Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini

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Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini (1881–1958) artist, painter, draftsman, graphic artist,
Mural, 1917, Arnold Schick's stone throw , Battle of St. Jakob an der Birs

Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini (born January 10, 1881 in Basel ; † August 5, 1958 there ) was a Swiss painter , draftsman and graphic artist . Along with Heinrich Altherr , Paul Bodmer and Walter Clénin, he was one of the busiest wall painters in Switzerland in the first half of the 20th century.

Life

Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini was born as the son of the native Ticino and stone sculptor from Stabio Isodoro Pellegrini (1841–1887) and Apollonia Schlueb (1837–1907) in Basel. After secondary school he studied at the Basel trade school with Fritz Schider and Albrecht Wagen. He also worked in his father's sculpture business, which was run by his older brother Isidor Raphael Pellegrini . After a three-year apprenticeship, Pellegrini left the Basel School of Applied Arts to continue his education in Munich . On November 4, 1899, after passing the entrance exam, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts as a student of Gabriel von Hackl . With Gabriel von Hackl he learned how to draw portraits, whereby special attention was paid to a naturalistic representation. During these three semesters 50 works were created, almost exclusively drawings, of which 42 were nudes. The first well-known self-portrait recorded in the artist's oeuvre catalog was also created in Munich.

In the summer of 1901 Pellegrini returned to Switzerland. After he was exempted from military service because of his slender constitution, he spent the following years in the mountains of central Switzerland . In Uri he discovered the Maderanertal with the Chästelenbach and later the mountains of Samedan in Graubünden . The lake landscape of Ticino and the landscape on Lake Thun also inspired Pellegrini to create many other works.

From April 1902 Pellegrini lived in Geneva , where he was employed by the graphic company "Atar". There he learned to retouch photographs, to make exact industrial drawings and to lithograph . The first advertising posters were created - those with sports motifs are particularly noteworthy - but also posters and prints with socially critical content that are stylistically close to Félix Vallotton's prints . The 1903 test print for Switzerland's first football poster bears witness to his subsequent activity as an illustrator. In his spare time he continued to work on his own works. In Geneva he met his patrons , the lawyer and politician Guillaume Fatio and the chemist Adolf Saager. This introduced Pellegrini to the publisher's son Robert Lutz, whom he followed to Stuttgart in 1906 . Ferdinand Hodler confirmed Pellegrini's decision to continue his studies there.

In 1907 Pellgrini was able to take over Louis Moilliet's studio in Stuttgart . From 1906 to 1908 he initially worked as an illustrator and commercial artist. In 1906 he became a member of the Munich Secession . In the years 1908–1912 he took lessons from Adolf Hölzel at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. With the entry into Hölzel's class Pellegrini's painting and drawing style changed fundamentally.

From 1913 on, Pellegrini increasingly portrayed figures from Greek and Roman mythology. The floating depictions of these gods initially created a purely motivic connection point to the Stuttgart group of friends that gathered around Otto Meyer-Amden . In addition to Pellegrini, Oskar Schlemmer , Willi Baumeister and his friend Hans Brühlmann belonged to the group. Pellegrini was inspired by figures painted by Brühlmann, who express emotions such as resistance, devotion, amazement and often sorrow and sadness in their sign language. Pellegrini had a deep friendship with Brühlmann until his untimely death in 1911.

From Hölzel and the three members of the artist group, Pellegrini received the strongest suggestions, both in terms of style and motif. While Pellegrini presented their allegorical meaning in his depiction of the gods, the other three chose an almost abstract, reducing symbolic language. Without the necessary knowledge of the ancient Greco-Roman mythology of gods, Pellegrini's works are difficult to understand. Many of his submitted competition entries were not understood and were rejected.

Pellegrini was the busiest and most successful wall painter of the Hölzel students. During his stay in Stuttgart and later in Munich, between 1903 and 1913 he was given twelve orders - in Stuttgart, Württemberg and outside the country - for execution. None of his works in Germany has survived. From 1914 to 1917 Pellegrini stayed again in Munich and became a member of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München . In 1913 he was asked by the art school in Essen and in 1926 by the art school in Cologne for a teaching position in monumental painting, which he refused.

In 1917 he returned to Basel. As a freelance artist, he made his breakthrough with the two wall paintings on the facade of St. Jacob's Church . Pellegrini designed posters such as the poster Why Were We Born Poor? Others were the poster for voting on women's suffrage, printed in Basel in 1920, Your sister, give her right, not just duty or the affiche Schon wieder Nacht , which advertised the eight-hour day in 1924, or the poster for the exhibition in the Kunsthalle Basel from 1937. Pellegrini was fascinated by sport, he also created numerous works for various sports; including drawings from the 1954 World Cup .

Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini (1881–1958), family grave, cemetery on the Hörnli
Family grave, cemetery on the Hörnli

In addition to numerous exhibitions at home and abroad, Pellegrini took part in the 1932 Venice Biennale . He campaigned for modern art on various levels, wrote art reviews and, among other things, suggested the foundation of the Basel-Stadt art credit in 1919 . In 1923 he arranged and organized the first exhibition of works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Switzerland for the Kunsthalle Basel . The mural Merkur combines original production and traffic , 500 cm × 1200 cm, created between 1921 and 1923, was originally on the facade of the former stock exchange at the Basel fish market. In 1939 the building was demolished. The parts of the picture, harvest workers and miners , can be seen today in the passage of the “Spiegelhof”. In 1945, Pellegrini spoke on the subject of illustration. In 1948 Pellegrini created the mural in the anteroom of the lecture halls in Basel University Hospital .

