Hermann Beenken

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Hermann Daniel Theodor Beenken (born February 2, 1896 in Bremen ; † April 6, 1952 in Madrid ) was a German art historian , professor in Leipzig and full professor in Aachen .

Live and act

Hermann Beenken, the son of a merchant, studied for his high school art history in Freiburg and Munich , where he in 1920 at Heinrich Wolfflin with the theme The general design problem in the architecture of German Classicism Dr. Phil. Received his doctorate. He then moved to Wilhelm Pinder at the Institute for Art History at the University of Leipzig and shifted his main focus to sculpture in the Middle Ages . In 1922 he completed his habilitation on the subject of The Rottweiler - A German School of Sculpture of the 14th Century. He then taught at this university, initially as a private lecturer . From 1925 to 1927 Beenken then undertook a study trip to the Art History Institute in Florence as a scholarship holder , where he devoted himself to Florentine architecture and especially to the painters Masaccio and Masolino. Upon his return, the University of Leipzig took him on as the youngest associate professor for art history. He worked in Leipzig in close cooperation with Leo Bruhns and Theodor Hetzer .

In Leipzig he dealt with Jan and Hubert van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden , among others . Until 1938, Beenken had a journalistic controversy with the art historian Erwin Panofsky . The dispute arose over the still unresolved question of which of the van Eyck brothers is the authorship of the Ghent Altarpiece . Panofsky criticized Beenken's way of analyzing the work of the van Eyck brothers, and the opponents publicly disputed which method of the iconography and iconology developed by Panofsky could reliably prove the originality and interpretation of an art object.

After the handover of power to the National Socialists, Beenken signed the declaration of professors at German universities and colleges on Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state on November 11, 1933 . During his time in Leipzig he became a member of the National Socialist Teachers' Association in 1933 . After the beginning of the Second World War , he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1940 and the National Socialist German Lecturer Association in 1941 . A court martial against Beenken initiated by the company commander after the end of the war in April 1945 was no longer carried out due to the events. On July 25, 1946, Beenken was rehabilitated by the special committee of the anti-fascist party of Saxony.

In 1949 followed Beenken, who now which architecture and the time of romance had turned, a professor at the RWTH Aachen , where he served as the official successor to the given birth of his official duties and Peter Mennicken represented John Christian was transferred to the Department of Art History. His main areas of work were in the areas of style-critical investigations, Dutch and Italian painting of the 15th and 19th centuries and "creative building ideas of the Romantic era". There he was director of the Reiff Museum Collection from 1948 . On April 6, 1952, Beenken died during a study trip to Madrid.

Hermann Beenken is one of the most important Medievalists of his time and played a decisive role in a new approach to historicism . He pointed out that, in contrast to most art-historical style studies, his investigations did not deal with the formal style of the works of art, as was still partly represented by Alois Riegl , August Schmarsow and Heinrich Wölfflin, but with the inner logic between the meaning of a Deal with the object and its external form. He also showed that architecture can be a good mirror of the epoch or its tasks, and that the architecture of the 19th century faced all the tasks that had also been those of the past ages.

Publications (selection)

  • Artworks in Westphalia , Bonn: F. Cohen, 1923
  • Romanesque sculpture in Germany (11th and 12th centuries) , Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1924
  • Images of Bamberg Cathedral from the 13th century , Bonn: F. Cohen, 1925, 1st edition, 1st – 20th Thousand
  • Fourteenth-century sculptors on the Rhine and in Swabia , Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1927
  • Publications on the genesis of the Ghent Altarpiece:
    • On the genesis of the Ghent Altarpiece, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, H. Beenken, Wallraf-Richartz Yearbook (1933–34): 76–132 .;
    • Genter Age by van Eyck, revised , H. Beenken, Burlington Magazine 63 (1933): 64-72;
    • The “Friedsam Annunciation” and the problem of the Ghent Altarpiece , E. Panofsky, Art Bulletin 18 (1935): 432–73;
    • The status of the Hubert van Eyck problem: Questions about the Ghent Altarpiece , H. Beenken, Oud Holland 53 no. 1 (1936): 7–33;
    • The Annunciation of Petrus Christ in the Metropolitan Museum and the problem of Hubert van Eyck , H. Beenken, Art Bulletin 19 (June 1937): 220–41,
    • More on the "Friedsam Annunciation" and the problem of the Ghent Altarpiece , E. Panofsky, Art Bulletin 20 (December 1938): 419–42;
  • The Tympana of la Charité sur Loire , Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1928
  • The Master of Naumburg , Berlin: Rembrandt-Verl., 1939
  • The visual art of the early Middle Ages , in: Zeitschrift für deutsche Geisteswissenschaft 2, 1939/40, p. 28
  • The concept of death in 19th century German art , in: Zeitschrift für deutsche Geisteswissenschaft 1, 1938/39, p. 56 ****
  • Hubert and Jan van Eyck , Munich: Bruckmann, 1941; 2nd edition ibid 1943
  • The Nineteenth Century in German Art , Munich: Bruckmann, 1944
  • Rogier van der Weyden , Munich: Bruckmann, 1951
  • Creative building ideas of German Romanticism , Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1952

Literature and Sources

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reiff Museum
  2. ↑ This article is a preprint of The Experiencing Death section in his book on the 19th century, 1952.
personal data
SURNAME Beenken, Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beenken, Hermann Daniel Theodor (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German art historian and full professor at the universities in Leipzig and Aachen
DATE OF BIRTH February 2, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH April 6, 1952
Place of death Madrid