Albert Haberer (artist, 1908)

Albert Reinhold Haberer (born July 12, 1908 in Stuttgart , † June 22, 1986 in Tübingen ) was a German painter , interior designer , furniture designer and author .

biography

Family, private life

Albert Haberer grew up in Stuttgart as the sixth of nine children of master carpenter Georg Haberer (1867–1954) and his wife Katharina (1875–1956), born Zipperer. In 1935 he married Martha Häcker (1908–1998), later the birth of the children Bärbel (1936), Ulrike (1938) and Godfrid (1941). During the war, Albert Haberer bought a small house in Gächingen on the Swabian Alb, rebuilt it after the war, expanded it and supported the family with plans to rebuild farmhouses. In 1944 he was called up for military service, where he built accommodations for soldiers in Poland.

Only after the war ended in 1945 did he return to the family who had left their Stuttgart apartment during the war to live in Gächingen. After the war, he bought another piece of land there, on which he had a small wooden house built, in which the drawings for his later reference books were made. According to his designs, this house was extended and rebuilt and, after retreating to Stuttgart in 1951, continued to serve as a weekend house. In 1954 the Gächinger Kantorei was founded in these rooms , which from then on met there several times a year to rehearse until 1964. With the beginning of his retirement in 1973, Albert Haberer was in Gächingen more and more often and spent his old age in the house he had built and expanded.

Professional background

In 1927 Albert Haberer passed his apprenticeship examination as a carpenter in Stuttgart. From 1927 to 1931 he studied interior design at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Stuttgart, last year (1930–1931) as a master student of Adolf Gustav Schneck . From 1931 he worked in various offices and as a freelance interior designer and from 1938 as a consultant at the Stuttgart State Trade Office.

Shaped by the Bauhaus idea, the synthesis of art and craft, after the war (1948) Albert Haberer published together with the architect Willi Simon the specialist book Furniture invented and self-made (Bärenreiter) and in 1951 the specialist book Das Möbel (Konradin), together with the architect Karl Eichhorn. His specialist books, which have appeared in several editions, are each dedicated in individual volumes to a series of examples of various interior design tasks. With plans, photographs and drawings, they provide a design repertoire, a collection of ideas for exemplary solutions, which should be accessible through the visual material alone without comment.

As a freelance interior designer, he also designed seating furniture that is manufactured in large series and some of which are still on sale today. He also organized exhibitions for exemplary living and designed the exhibited examples himself. In 1951 he moved to Stuttgart because he was employed as an editor at Konradin Verlag for the magazine BM (Bau- und Möbelschreiner) , the specialist journal for the joinery and joinery trade. Further publications followed, in Konradin Verlag, whose editor-in-chief for BM magazine he was from 1954 until his retirement in 1973. After that he devoted himself exclusively to painting.

Picturesque character and development

As a young interior designer Albert Haberer discovered the abstract painting and learned by his wife Martha hackers, with a niece in 1933 Oskar Schlemmer was a friend, Ida Kerkovius know whose pupil he was in 1934 and with whom he remained friends until her death 1970th Kerkovius was a former student of Adolf Hölzel , who in 1912, at the same time as and independently of Kandinsky, began to move away from figurative painting in the direction of abstraction, which also fascinated Haberer and shaped his entire work.

Hölzel and Kerkovius were among the artists ostracized by the National Socialists. When Kerkovius' studio was completely destroyed in 1944, she found shelter in the Stuttgart apartment, which was now occupied by Albert Haberer's sisters. After the war she had a few students again, including Albert Haberer. A close friendship gradually developed from the student body. Through Kerkovius, Haberer was fully familiar with the teaching at the Bauhaus and introduced to Hölzel's painting style. The early works in particular were clearly shaped by Kerkovius' style. At the end of the 1940s, Kerkovius and Haberer regularly worked together on an abstract topic of their choice, which each implemented in his own way. From the mid-1950s there were regular joint painting weekends in Gächingen and in 1965 Haberer and Kerkovius went on a painting trip to Venice , during which a film was made (SWR) that was often shown at exhibitions by Ida Kerkovius.

