Fritz Lattke

Fritz Lattke in the studio

Fritz Lattke , actually Friedrich Karl Lattke , Fryco Latk in Lower Sorbian (born February 7, 1895 in Neuendorf , Cottbus district ; † November 9, 1980 in Weimar ) was a Sorbian- German painter , graphic artist , book illustrator and comic artist . He is considered an important German landscape painter of the 20th century.

Life

Early years

Fritz Lattke was born on February 7th, 1895 in Neuendorf (today Parish Teichland ) and baptized on March 12th in the Peitzer Church. He came from a modest background. His father Johann Lattke (born August 30, 1871) was the son of a Neuendorfer kossaeteer , but as the youngest of a total of eight children, he was unable to take over his parents' farm and had to earn his living as a carpenter . Lattke's mother Anna Lattke, b. Kobela, also came from a rural background in the neighboring village of Willmersdorf . Due to the work of the father, the family lived in Sandow from 1895 , which was incorporated into Cottbus in 1904. Between 1902 and 1909 Lattke attended the school there. Lattke's artistic talent was recognized during his school days. On the recommendation of his teacher Gottfried Herzog, the city of Cottbus made it possible for the destitute Lattke to receive a scholarship to attend the arts and crafts school in Berlin in 1910.

Military service

Military service , World War I and the Freikorps caused a lengthy break in training: between 1910 and 1914 he attended the NCOs pre- school in Annaburg near Torgau and the NCOs in Treptow an der Rega . In 1914 Lattke was a non-commissioned officer in Koblenz . During the First World War , missions followed in France , Poland and Russia between 1914 and 1918 and in Freikorps in Westphalia and Weimar between 1918 and 1920 . Nevertheless, many sketches and drawings were made during those years . In it Lattke processed, among other things, the traumatic war experiences. After the war, in 1919 and 1920, the first illustrations were published in newspapers and magazines in Nuremberg , Duisburg and Cottbus.

Education

It was not until the early 1920s that he succeeded in continuing his training, again supported by his sponsor Gottfried Herzog. From 1921 to 1929 he studied at the Weimar Academy of Art , from 1925 as a master student of Walther Klemm and Alexander Olbricht . Around 1923 he made the acquaintance of the Dissen pastor Gotthold Schwela ( Bogumił Šwjela ), who arranged contacts with the writer and publicist Wilhelmine Wittka ( Mina Witkojc ) and the graphic artist and publicist Martin Neumann ( Měrćin Nowak-Njechorński ). In 1923 he was one of the founders of the Association of Sorbian Visual Artists. Also in 1923 he stayed in Prague . At the end of the 1920s he went on a trip to Yugoslavia , mediated by Jaruslav Votruba .

He earned his living with commissioned work during his studies; in addition to drawings for newspapers and magazines, mostly with book illustrations. The picture stories for children (Hanni, Fritz and Putzi stories) that appeared in the early 1930s were among the first German comics . Lattke was soon considered a talented illustrator and caricaturist . However, he himself had little pleasure in this work. From his point of view, the activity necessary to earn a living robbed him of valuable time for his real concern, the free artistic creation.

Life and work

Gravestone of Fryco Latk and his wife in the cemetery in Weimar

On July 6, 1932, he married Irmgard Schaeffer, who came from a Weimar family, and was the great-granddaughter of a Weimar mayor. Lattke settled in Weimar and lived there until his death in 1980; this is where the majority of his works were created. Also in 1932 he made a trip to Italy. His son Joachim was born in 1936 and his daughter Elisabeth in 1939.

In the 1930s he was regularly drawn back to visit his home in Lower Lusatia . Here he looked for and found his roots, which shaped his later main work. In this region he drew and watercolored landscapes. Here Lattke had frequent contacts with Lower Sorbian intellectuals and artists, including Bogumił Šwjela, Mina Witkojc and Měrćin Nowak-Njechorński.

Lattke was always an unadjusted fellow. In 1934 he was imprisoned in Bärenbrück in Cottbus for refusing to give the Hitler salute and for espionage ; however, he was released for lack of evidence. Due to an injury from the First World War, Lattke was unfit for use in the Second World War . Stays in the Spreewald followed between 1939 and 1945 . In 1941 he began to paint Niederlausitz landscapes in oil . In 1945 his apartment and studio in Weimar fell victim to a bomb attack . He then moved to the Ibsenstrasse garden house. Also in 1945, Lattke met Bogumił Šwjela and Mina Witkojc in Weimar.

Since 1948 Lattke was a member of the newly founded working group of Sorbian visual artists. He could not make friends with the approach of Sorbian cultural functionaries to the GDR system after 1949. Due to a lack of socialist attitude, he was excluded from the working group of Sorbian visual artists in 1954. The painters Conrad Felixmüller and Carl Noack also declare their resignation in solidarity . In 1965 Lattke was also excluded from the GDR's Association of Fine Artists.

