Alfred Schmela

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Alfred Schmela in front of his first gallery in Düsseldorf's old town, 1961

Alfred Schmela (born November 23, 1918 in Dinslaken ; † July 20, 1980 in Düsseldorf ) was a German artist and gallery owner .

Life

origin

Alfred Schmela came to Düsseldorf with his parents in 1923 during the Weimar Republic . His father Franz Laurentius Schmela came from Leisnitz in the district of Beuthen , where trouser buttons, cleaning buckets, bathtubs, sugar, stationery and beet sugar were sold in the parental "Paul Schmela department store". At the age of fourteen he escaped village life and became an authorized officer at the pipe association in Düsseldorf.

Education

In 1940, Alfred Schmela first took an exam as a structural engineer in Cologne (then the "State Building School") and briefly studied at the Technical University in Berlin until he was called up for military service. From 1940 until the end of the war he did military service in various countries and was taken prisoner by the US after being wounded near Livorno / Italy . There he managed to escape over the Alps. From 1947 Schmela studied at Jo Strahn's private painting school in Düsseldorf- Niederkassel and then with André Lhote in Paris until the end of 1950 . In 1952 Schmela met his future wife Monika, whom he married in July 1953, in the house of the sculptor Hannes Rompel, a student of the sculptor Edwin Scharff . In 1954 the daughter Ulrike was born and in 1962 the daughter Franziska was born.

The gallery owner

In 1957, Schmela opened the initially modest Schmela Gallery at Hunsrückstrasse 16/18 in Düsseldorf's old town , in a 9 × 3 m room with large shop windows . On the recommendation of Norbert Kricke , he showed Monochrome by the French painter Yves Klein in his opening exhibition . The gallery quickly became an “insider tip” on the emerging German and European art scene. In addition to Yves Klein, Schmela brought together young artists such as Jean Tinguely , the members of the artist group ZERO , Arman , Christo, Konrad Klapheck and Joseph Beuys , whom he had met in 1958, and Gerhard Richter and Jörg Immendorff in the 1960s . The artists are now known all over the world and are represented in all major museums.

The collector couple Gustav Adolf and Stella Baum frequented Schmelas Galerie from the time it was founded for purchases that were paid for through savings in the household budget, and they often invited people to the New Year. During one of these New Year's Eve celebrations at the Baum house in the early 1960s, Alfred Schmela asked for access to the bathroom late at night, stripped down to his long underpants, wrapped them from top to bottom with toilet paper, and painted his bare, very round stomach with Frau Baum's make-up as his face, returned with measured steps, following the voice of Callas , back into the living room and, to thunderous applause, let his stomach face circling in time with the Callas arias and grinning.

Alfred Schmela had a flair for new, innovative artists and quickly found popularity from the German art scene, which was increasingly settling in the Rhineland, but also bought works by Jean Dubuffet , Paul Klee , Wols , Joseph Cornell , Cy Twombly , Ellsworth Kelly , David Hockney , Alberto Giacometti , Agnes Martin , Georges Braque , Fernand Léger , Claude Monet as well as Antoni Tàpies and Lucio Fontana , which, to the chagrin of his wife, he sold again quite quickly because, as Alfred Schmela repeatedly emphasized, he was not a collector but a gallery owner . In 1968 he resigned from the “Association of Progressive German Art Dealers”, which he himself had initiated and which was founded two years earlier to “[...] promote interest in contemporary art.” He also refused to participate in the Association organized Cologne art market .

After changing locations, Alfred Schmela moved into a spacious gallery building designed by the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck in 1971 in Düsseldorf's Mutter-Ey-Strasse , very close to the Kunsthalle . At that time the building was celebrated as the “first original new gallery in the Federal Republic”. In the following years Schmela continuously expanded his gallery, and Schmela became the spiritus rector for various museum projects . On his 60th birthday, Schmela was made an honorary member of the Düsseldorf Art Academy .

estate

Since his death in 1980, his daughter Ulrike has been running the gallery and managing the estate. In 2008 the gallery left its traditional premises in Düsseldorf and moved to Berlin. In the same year, the gallery building was acquired by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and at the end of 2009 it became a branch of the North Rhine-Westphalia art collection under the name Schmela Haus . From 2005 to 2013 the granddaughter Alfred Schmelas, Lena Brüning, ran her gallery of the same name with her own program in Berlin. Since 2015 she has been writing her dissertation in art history about the Schmela Gallery. In 2018 Lena Brüning curated the exhibition "Alfred Schmela on the 100th birthday" in the Schmela Haus in Düsseldorf together with the curators of the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection Doris Krystof and Linda Walther.

archive

The archive of Alfred Schmela's gallery with several thousand letters, sketches, photographs, catalogs and reviews from the 1960s to 1980s was purchased by the American Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and is now in the research center of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Early exhibitions

literature

  • Karl Ruhrberg (Ed.): Alfred Schmela. Gallery owner · pioneer of the avant-garde . Wienand, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-87909-473-X
  • Susanne Gaensheimer , Doris Krystof, Linda Walther (eds.): Alfred Schmela on the 100th birthday. A centenary exhibition, German / English, catalog for the exhibition from November 24, 2018 to January 20, 2019 in the Schmela Haus, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Kerber 2018, ISBN 978-3-7356-0546-7

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Monika Schmela: Memories . In: Karl Ruhrberg (Ed.): Alfred Schmela. Gallery owner · Wegbereiter der Avantgarde , Cologne 1996, p. 168
  2. ↑ Martin Schieder , Werner Spies, KO Götz: In the view of the other: The German-French art relations, 1945-1959 . Akademie Verlag, 2005, ISBN 978-3050041483
  3. ↑ Loretta Baum-Ischebeck: Notes on the Boltenberg. Memories of Gustav and Stella Baum . In: Gerhard Finckh (Vorw.): »Private«. Contemporary Wuppertal collectors in the Von der Heydt Museum . Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal 2009, p. 88
  4. ↑ Monika Schmela, in: Karl Ruhrberg (Ed.), Pp. 203 f.
  5. ↑ Ute Bongartz: “Doing something different…” Lena Brüning on the Schmela family of gallery owners In: Monopoly from August 7, 2009
  6. ^ Anne Kretzschmar: Art marketing as a family tradition: The gallery owner Lena Brüning on the road to success in: Deutschlandradio Kultur from April 17, 2007
  7. ^ Art collection NRW: Art collection NRW: exhibitions. Retrieved November 17, 2018 .
  8. ↑ The memory given away in: Der Tagesspiegel of December 22, 2007
personal data
SURNAME Schmela, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German artist and gallery owner
DATE OF BIRTH November 23, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Dinslaken
DATE OF DEATH July 20, 1980
Place of death Dusseldorf