Even as a young architect, Albert Haberer was also enthusiastic about Japanese painting, calligraphy , architecture and especially the gardens in the context of the teahouses. In the early 1960s, based on Japanese culture, he built a tea house as a studio in Gächingen and gradually transformed the garden space, which was understood as part of the interior, into a Japanese garden . This quiet passion for gardening and Zen Buddhism , which impressed him on a trip to Japan, led him more and more to painting out of meditation and spontaneous presence.

Around 1969 Albert Haberer met the somewhat older painter Paul Reichle (1900–1981, State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart), a student of Willi Baumeister . An intensive exchange of painterly experiences began. Through the friendship with Paul Reichle and the examination of his painting and that of Willi Baumeister, he was able to find his own artistic language. Just as Ida Kerkovius broke away from Hölzel's influence, Albert Haberer gradually managed to stand out from her expressive style and to find her own picturesque waters.

In 1973 Albert Haberer retired as editor-in-chief, author and freelance architect and devoted himself exclusively to his passion to paint. In a short time, a multi-layered work unfolded in its own signature of clear picture structure and differentiated coloring. The first solo exhibition of his works opened three years later. Further exhibitions followed until his death in 1986 and beyond. These later exhibitions were organized and supported especially by his eldest daughter Bärbel, who cataloged and managed his life's work. In 1986, Albert Haberer and the 25 years younger artist and painter of the same name, Albert Haberer from St. Wendel, got to know each other on the occasion of the last exhibition that took place in Kirchheim an der Teck during Haberer's lifetime and the idea of a joint exhibition was born, which was held in St. Wendel took place.

plant

The fact that Albert Haberer initially pursued a craft profession as a trained carpenter and in the course of his life not only designed furniture, but also built and painted it himself, also shaped his painting. In many of his works, the conception and the constructive use of forms can be understood, to which an intensive examination of colors and the color theory of the Bauhaus and Goethe is added. For Albert Haberer, Hölzel and especially Kerkovius, his pupil, paved the way for a formal abstraction and an artistically free handling of form and color, detached from the object. His compositional security, gained through training as a carpenter and interior designer, is a key characteristic of his art. His works are characterized by clear structures and a great wealth of differentiated forms and color nuances. He always manages to strike a balance between color and shape, his teacher's credo.

The early works are, based on Ida Kerkovius, mostly pastels. There are also two cycles with charcoal drawings and later some reverse glass pictures, which, however, are not so complex due to the medium. Haberer's late work mainly comprises oil paintings, some of considerable size, as well as watercolors, ink drawings and collages. The latter emerged in the later phase of his work and served several times as a template for oil paintings, just as elements from the drawings and watercolors are later taken up in the oil paintings. The progressive abstraction from representational painting and the play with colors in Albert Haberer's later work reveal the influence of Bauhaus artists such as Paul Klee , Wassily Kandisky, Johannes Itten and Oskar Schlemmer as well as Willi Baumeister, who also recognize the related style of his painter friend Paul Reichle coined.

Albert Haberer developed his own expressive style, especially in his late creative phase, which goes well beyond his role models. He played with figurative representations within the abstraction, which result from the architectural composition of his pictures and depending on the location of the viewer shine out more or less. Often form is created out of color. Particularly in the later oil paintings, his own layering of forms over and inside one another creates a density and plasticity of his pictures, which is probably also achieved by the artist first priming and later working on his pictures again and again in different phases, often on ten or more more at the same time. The images were not created in one piece, but gradually grew again and again through meditative engagement with the respective object towards an intensive compression of the representation that appears tangible.

His painterly oeuvre is characterized by the search for vibrant color surfaces and color tones. Starting with constructive forms and strictly built images, he found an increasingly freer painterly style. While his early pictures often appear formally overloaded, the phase of exclusive painting begins to detach from the constructive structure of the picture. The ductus signaling both the shape and the color gradient gains more and more independent character, which increases the effect of the free and unbound composition. Many pictures seem like calligraphy written in one go, although they are only partially. Most of the improvisational effect he strives for as a personal expression of painterly sensation is achieved through manual means and cleverly used techniques.

