Born July 13, 1885, in Magdeburg; died August 22, 1948, in Berlin, was a German architecture critic, publicist, and art historian. During the Weimar Republic, he was one of the leading intellectual voices of the avant-garde.

Life and Work

Adolf Bruno Behne was the son of the architect Carl Behne and his wife Therese, née Lucklum. He initially studied architecture for four semesters at the Technical University in Berlin before switching to art history at the University of Berlin, where he studied under Heinrich Wölfflin and Karl Frey. In 1911, he received his doctorate with a dissertation on The Incrustation Style in Tuscany.

Behne was a member of the Choriner Freundeskreis and the German Werkbund. He was an early advocate of modern art movements and supported the painters of Der Blaue Reiter. In 1913, he guided visitors through the First German Autumn Salon, a key exhibition of the avant-garde. That same year, he married Elfriede Schäfer in Charlottenburg.

From 1915 onward, Behne gave illustrated lectures for the educational committee of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He was later conscripted as a medical orderly during the First World War, during which time he contracted tuberculosis and was discharged after several months.

In 1918, Behne co-founded the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers’ Council for Art) in Berlin. In 1919, he was elected to its three-member leadership alongside the painter César Klein and the architect Walter Gropius. The council promoted the idea of a “primacy of architecture,” which was intended to unify all the arts. Behne supported expressionist architecture and was a strong proponent of Neues Bauen (New Building). He was closely associated with the Magdeburg artists’ group Die Kugel and called for the creation of a new, socially engaged art and architecture.

Behne was a regular contributor to the journal Die Weltbühne, where he argued for progressive architecture and urban planning. His close ties to Bauhaus artists and architects led to lasting friendships with Bruno and Max Taut. Together with his wife, Behne maintained an open household that became a gathering place for artists and intellectuals. Among his circle were Hannah Höch, Hans Orlowski, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Heinrich Zille, with whom Behne collaborated on several publications.

His engagement with painting is reflected in the large portfolio work The Victory of Color, which was banned in 1933. Between at least 1929 and 1932, Behne regularly delivered radio lectures, addressing topics such as modern housing and the interpretation of art history as world history.

Until his dismissal in 1933, Behne taught at the University of Berlin. During the Nazi period, he continued to work as an author in Germany. His name appears in the guestbook of Hanna Bekker vom Rath, who organized clandestine exhibitions in her Berlin apartment for artists persecuted as “degenerate” by the regime.

From 1945 to 1948, Behne was a professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin and a member of the architects’ association Der Ring. In June 1945, he opened the Berlin-Wilmersdorf adult education center with a lecture titled Degenerate Art: A Hitler Lie. Behne died in 1948 following a renewed outbreak of tuberculosis and a fatal heart attack in his long-time Charlottenburg residence.

The city of Magdeburg later named a street, Behneweg, in his honor.

Reference

Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), German edition.
Retrieved January 19, 2026.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Behne