Alexander von Salzmann

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Alexander von Salzmann: Heartache , 1905
Alexander von Salzmann: The marriage paragraph § 300 , 1905

Alexander Gustav von Salzmann (born January 25, 1874 in Tbilisi , † March 3, 1934 in Leysin , Switzerland ) was a Russian painter , caricaturist and set designer . Many of his paintings are kept in the Art Museum of Tbilisi. After 1945 his works were exhibited again for the first time, in 1983 in the Wiesbaden Museum and in 2002 in the Murnau Castle Museum .

life and work

Artistic beginnings

Alexander Salzmann's ancestors were Caucasian Germans . At the beginning of the 19th century they immigrated as Protestant farmers from Swabia to Elisabeththal in Georgia , which at that time belonged to the Russian Empire . His grandfather had already moved to the city of Tbilisi with his family. His father Albert Salzmann (1833–1897) became an architect and married the daughter of a St. Petersburg master builder. In Tbilisi they ran an open house and set great store by a good education for their children. Her son Alexander's musical inclinations for painting and theater were encouraged from an early age.

Studied in Moscow

Alexander von Salzmann: In anticipation, 1909

At the age of twenty-two, Salzmann began studying painting in Moscow in 1892 .

Studied in Munich

On November 5, 1898, he enrolled at the Munich Academy to receive further training in Franz von Stuck's studio . At the same time he worked for the magazine Jugend .

Freelance artist in Munich

Around 1900 Salzmann had a joint studio at Findlingstrasse 28 with Adelbert Niemeyer and Carl Strathmann (1866–1939). In 1901 he took part in the first exhibition of the phalanx . At that time, at the latest, he met Wassily Kandinsky and thus had the opportunity to contact Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej Jawlensky .

1903, travels with Werefkin to Normandy

Salzmann traveled with Werefkin to France at the end of August 1903, while Jawlensky looked after the apartment in Munich on Giselastrasse. First they stayed in Normandy in the seaside resort of Carteret . Worth mentioning are paintings that Salzmann created in Normandy, which identify him as an astonishingly early Cloisonnian painter. On the return trip they visited Paris, where they studied and admired the works of Whistler , Zuloaga , Manet , Monet , Renoir and Cézanne in particular in the Louvre .

1906/07, Wiesbaden

It was unknown for a long time that Salzmann and his colleague Fritz Erler, who was only two years older than him, worked in the south wing of the Wiesbaden Kurhaus in the so-called Muschelsaal in 1906/07 in order to paint him in with the fresco cycle The Four Seasons .

Since 1906 he worked as a freelancer for the "Deutsche Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst GmbH, Dresden and Munich" . He designed craft items, including textiles.

Before 1910, Gustav Pauli , the director of the Kunsthalle Bremen at the time , organized "with great success an exhibition of his easily thrown goua paintings " in his museum.

At the Hellerau Festival Hall

From 1910 Salzmann is the Festspielhaus Hellerau in to Dresden belonging garden city Hellerau worked. There he became one of the most important collaborators of the composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze , the founder of rhythmic-musical education , and of the set designer and architect Adolphe Appia . Salzmann made a name for himself in particular “as a lighting inspector. In the pantomime performances of the stage house, the scene was structured by large prism-shaped bodies, which were set up like a backdrop or layered in a staircase as required. In the interior of this body, which was made of wood and covered with burlap, Salzmann had distributed light bulbs that could be easily switched “in order to achieve a wide variety of lighting effects.

In 1912, in Hellerau, Salzmann met the composer, pianist and ballet artist Jeanne Allemand , who was trained at the Geneva Conservatory . The couple married in Geneva that same year.

Tbilisi

In 1917 Salzmann moved with his wife to Tbilisi, where they opened a dance and music school. There he designed costumes and sets for several theatrical performances. In 1919 the couple met the Russian composer Thomas von Hartmann , who in turn introduced them to the esotericist , choreographer and composer Georges I. Gurdjieff .

Paris

In 1921, Salzmann was appointed to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where he successfully expanded the lighting system developed in Hellerau. In addition, he was active in the antique trade. During those years he also worked with the surrealists Josef Šíma and René Daumal .

In 1934 Alexander von Salzmann died of tuberculosis in the “Le Belvédère” sanatorium in Leysin , Switzerland .