For almost 30 years he was a member of the Art Commission of the Public Art Collection. In 1949 he was awarded the Art Prize of the City of Basel . In a radio interview on April 3, 1937, Pellegrini spoke about his life.

Pellegrini married Maria Kneubühler (1882–1962) from Basel in 1904. Together they had a daughter, Anna Pellegrini (1914–2011). His grandson is the gallery owner and patron Daniel Blaise Thorens. The family grave is located in sector 5 in the Hörnli cemetery .

plant

Pellegrini was influenced by Ferdinand Hodler , Paul Gauguin , Edvard Munch , Adolf Hölzel, Hans Brühlmann, and Otto Meyer-Amden. His works include panel paintings and frescoes , as well as portraits , landscapes and figures. Through his acquaintance with the architect Theodor Fischer , he received orders for murals, for example a mural for the church in Kirchheim unter Teck in 1909 . Pellegrini painted the fresco, completed in 1917, for the St. Jacob's Church, which shows Arnold Schick's throwing stone in the battle of 1444 , based on designs developed in the course of a competition . Within his “great period of decorative wall painting, within the generation following Hodler”, Pellegrini designed a mural on the Basel stock exchange in 1922 and the large mural Apollo and the Muses on the front of the Basel city casino in 1941 . Because of its revealing depictions, the painting was smeared with paint by strangers shortly after the inauguration. In the course of the new casino building that failed in 2007, it almost disappeared from Barfüsserplatz .

Pelegrini's works are represented in several museums: Kunstmuseum Basel , Kunstmuseum Bern , Kunsthaus Aarau , Bündner Kunstmuseum , Kunstmuseum Luzern , Kunsthaus Zürich , Staatsgalerie Stuttgart , Kunsthalle Mannheim and the Städelsches Kunstinstitut (Frankfurt am Main) as well as the Daniel Blaise Thorens gallery.

literature

  • Tapan Bhattacharya: Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . January 7, 2009 , accessed April 1, 2020 .
  • Robert Darmstädter: Reklams artist lexicon. Philipp Reclam jun. Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-15-010281-2 .
  • William U. Eiland: Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini, 1881-1958: A Swiss Modernist and the Art of the Figure. University of Georgia, Georgia Museum of Art, 1996, ISBN 0915977273
  • Claudia Giani Leber: Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini and the Hölzel School. Editions Daniel Blaise, Thorens 1988.
  • Education Department Basel-Stadt. Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini. In: Art for Basel: 75 years of art credit Basel-Stadt. Art in public space. Schwabe Verlag, Basel 1974, ISBN 3-7965-0968-1 .
  • Peter Meyer : Exhibition for the 60th birthday of AH Pellegrini In: The work: Architecture and Art = L'oeuvre: architecture et art, Vol. 28, Issue 12, 1941, pp. 318–322 ( digitized ).
  • Alfred H. Pellegrini: Self-portrait In: The work: Architecture and art = L'oeuvre: architecture et art , Vol. 36, Issue 3, 1949, pp. 96–98 ( digitized version ).
  • Hans F. Secker: Built Pictures. Basics for an upcoming wall painting. (with detailed appreciation of the work of Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini), Atlantis-Verlag, Berlin / Zurich 1934.
  • Walter Ueberwasser: Pellegrini's new wall paintings in Basel. In: Das Werk: Architektur und Kunst = L'oeuvre: architecture et art, Vol. 24, 1937, pp. 306–308 ( digitized version ).
  • Walter Ueberwasser: To the memory of AH Pellegrini , Schweizer Kunst, Heft 10-11, 1958, S. 117-127 ( digitized version ).
  • Walter Uberwasser: AH Pellegrini. Development and work of a Swiss painter . With an oeuvre catalog by Anne-Marie Thommann, Schwabe, Basel, 1943.

Web links

Commons : Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Isidoro Pellegrini. In: Sikart
  2. ^ Academy of Fine Arts Munich: Matriculation book, Alfred Pellegrini, 1899. Retrieved on July 15, 2019 .
  3. ^ Heinrich Pellegrini, Football Posters. Retrieved July 15, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Heinrich Pellegrini: Pellegrini's obituary for Hölzel, October 1934. Retrieved on July 15, 2019 .
  5. ^ Heinrich Pellegrini: Poster from 1919, Why were we born poor? Retrieved July 15, 2019 .
  6. ^ Heinrich Pellegrini: Exhibition poster for the Kunsthalle Basel, 1937. Accessed July 15, 2019 .
  7. ^ Marie-Louise Schaller Swiss National Library: Heinrich Pellegrini, Football World Cup 1954. Swiss National Library, accessed on July 15, 2019 .
  8. ↑ ETH Zurich: Mural, Merkur connects primary production and traffic. Retrieved September 9, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Willy Raeber, Architecture and Art, 1924: Wall picture, Merkur combines primary production and traffic. Retrieved November 9, 2019 .
  10. ^ Swiss Bibliophile Society, 1945: Book Illustration. Retrieved November 9, 2019 .
  11. ↑ 1948, mural in the University Hospital Basel
  12. ^ Biography Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini ( Memento from March 20, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ Apollo and the Muses, pp. 275–279
  14. ^ Gallery, Daniel Blaise Thorens: Heinrich Pellegrini. Retrieved July 15, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Pellegrini, Alfred Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss painter
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel
DATE OF DEATH 5th August 1958
Place of death Basel