe, Mexico and Hawaii provided him a wealth of new material, augmented with portraits and still lifes including the official portrait of Governor Richard Lamm in 1976 for the Colorado State Capitol in Denver. To keep his eye fresh throughout his career, Kontny did hundreds of ink drawings in both representational and nonobjective styles. He likened them to a pianist's need for daily keyboard practice. His love of classical music and jazz is reflected in nonobjective paintings and pastels done both in Europe and the United States.

Apart from his disciplined daily studio schedule in Denver, Kontny willingly trained a younger generation of professional artists, sharing with them his extensive knowledge of art history and the techniques of his facility in oil, watercolor, pastel and drawing. Among those benefitting from his instruction, counsel and assistance were Lorenzo Chavez, Tim Cisneros, Len Garon, Carol Katchen, Desmond O'Hagan, Leon Loughridge, George Tate, as well as David Isenberg and Janet Brooks-Gerloff both of whom later relocated to Europe.

Kontny was equally generous in donating his art over the years to a number of charitable causes in Denver: Opera Colorado, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Denver Symphony Orchestra, Cancer League, Colorado AIDS Project, Sisterhood of Temple Emanuel, Mount Saint Vincent's Home, Carousel Ball, and the KRMA Channel 6 Auction.

Solo Exhibitions: Amerika Haus, Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Germany (1949); Bibliothèque Française, Nuremberg, Germany (1950); Galerie Schröder, Munich, Germany (1951); Galerie Prestel, Frankfurt (1952, 1954); Galerie Stenzel, Munich, Germany (1954); Hamburger Künstlerclub "Die Insel," Hamburg, Germany (1956); The Little Studio, New York (1957); Marshall Fields Gallery, Chicago (1957); Pogzeba Art Gallery, Denver (1958); Saks Galleries, Denver, Colorado (1962, 1967,1968,1972,1974,1984,1995, 2014); 5207 Galleries, Oklahoma City (1962); Maxwell Gallery, San Francisco (1963, 1972); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe (1963); Houghton House, Amarillo, Texas (1964); Bertha Eccles Art Center, Ogden, Utah (1966); Ogden Community Arts Council, Ogden, Utah (1966); Jamison Galleries, Santa Fe (1967); The Gallery, Palm Springs, California (1968); Tower Art Gallery, La Junta, Colorado (1977); Beaumont Art Gallery-Loretto Heights College, Denver (1979), Valhalla Art Gallery, Wichita, Kansas (1981,1982-with George Tate, 1984, 1986, 1987- with Mario Kontny); Valhalla Gallery, Dallas, Texas (1989, 1990), Fukujin Gallery Tokyo, Japan (1992), Canvasback Gallery, Niwot, Colorado (1995).

Group Exhibitions: Association of Professional Nuremberg Artists, Nuremberg, Germany (1949); Albrecht-Dürer-Verein, Nuremberg (1951); Haus der Bamberger Kunsth?ndlers Rauh, Bamberg, Germany (1951); "Iron and Steel" Exhibition, Staats Museum, Dusseldorf, Germany (1952, traveled to Folkwang Museum, Essen; Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund); Galerie Valentin, Stuttgart, Germany (1952); Frankfurter Kunstkabinet, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (1952); Galerie Alioth, Basel, Switzerland (1954); "New Direction in Serigraphy," Galerie Stenzel, Munich (1960); Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1962); Frankische Galerie Am Marientor, Nuremberg (1963); Saks Galleries, Denver (1964, 1971); Gallery of Contemporary Arts, Taos, New Mexico (1969); Odette Gallery, Georgetown, Colorado (1971); Arvada Art Center, Arvada, Colorado (1977); Robiand Gallery, Colorado Springs, Colorado (1978); Amparo Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona (1989); "Visions of the American West," Hotel Nassauer Hof, Wiesbaden, Germany (1995).

Collections: City of Nuremberg's Painting and Sculpture Collection, Germany; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver, Colorado; Art Collection-City of Greenwood Village, Colorado.

©Stan Cuba for David Cook Galleries, LLC