Kurt Kranz was born at Emmerich on the Rhine in 1910 and joined the Bauhaus in 1930. In 1950 he became an Assistant Professor to the Hamburg Academy of Art. During much of the 1930s, Kranz headed Herbert Bayer's Dorland Studio in Berlin. He held a number of visiting professor or similar positions in the United States: Tulane University (1957-1958); University of California, Santa Barbara (1965); Academy of Honolulu(1966); Nihon University, Tokyo; and Harvard (1967-1968). The Chammber of the Turk series of watercolors were included in the circulation exhibition by the Smithsonian Institute 1973-1975 entitled "kurt kranz bauhaus and today."
