I met Josef Wittlich for the last time in the spring of 1981. As maverick in his appearance as ever, he was wearing a flat cap, a dark jacket over a pyjama top, the cuffs of his trousers were tucked into his socks and his shoes were highly polished. Yet, his gaze was alert, restless and somewhat mischievous. It was not easy to convince him to take me one more time through the ceramics factory where he had worked for twenty years, from 1948 to 1968. Here his dream of being an industrial worker had come true; here the shy small man had finally found respect and recognition.

The son of a button maker, Wittlich was born on 26 February 1903 in the small village of Gladbach near Neuwied on the Rhine. ‘Father had a fine job’, he used to say, even though Josef and his siblings would often go hungry. At the age of four Josef lost his mother, and not much love appears to have been lost between him and his stepmother. Little is known about the subsequent years. In 1921 Wittlich allegedly spent some time in the service of a French officer in Paris. The late Twenties saw him roaming Eastern Europe and the Balkans. In 1934, at the end of the world economic crisis, Wittlich turned up in Nauort, a small village some seven miles from his place of birth. He took on work in the house of a factory owner and as an agricultural labourer and found lodgings in the spacious attic of an old farmhouse. The furnishings were poor, but for the first time in his life Josef Wittlich felt safe and happy. He had finally found a home, and his landlady looked after him like a mother.

Known throughout the village as ‘our little Josef’ on account of his short stature, Wittlich was a diligent worker, but after work, in the evening, at night, at weekends he was overcome by such restlessness that he could barely bring himself to sit down for a meal. He would retire to his room and paint as if compelled by some mysterious power, spreading his paper on the floor and working by candlelight into the early hours. When he had finished one picture, he would roll it up, put it on a pile in the corner of his room and start a fresh one. His landlady later recalled that he often talked and sang to himself through the night. Frequently he would walk to Neuwied – a journey of 8 miles each way – in order to buy more paper and paint. Wittlich produced many hundreds of pictures, probably even a few thousand, most of them small, but some as big as 1.5 metres by 5 metres. Every so often he took a few of his paintings to the local pub and gave them to the publican and his guests, who accepted them out of pity but fed them to the fire when Wittlich’s back was turned.

Asked later about the subject of these paintings, the Nauort publican recalled that Wittlich was obsessed with soldiers. Wittlich had amassed a stack of books on wars, adventures and voyages of discovery. Under Africa’s Sun was the evocative title of one of the books in his possession, the inside cover of which preserves Wittlich’s earliest surviving drawing of around 1930. He also collected picture trade cards from cigarette packets and cartons of porridge oats, which he used as models for his paintings, often combining a number of cards to create a large painting. Wittlich’s mature style emerged fully formed in these early works; he would produce a quick sketch in pencil, mark the areas he intended to colour with the names of the intended colours and surround his composition with a vivid painted frame.

Wittlich loved colour; before the war he had owned a collection of hundreds of colourful buttons, which may well have reminded him of his father. Throughout his life he wore unmatched socks of different colour, smoked coloured cigarettes and used dyed matches. At the end of his life he owned an assortment of outrageously loud ties that he rarely wore but guarded jealously.

In 1940 Wittlich was conscripted into the labour force. He was held prisoner of war by the Russians, escaped after three months and was forced to work in an arms factory in Kassel. Trapped for many hours under a collapsed building after a bombing raid in March 1945, he thought his end had come.

After the end of the war Wittlich returned to Nauort. The old farm had been torn down; his pictures, his books, the button collection and all his earthly possession lay buried under rubble. For a while Wittlich eked out a living doing odd jobs, but in 1948 his dream of a regular existence with a real job finally came true when an industrial ceramics works hired him. His workmates and supervisors remembered Wittlich as a faithful employee, who was eager to please – provided he was not teased. As he had done before the war, Wittlich gave away many of his pictures, and, as before, the recipients accepted the gifts so as not to offend their colleague, but then conveniently forgot them in some dusty corner of the workshop or chucked them in the furnace. A few, however, did end up on the walls or the ceiling of the workshop.

It was the ceramicist and painter Fred Stelzig who noticed them during the course of a factory visit. ‘In January of 1967, I visited an industrial ceramics works in Höhr-Grenzhausen, where a number of large colourful paintings caught my eye. They were pinned to beams and girders, stuck to the walls of the grey factory building, and even though many were defaced or had pin-up-girls pasted all over them, I was struck by their immediacy.’ When Stelzig enquired after the artist, the workers told him, ‘Our little Josef paints that stuff’.

This chance encounter led to the miraculous discovery of the painter Josef Wittlich, whose prolific output had thus far only been noticed – and frequently complained about – by the cleaning lady, who had to fight her way through piles of dusty pictures whenever she wanted to clean the two tiny attic rooms in the factory-owned dormitory that Wittlich had occupied for the past 19 years.

Stelzig showed Wittlich’s pictures to Dieter Honisch, then director of the Stuttgart Kunstverein, who immediately agreed to organise an exhibition. Opened on 13 May 1967, it proved a huge commercial success and was followed by a spate of exhibitions in galleries all over Germany, among them Brusberg in Hanover, Springer in Berlin, Lichter in Frankfurt, Brockstedt in Hamburg, Zimmer in Dusseldorf, Lange in Siegburg and Susi Brunner in Zurich. Museums were quick to follow suit, and as early as 1969 Wittlich was given his first solo exhibitions at the Folkwang Museum in Essen. Important groups of works were shown in international exhibitions in Bratislava, Zagreb, Munich, Zurich and Helsinki.

Josef Wittlich soon came to feel the full force of the art market. The artist, who had never signed or dated any of his pictures, now had to go back and sign them all. Furthermore, he, whose pictorial world had revolved solely around soldiers and battles, was now inundated with mail order catalogues, illustrated magazines and fashion journals intended to inspire him to embark on new subjects. Wittlich was fêted as the Ingénue of Pop, even though he had developed his mature style before Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Mel Ramos were even born.

Abridged and translated by Carola Kleinstück-Schulman.