Salzmann and Japonism

The Japonism exhibition of the Murnau Castle Museum discovered Salzmann for the first time as a Japonist in 2011 . To the astonishment of the professional world, it was found that this artist oriented himself stylistically on Far Eastern art much earlier than, for example, his colleagues from the New Artists' Association in Munich . He took over from Japanese woodblock prints a. a. the way of framing his representations on the picture carrier - as Jawlensky also did - with brushstrokes. He also used the extreme portrait format, even for pictures with Russian iconography . He liked to cut figures, houses and objects in his paintings and gave them strong contours. As early as 1902, Salzmann was practicing the custom of adding East Asian characters to his signature or monogram. From 1908, for example, Franz Marc was also to follow this fashion by stamping his letters and postcards with Chinese and Japanese soapstones in which he had cut his name - possibly in corrupt East Asian script himself.

literature

  • Gustav Pauli, memories from seven decades, Tübingen 1936, p. 265 ff
  • Isolda Kurdadze, Tamaz Tschkonia, Alexander Salzmann, Germans in Georgia, At the Beginnings of Georgian Opera Scenography, Caucasian Post No. 36, July / August 2002, no p.
  • Brigitte Roßbeck, Marianne von Werefkin, Die Russin from the circle of the Blue Rider, Munich 2010, pp. 86–91, 106, 268 ff
  • Brigitte Salmen (ed.), "... these tender, spirited fantasies ...", The painters of the "Blue Rider" and Japan, exh. Cat. Schloßmuseum Murnau 2011, ISBN 978-3-932276-39-2
  • Basarab Nicolescu, "Alexandre de Salzmann - un continent inexploré", in René Daumal et l'enseignement de Gurdjieff , Le Bois d'Orion, France, 2015.

Web links

Commons : Alexander von Salzmann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data from: James Moore, Gurdjieff: The anatomy of a myth, a biography , Element Books, Rockport MA, 1991, ISBN 978-1-85230-114-9 , pp. 127, 258
  2. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Alexej Jawlensky, drawing-graphic documents, exh. Cat .: Museum Wiesbaden 1983, p. 21 f, fig. 11–12, cat. No. 39–41
  3. ↑ Exhib. Cat .: Marianne von Werefkin in Murnau, art and theory, role models and artist friends, Murnau 2002, fig. 134–135, p. 134 f
  4. ↑ a b "Pauli: Memories from Seven Decades , 1936, p. 266."
  5. ↑ a b Kurdadze / Tschkonia: Alexander Salzmann, Deutsche in Georgien , 2002, o. P.
  6. ^ Matriculation book of the Munich Art Academy
  7. ^ "Roßbeck: Marianne von Werefkin, The Russian woman from the circle of the Blue Rider . 2010, p. 86. "
  8. ^ "Roßbeck: Marianne von Werefkin, The Russian woman from the circle of the Blue Rider . 2010, p. 87 ff and p. 269, note 42. "
  9. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Marianne Werefkin, Munich 2001, figs. 60–61, p. 69
  10. ↑ Martin Hildebrand, Who was Alexander von Salzmann, A biography with riddles - trace also leads to Wiesbaden, Wiesbadener Leben, 10/92, p. 14 ff.
  11. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Decorative and Conservative, The frescoes in the shell hall of the Wiesbaden Kurhaus by Fritz Erler, in: Wiesbaden international, 4/1975, p. 22 ff.
  12. ↑ Thomas Nitschke: The history of the garden city Hellerau. Hellerau Verlag, Dresden 2009, ISBN 978-3-938122-17-4 , p. 32
  13. ^ "Pauli: Memories from Seven Decades . 1936, p. 267 f. "
  14. ↑ Basarab Nicolescu, René Daumal et Alexandre de Salzmann , scribd.com, accessed on March 5, 2011
  15. ↑ Brigitte Salmen (ed.), "... these tender, spirited fantasies ...", The painters of the "Blue Rider" and Japan, exh. Cat.Murnau Castle Museum 2011, illus.s 166, cat.no.48, ISBN 978-3-932276-39-2
  16. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Werefkin and Jawlensky with son Andreas in the “Murnauer Zeit”, in exhib. Cat .: 1908-2008, 100 years ago, Kandinsky, Münter, Jawlensky, Werefkin in Murnau, Murnau 2008, p. 44
  17. ↑ Winter in the city by Alexander von Salzmann on artnet
  18. ↑ Horse sledges in Russia by Alexander von Salzmann on artnet
personal data
SURNAME Salzmann, Alexander von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Salzmann, Alexander Gustav von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian painter, caricaturist and set designer
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Tbilisi
DATE OF DEATH March 3, 1934
Place of death Leysin , Switzerland