Between 1950 and 1952 he was a teacher for ornamentation at the vocational school for painting trade in Buxtehude . In February and March 1951 he took part in a four-week course of the working group of Sorbian visual artists in Bautzen and Crosta. In 1975 Lattke made the acquaintance of Joachim Meisner , the auxiliary bishop in Erfurt and later bishop of Berlin.

Fritz Lattke died on November 9, 1980 in Weimar. He was buried in the local cemetery.

plant

As of 2005, the official catalog raisonné (which does not claim to be exhaustive) comprised around 600 works, including almost 500 oil paintings.

Lattke's main work, a large number of landscape paintings, was created in Weimar. Almost without exception, however, he was inspired by the austere beauty of the Niederlausitz landscapes. Lattke painted the simple nature: muddy paths, flooded fields, ditches, swampy meadows and again and again the pond landscapes of his homeland. His pictures radiate a melancholy, poetic mood. He developed an ostensibly old master-looking style of painting, which was characterized by the balanced use of stylistic elements and a selected, sensitive color palette.

In addition to landscape paintings and illustrations , Lattke's work includes a number of portraits , representations of the environment and history pictures . Examples from his extensive work are: Good Friday early (landscape painting 1962), Bogumił Šwjela (portrait 1936), Sorbian couple in church (painting 1952), Cossacks in Berlin (history picture 1954).

Artistic development

Lattke's early work was shaped by the traditionally realistic orientation of the Weimar School of Painting . The choice of motifs in the early years follows the tradition of the Barbizon school . Just like the French landscape painters, Lattke discovered his motifs in seemingly undemanding and unspectacular corners of nature. He was often inspired by inhospitable seasons, cloudy November days or late winter days.

The purely realistic depictions of nature from his early creative period was followed by constant stylistic development from the 1940s onwards. He experimented with painting techniques, with colors and light. As a result, his work experienced an exciting increase. Despite the joy of experimentation, Lattke retained his old masterly style of painting and almost completely dispensed with ephemeral fashion trends. He used staffage figures for interesting, sometimes dramatically pointed productions. When reflecting on Lattke's artistic work, his ability to create a melancholy, almost mystical mood without letting the overall composition appear romanticized should be emphasized.

With his choice of motifs, the focus on original and unadorned nature, he deliberately set a counterpoint to the sometimes idyllic motifs of his impressionistic predecessors. For example, he took a critical look at Max Liebermann's familiar garden depictions. Equally distant was his attitude towards the spectacular effects of modern art of his time and the prescribed optimism of socialist realism. He countered these art movements with his own style, which was characterized by a balance of old masters' skills, the joy of experimentation and well-measured abstraction.

Honors

• 1980: Domowina Art Prize

Exhibitions

Permanent exhibitions

• Weimar art collections
• Goethe National Museum , Weimar
• Sorbian Museum , Bautzen
• Wendisches Museum , Cottbus,
• Lindenau Museum , Altenburg
• German Historical Museum , Berlin
• Karáskova gallery, Prague
• The majority of the paintings are in private collections

Personal exhibitions

• 1995: Sorbian Museum Bautzen
• 2005: Wendisches Museum Cottbus
• 2011: Wendisch-Deutsches Heimatmuseum Jänschwalde

Illustrations and comics

(List not complete)