The basic tone of Albert Haberer's pastels and oil paintings is rather gloomy despite the use of clear, intense colors in many works. Brown, black and gray tones are set in contrast to colors, but often dominate them by appearing as an omnipresent background and dimming the color shapes as shading, which however gain in plasticity. Albert Haberer preferred a primer to the bare white canvas, which he applied in advance like plaster with sponges, which later also suggested Ida Kerkovius, who painted her last large series of oil paintings on such “plastering grounds”. This explains the darker note of most of Haberer's oil paintings, whereas the watercolors and ink drawings, some of which are enriched with pastel shades, often have a lighter base note and are more fragile and translucent in their delicacy than the very dense pastels of his early phase and the extremely detailed, interlaced shapes and colors of his later ones Collages and oil paintings.

Further information about Albert Haberer's work can be found in the two catalogs listed here under 'Literature', which were created in 1998 and 2008 on the occasion of his 90th and 100th birthday and on which this article and the description of his work are based.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

1976: Cologne, Galerie Busmann & Haberer
1978: Schöneich, town hall
1979: Altenkirchen, Landschaftsakedemie
1981: Regensdorf near Zurich, community museum
1982: Tübingen, gallery in the Geschwister-Scholl-Schule
1983: Esslingen, Galerie Forum
1984: Gächingen, community center
1984: Marburg, gallery in the Hofstatt
1986: Kirchheim Teck, Kornhaus
1986: Heidenheim, foyer town hall
1988: Musberg near Stuttgart, Burg Gallery
1989: Stuttgart, Kunsthaus Schaller
1998: Stuttgart, Kunsthaus Schaller
1999: Tübingen, Galerie am Hausthof
2008: Böblingen, Galerie Contact, on the occasion of Albert Haberer's 100th birthday
2008: Stuttgart, Galerie Königsblau, on the occasion of Albert Haberer's 100th birthday
2012: Winterbach, Old Town Hall
2019: Münsingen, Reutter Immobilien GmbH

Group exhibitions

1981: Schönaich, City Hall
1986: Stuttgart, Kunsthaus Schaller, twelve artists show watercolors
1986: Stuttgart, Kunsthaus Schaller, Ligne e Couleur
1987: St. Wendel (Saarland), gallery in the courtyard with Albert Haberer from St. Wendel
1988: Stuttgart, Galerie Adriana, with Gertrud Tonne
1990: Stuttgart, gallery in the Sonnenberg retirement home, with Gertrud Tonne
2002: Stuttgart, Galerie Königsblau, Ida Kerkovius and her students
2004: Stuttgart, Galerie Königsblau, Power of Color
2007: Stuttgart, Galerie Dorn, with Willi Baumeister and Hans Berweiler

Publications

with Willi Simon: Furniture designed and made by yourself. Instructions for school, workshop and home. Bärenreiter, Kassel 1948.
with Karl Eichhorn: The furniture. A specialist book on room and furniture design for craft and school with natural-size cuts. Konradin, Stuttgart 1951.
with Karl Eichhorn: external doors. A specialist book for craftsmen and architects on the design of all types of exterior doors. Konradin, Stuttgart 1952.
Door + gate. 5th completely revised, substantially expanded edition (in three languages) of the textbook external doors. Konradin, Stuttgart 1952.
with Karl Eichhorn, Eberhard Gaugele (Ed.): Interior work in the house. Konradin, Stuttgart 1958.
Workbook of the Book Guild. Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1960 a. 1961.
You just have to know how to help yourself. Vol. 1-3. Goldmann, Munich 1970.

literature

Albert Haberer, pictures from five decades. Kunsthaus Schaller, Stuttgart 1998.
Albert Haberer, Counterpoints of Absolute Painting in the Context of Ida Kerkovius and Adolf Hölzel. Galerie Contact, Böblingen and Galerie Königsblau, Stuttgart 2008.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Haberer, Albert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Haberer, Albert Reinhold (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German painter, interior designer, furniture designer and author
DATE OF BIRTH	July 12, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH	Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH	June 22, 1986
Place of death	Tübingen