Alfred Loercher

Portrait of Alfred Lörcher (oil painting by Albert Weisgerber , 1904)

Portrait of Professor Lörcher (oil painting by Bernhard Pankok )

Alfred Lörcher (born July 30, 1875 in Stuttgart ; † March 26, 1962 ibid) was a sculptor and medalist and from 1919 professor at the Württemberg State School of Applied Arts in Stuttgart and from 1941 at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart , where he worked until the end of the war was active.

Life

Alfred Lörcher was the only child of Carl (1849–1917) and Mathilde (1847–1898) Lörcher. After two years of apprenticeship in Paul Stotz's ore foundry, he attended the Karlsruhe School of Applied Arts in 1894, where he met the painters Hans Purrmann and Albert Weisgerber . In 1897/98 he worked in the applied arts workshop W. Wächter in Kaiserslautern. In 1898 he moved to the Munich Art Academy and became a student of Wilhelm von Rümann . Here he was influenced by the plastic conception of Adolf von Hildebrand . Ancient and early Renaissance were decisive for him, while Rodin and his dissolution of the plastic form was rejected by him. In 1902 he returned to Stuttgart as a freelance sculptor and carried out commissions for tombs, portraits, and later also for seals and medals.

In 1905 he traveled for a year through Italy, where he mainly studied archaic and Etruscan sculpture, but also the reliefs by Andrea Pisano at the Florentine Baptistery . In 1908 he moved to Berlin and in the same year exhibited his portrait bust of a Roman woman in the secession exhibition. In 1914 he won first prize at the international art exhibition in Stuttgart with his clinker brick sculpture Liegende (Museum Ludwig in Cologne) from the previous year .

In the First World War (1914-1918) he served as a volunteer medic. After the end of the war, Bernhard Pankok appointed him to the Württembergische Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule at the Weissenhof in Stuttgart as head of the modeling department and - after initial difficulties in 1933 due to his membership in a Masonic lodge and his alleged tolerance towards communist students - continued after the organizational merger from arts and crafts school and academy in 1941 to the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart in office, now responsible for the fields of decorative sculpture and building ceramics until the end of the war. From 1941 to 1951 he lived withdrawn in Billensbach in the Bottwartal , then back in Stuttgart.

Alfred Lörcher was a member of the German Association of Artists . In 1961 he was a member of the DKB Honorary Board.

style

Alfred Lörcher's grave, designed by himself, in the Bergfriedhof in Stuttgart, Department 18.

Lörcher found growing recognition beyond southern Germany not only with the closed, cubically simplified, reflective female figures from 1910–1933, which earned him the nickname "Swabian Maillol", although they differed significantly from Maillol's sensual, swelling texture, but also with the multi-figure reliefs of his late work since 1946, in which he addresses contemporary themes such as B. Strike talks (1957/58) or television (1959/60) designed. Whereas in the past it was the resting individual figures, above all seated figures, to which Winckelmann's terms of “noble simplicity and quiet greatness” apply, the post-war work developed antithetical to this: instead of stereometric round shapes and smooth surfaces, the clearly modeled figures now dominate Form moving groups or orderly rows and measure the space suggested by the base plate or the relief ground in an exciting choreography. Lörcher has thus resolutely gone it alone in the context of German sculpture in the 20th century and has achieved a high status, especially in the field of small sculptures and relief art, also in a European context.

Awards

• Villa Romana Prize 1959

Works

• Further works in the estate, private holdings: portrait bust, self-portrait, 1907
• Sleeping reclining woman , 1913/14 (private collection, Stuttgart)
• Striding Girl , 1923/24 (State Gallery Stuttgart)
• The stocking dancer , 1935 (Städtische Galerie Böblingen)
• Jumping riders , 1953
• Sparkassenbrunnen , re. 1955, Stiftstrasse Stuttgart, kneeling with grapes
• Revolutionary procession , 1957 (Kunsthalle Recklinghausen)
• Small group of riders , 1960
• Rectangular Table Conference , 1959
• Woman leaning against it , 1926/27 (private collection, Lindau)
• Panik II , 1959/60 (private collection, Stuttgart)
• Panik III , 1960 (Lower Saxony State Gallery Hanover)
• Menetekel , 1957 (Kunsthalle Mannheim)

Fonts

• About my work , in: German Art and Decoration 53, 1923, pp. 146–154
• Lörcher's work on his sculptural work , in: Die Kunst 27, 1926, pp. 68–72
• The tombstone , 1927

literature

• Karin von Maur :  Lörcher, Alfred. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 15, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-428-00196-6 , p. 55 ( digitized version ).
• W. Gischler, Alfred Lörcher , in: German Art and Decoration 44, 1920, pp. 264–267
• Hermann Strenger: The sculptor Alfred Lörcher . In: Württemberg. Monthly in the service of people and homeland, 1930, pp. 142–146.
• H. Hildebrandt, ibid. 69, 1931, pp. 43-48
• J. Baum, Alfred Lörcher , in: Die Kunst 21, 1920, pp. 268–278
• PO Heim, the sculptor Alfred Lörcher , 1935
• Exhibition category , Alfred Lörcher , Staatsgalerie Stuttgart , 1950
• E. Petermann, Alfred Lörcher on his 80th birthday, dedicated by his friends , 1955
• Exhibition category Alfred Lörcher , Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart , 1960
• M. Grüterich, Alfred Lörcher, sculpture-relief-drawings , 1976 (W-Verz)
• Exhibition category Alfred Lörcher , Staatsgalerie Stuttgart , 1978
• International Biographical Archive 22 , 1962

Individual evidence

1. ^ Numismatic Society Berlin: Brief biographies of the artist medalists and private mints . (PDF) Retrieved May 2, 2020 . 
2. ↑ Loercher, A. in: L. Forrer: Biographical Dictionary of Medallists, Volume VII, London 1923, p. 559.
3. ↑ Wolfgang Kermer : Data and images on the history of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart . Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1988 (= improved reprint from: The State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart: a self-portrayal . Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1988), o. P. [8, 10].
4. ^ Kuenstlerbund.de: Board members of the German Association of Artists since 1951 . Retrieved May 2, 2020 .