• 1920: " Berliner Morgenpost " newspaper (pen drawings)
• 1920: weekly "Jugend", issue 49 (pen drawing)
• 1920/21: magazine "The Funny Saxon" (pen drawings)
• 1921/22: newspaper "Der Cottbuser Anzeiger" Verlag Albert Heine, Cottbus (pen drawings)
• 1921/22: newspaper "Die Jugend" (pen drawings)
• 1922: Draft of the Domowina membership card
• 1923–31: District calendar Cottbus, Calau, Spremberg (title design)
• 1923–32: District calendar Cottbus, Calau, Spremberg (monthly pictures)
• 1925: Karl Hahn: “How our leaders weep and laugh. All sorts in Lusatian dialect ”. In: Lausitzer Heimat-Bücher, Volume I, Verlag Albert Heine, Cottbus (6 drawings, pen, brush washed)
• 1929: Mato Kosyk : "Pěsńe, I. źěl" in the series "Dom a swět", Schmaler's printing and publishing house, Bautzen (3 pen drawings)
• 1930: Mato Kosyk: "Pěsńe, II. Źěl" in the series "Dom a swět", Schmaler's printing and publishing house, Bautzen (3 pen drawings)
• 1930: "Motor und Sport" magazine, Vogelverlag Pößneck
• 1931: "Motor und Sport" magazine, Vogelverlag Pößneck
• 1933–36: Lok Myler: " Sun Koh - Der Erbe von Atlantis" (series of issues), Verlag A. Bergmann, Leipzig (150 cover images)
• 1933: Newspaper “Thüringer Allgemeine Zeitung”, Hanni, Fritz and Putzi stories (these stories were laid out like today's comics: small continuous picture fields with sub-texts or speech bubbles - from 1934 in book form; many children know the characters today as the logo of Toy manufacturer "Die Spiegelburg")
• 1934: Joachim Rohde: “100 of the most beautiful Hanni, Fritz and Putzi stories”, Gebrüder Richter Verlagsanstalt, Erfurt
• 1936: Joachim Rohde: "Four loyal friends", Gebrüder Richter Verlagsanstalt, Erfurt (736 pen drawings)
• 1937: Joachim Rohde: "The four faithful", parts 1 and 2, GEG Deutsche Großeinkaufs Ges. Mb H., Hamburg
• 1937: Joachim Rohde: "Around the world for four", Gebrüder Richter Verlagsanstalt, Erfurt (62 colored pen drawings)
• 1938: Joachim Rohde: "The Great Beginning", Gebrüder Richter Verlagsanstalt, Erfurt (87 mostly colored pen drawings)
• 1938: Joachim Rohde, Walter Schmidkunz : "Alpenreise zu Viert", Gebrüder Richter Verlagsanstalt, Erfurt (60 colored pen drawings)
• 1939: Joachim Rohde: "Something happened", Gebrüder Richter Verlagsanstalt, Erfurt (60 colored pen drawings)
• 1939: Joachim Rohde: "Putzi's Freud und Leid", Gebrüder Richter Verlagsanstalt, Erfurt (83 mostly colored pen drawings)
• 1939: Joachim Rohde: "This is where the four loyal friends live", Gebrüder Richter Verlagsanstalt, Erfurt
• 1936 to 1940: "Genossenschaftsfamilie" magazine, picture stories (comics, one sequel per issue)
• 1940: Joachim Rohde: "Four people in forest and field", Gebrüder Richter Verlagsanstalt, Erfurt (97 mostly colored pen drawings)
• 1945: “Weimarer Zeitung” newspaper, children's page
• 1951: Jonathan Swift : "Guliwer pola palčikow", Volk und Wissen publishing house, Berlin / Leipzig
• 1952: Dorothea Märtens: “In the kindergarten for the apiary”, Gebrüder Knabe Verlag , Weimar
• 1952: Johannes Sittauer (d. I. Hans Leo Sittauer): A handful of cherries and other youth stories , Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar (title drawing and 14 pen drawings)
• 1953: Rudolf Weiß: “The attack on the forest camp”, Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar
• 1953: Mato Kosyk: "Wubjerk z jogo leriki", Domowina-Verlag, Bautzen (6 pen drawings)
• 1954: Herta Fischer: "Bärbel und die 6 b", Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar (title drawing and 24 pen drawings)
• 1954: Rudolf Weiß: "The secret of the floating island", Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar (title drawing and 25 pen drawings)
• 1955: Annelies Böer: "The sentence on the blackboard" Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar (title drawing and 22 pen drawings)
• 1955: Hans-Günter Krack: "The story of the envious Dorle" Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar (title drawing and 24 pen drawings)
• 1955: Dorothea Märtens: "Knüllch goes to the children's home" Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar
• 1955: Rudolf Weiss: “Eleven boys - one ball”, Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar
• 1955: "Kriminalakte Kern", comic (21 episodes) in National-Zeitung (Berlin)
• 1955: "The adventures of Jürgen Reetz", comic (20 episodes) in National-Zeitung (Berlin)
• 1955: "Heldenmädchen Eleonore" about Eleonore Prochaska , comic (20 episodes) in National-Zeitung (Berlin)
• 1956: Herta Fischer: "Traudel's thirteen grandfathers", Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar (draft cover)
• 1957: Friedrich Lange-Birkhof: "Vati, Mutti and we", Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar
• 1957: Wolfgang Sieler: "Car 49 does not start" Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar
• 1957: Hans-Günter Krack: "Rainer and the puppet mother" Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar (title drawing and 30 pen drawings)
• 1957: Heinrich Seidel: "The Magic Piano and Other Fairy Tales" Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar (title drawing and 27 pen drawings)
• 1957: Herta Fischer: "2 x Erika" Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar (title drawing and 23 pen drawings)
• 1957: Rudolf Weiss: “The hunt for the magic box” Gebrüder Knabe Verlag, Weimar

literature

• Dora and Heinrich Liersch: Fritz Lattke - a painter of the Spreewald landscape . In: Cottbus home calendar . 1993.
• Alfred Krautz, Benno Pötschke: Wendish worlds of images. On the trail of the art of Heide and Spreewald . Domowina-Verlag, Bautzen 1999, ISBN 3-7420-1765-9 .
• Hans Vollmer u. a .: General Lexicon of Visual Artists , Vol. 3 . EA Seemann Verlag, Leipzig 1999, ISBN 3-363-00730-2 (reprint of the Leipzig 1956 edition).
• Alfred Krautz, Maria Mirtschin u. a .: Fritz Lattke - painter and illustrator . 2nd edition Domowina-Verlag, Bautzen 2005, ISBN 3-7420-1636-9 .

Web links

• Something happened there . Children's book by Joachim Rohde with pictures by Fritz Lattke