Alma del Banco

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Alma del Banco, Summer Theater , oil on canvas, around 1918–1922

Alma del Banco (born December 24, 1863 in Hamburg ; † March 8, 1943 there ) was a German modern painter . In the era of National Socialism persecuted as a Jew, she took her own life in 1943 to the deportation to a death camp to escape.

life and work

Ernst Eitner with students from the Röver painting school on a study trip to Neustadt in Holstein in 1897. Fourth from left: Alma del Banco

Alma del Banco came from an assimilated Jewish family. Her father ran a trading business that was later continued by her brother. At the age of 30, del Banco turned to painting, after initially doing handicrafts . From 1895 to 1905, like many contemporary women in art , she completed a painting course at the private ladies' art school Valeska Röver in Hamburg with Ernst Eitner and Arthur Illies .

As an autodidact, she dealt with the works of Cézanne and Matisse , who were formative models for her early work alongside her teacher Eitner. And she went on trips through southern Europe. She implemented motifs from her native Hamburg area in an impressionistic way with the colorful palette of the south. In addition, she began to experiment with graphic simplifications.

Shortly before the start of the First World War , she continued her education in Paris with Jacques Simon , André Lhote and Fernand Léger . She dealt with Léger's early work and the current art movements of Cubism and Expressionism . In 1914 she returned to Hamburg to work as a freelance artist with her own studio in Grosse Theaterstrasse 34/35, which she had found with the help of her half-brother Sigmund del Banco.

Alma del Banco developed her own style of expression in the years after Paris. In the 1920s, she brought the graphic elements into the focus of the viewer by placing extreme emphasis on the preliminary drawing. Influenced by Cubism, the picture motifs were slightly distorted. Thin application of paint and areas with unpainted canvas result in an intentionally sketchy overall impression.

Del Banco was one of the most important figures on the Hamburg art scene. She made trips to Italy (with Gretchen Wohlwill , 1922), France and the Balkans , which she used for study purposes. In 1919 she was one of the founding members of the Hamburg Secession . In 1920 she joined the Hamburg Art Association and a year later the German Association of Artists . In the early twenties she took part in the round table of the journalist and writer Hans W. Fischer . Her studio developed into a meeting point for artists. In 1931 she was one of the founding members of the first German Zonta Club .

At the beginning of the 1930s, the style of the now seventy-year-olds changed. She now incorporated elements of the evolving Hamburg secession style into her work. Her old work moves away from the sketchy, looks more worked out, the lines around the edges now form soft, dark brushstrokes.

Alma del Banco was a sought-after portraitist; she painted numerous personalities of Hamburg society such as mayor Wilhelm Amsinck Burchard-Motz , Ida Dehmel and Max Sauerlandt . In Hamburg during the Weimar Republic she was a valued painter, as were her secession colleagues Anita Rée and Gretchen Wohlwill.

This changed with the increasingly anti-Semitic mood towards the end of the twenties, which finally led to the dictatorship of the National Socialists . In 1933, the Hamburg Artistic Association excluded del Banco because they came from a Jewish family. The Hamburg Secession , on the other hand, dissolved itself, among other things because it wanted to spare the colleagues of Jewish origin the humiliation of the expulsion demanded by the authorities.

Six paintings del Bancos and eight graphics were confiscated from the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1937 as part of the state-ordered “ Degenerate Art ” campaign . In 1938 she was also excluded from the Reich Chamber of Culture .

Alma del Banco's tombstone
Stumbling block for Alma del Banco

As a Jew and as an avant-garde artist, she was exposed to the pressure of the Nazi regime in two ways. The authorities forbade her to take part in exhibitions, and because of her exclusion from artist organizations and the public disregard for her works, she became more and more artistic and social.

After the death of her brother Sigmund, who was also unmarried, in 1938, she moved from the shared apartment on Jungfernstieg to Blankenese to live with her brother-in-law Hans Lübbert, who had set up a studio for her in his house years earlier. There, the authorities placed her under house arrest. The very old del Banco suffered from heart failure in her final years. Not least because of this, she felt too weak and too old to emigrate. When she received the decision to be deported to Theresienstadt , Alma del Banco committed suicide on March 8, 1943 with morphine .

Alma del Banco was buried in the area of ​​the “Lübbert” family grave in the Ohlsdorf cemetery , where a pillow stone commemorates her, grid square AC 8 (on Stillen Weg near Chapel 8). In Blankenese, a stumbling block was set for her in front of her brother-in-law's house . The house itself was demolished in 2019 for a new construction project.

Exhibitions

gallery

  • In the garden , around 1915

  • Portrait of Hunzinger , around 1920

  • Portrait of Dr. Wendemuth , around 1922

  • Girl with a red bow , 1925

  • Fishing boats in the harbor , around 1925

literature

  • Maike Bruhns : Art in Crisis. Volume 2, Hamburg 2001, pp. 48-50.
  • Maike Bruhns: Alma del Banco. In: Franklin Kopitzsch and Dirk Brietzke (eds.): Hamburgische Biographie . Lexicon of persons. Volume 2, Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-8353-0099-6 ( online )
  • Exhibition premiere. The forum for bequests presents works by eleven artists. Exhibition catalog. Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, Hamburg 2006 (online) .
  • Friederike Weimar: Alma del Banco (1862–1943). A Hamburg artist. With a list of works. Wachholtz, Neumünster 2011, ISBN 978-3-529-02852-6 .
  • Katja Behling, Anke Manigold: The painting women. Intrepid female artists around 1900. Elisabeth Sandmann, Munich 2009, p. 56f.

Web links

Commons : Alma del Banco  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Deviating from the year of birth 1863, which is documented, among other things, by the photo of the tombstone and under this link , the years 1862 and 1878 still exist in the literature (see DNB)
  2. ^ The ZONTA founding members , d-nb.info, accessed on May 17, 2016
  3. ↑ Picture of the pillow stone (at the bottom) at genealogy.net
  4. ↑ Alma del Banco on stolpersteine-hamburg.de, accessed on June 1, 2013.
  5. ↑ Matthias Schmoock: Blankeneser Künstlerhaus demolished due to construction project , abendblatt.de. July 30, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Banco, Alma del
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH March 8, 1943
Place of death Hamburg