Alo Altripp

Alo Altripp (born September 25, 1906 in Altrip ; † January 16, 1991 in Wiesbaden ; actually Friedrich Schlüssel ) was a German painter and graphic artist of the New Objectivity . Today he and Otto Ritschl are considered to be one of the most important Wiesbaden painters of the 20th century. The stylistic development of his oeuvre as a whole can be followed precisely chronologically and divided into clearly distinguishable work phases.

life and work

The artistic beginnings

After training from 1920 to 1924 at the Mainz School of Applied Arts in the subjects of commercial graphics and decorative painting, he attended the master school for painting from 1924 to 1925 in Munich and studied at the Academy for Arts and Crafts in Dresden from 1925 to 1926. In 1927 and 1928 Altripp stayed in Ellrich on the southern edge of the Harz Mountains . In the following year 1929 he took a job as a theater painter at the State Theater in Wiesbaden to earn a living . In his free time he had perfected his painting in the New Objectivity style to such an extent that from then on he was able to make a living as a freelance artist in Wiesbaden. With 26 other members, Altripp was a member of the Free Art Association of Wiesbaden.

Painter of the New Objectivity

His early works, which are assigned to the New Objectivity style, ultimately represent a form of realism and can be understood as a reaction to the emotionally charged painting of Expressionism . His painting of this epoch is characterized by a distanced, detailed reproduction of reality. It can be compared with that of Georg Schrimpf , Heinrich Maria Davringhausen , Adolf Erbslöh or Alexander Kanoldt .

Characteristic of Altripp's painting of this art direction is his general interest in light in all its manifestations, “a topic that has become more and more important to him in the course of his life.” The “illuminating light”, which was so frowned upon by the Expressionists, had the young one Impressed by the painter. With the sunlight and its shadow he modeled landscapes and gave the architecture back the third dimension.

Surrealistic influences

Around 1930, Altripp's painting was in upheaval. His way of expression was becoming increasingly detached from objective reality. Fantastic creatures were created using oil on canvas or spraying on paper. They are not yet completely abstract because they are explained to the viewer by titles. Explaining such pictures from Altripp with reference to the art movement surrealism opens up a new perspective. Pictures by the Rhinelander Max Ernst are likely to have influenced Altripp's work in the early 1930s. This is illustrated in particular by bird head shapes that are reminiscent of Ernst's work.

During the period of artistic change, two events occurred that were to determine Altripp's further life. In 1932 he met Alexej Jawlensky and shortly afterwards he learned that his art was not wanted by the state.

At the end of 1932 Ritschl had arranged an exhibition for the Nassauischer Kunstverein in the Wiesbaden Museum, in which pictures by Altripp were also shown. It was then shown in the Folkwang Museum in Essen . Also attended by Willi Baumeister , Ernst Wilhelm Nay and Fritz Winter in part. After the seizure of power of Adolf Hitler "Images for the protection of the people" were from the Nazis left behind. Altripp tells us that the exhibits have not been confiscated: “I was not prohibited from painting. Our pictures also came back from Essen in 1933. "

Inner emigration

Even if Altripp described himself as an apolitical person, he took a clear position against the Nazi regime and offered passive resistance : "He had strictly refused to make any kind of pact with National Socialism and had refused to paint swastikas." As early as 1933, he branded Nazi rule with the portrayal of his Ahriman , the embodiment of evil par excellence. In addition, clairvoyantly he predicted a future catastrophe, e.g. B. 1934 with a monotype which he called "War".

The friendship with Jawlensky

Since 1934 he was friends with Alexej von Jawlensky . Without Altripp, who after the Nazis came to power belonged to Jawlensky's small circle of friends who supported the banned from exhibiting since 1933, his series of “Meditations” would not have been so extensive, and it would have been poorer with a few versions and highlights. By helping Jawlensky to complete his old age, Altripp put himself in danger of being persecuted by the Nazis. From the beginning of 1934 to 1940, Altripp came regularly to the severely disabled Jawlensky. It was also Altripp who first called Jawlensky the “icon painter of the 20th century” and coined this term as a trademark for Jawlensky's later painting. In addition, he persuaded Jawlensky to paint five “meditations” on a gold background - treasures of his last work.

Altripp dealt intensively with Jawlensky's “meditations” and encouraged him to work in a further technique that Jawlensky did not know before. These paintings have a very different character than the ones you usually see. They are atypical in Jawlensky's oeuvre. The larger areas of color are worked in a kind of scratching technique, in fine parallel lines. Jawlensky found out about the technology when Altripp showed him his own work, which had been worked with "combs". Jawlensky asked the young colleague to bring him painter's combs in various thicknesses and widths. Jawlensky applied the previously unknown method, combined it with the brush painting he was familiar with, and in this way, in his last creative year in 1937, developed some works of art of very special charm.

Through Altripp you not only learn that Jawlensky was still open to technical innovations in old age, but also that there are many interesting things about his way of working. As a result, Jawlensky, who is now severely restricted in movement, painted his “meditations” using a unique method. He had the picture carriers mounted on a device that served him as an auxiliary construction on the easel in order to be able to work in serial production: This was achieved with the help of two boards that were so large in size that there were eight meditation oil papers on them Have thumbtacks attached. Four above and four below. The easel was provided with two stakes on which the pallet was placed. Brushes and paints were laid out within easy reach. When Jawlensky had finished a sequence, Lisa Kümmel and Altripp put the finished pictures on white Bristol cardboard.

Altripp described the glue in an identifiable way: “We mounted these pictures ... with glue ... from the Otto Rings company ... it was called Syndetikon , it is a fish glue that came from Gdansk ... a wonderful glue, it was water-soluble ... it was in the shop Hutter ordered. "

The canvas, which Jawlensky used from 1934 for some meditations and still lifes, was also used on a recommendation from Altripp, which may be of particular interest to some art collectors in the debate about authenticity problems. These are raw linen that Altripp had already provided with two layers of primer for his own painting. He cut these up into formats suitable for Jawlensky.

Monotypes in non-colors

The monotype came into use at Altripp after a visit to the Strasbourg Cathedral and the Isenheim Altarpiece by Mathias Grünewald in Colmar . There he experienced the “light of the Gothic and the inner light at Grünewald”. He then tried out the expressive possibilities of the colors white and black in the sense of light and dark in his monotypes. Altripp then experimented with this pair of colors in a manner similar to that described in Wassily Kandinsky’s textbook “On the Spiritual in Art” .

Abstract spatula work

Around 1936 Altipp was extremely creative and productive despite internal emigration . He experimented with colors, shapes, techniques and painting materials. At that time he developed a repertoire of forms that he would use again and again to build on after the war. Lines of vertical and horizontal lines, the circle, the triangle and above all the cross should play a role in the future.

Obviously, the observations made during the 1934 trip to Strasbourg and Colmar are reflected in these pictures. Technically, he worked on giving his pictures the effect of picture light coming from the depths. All pictures of this kind have in common that they have the impression of gloom and lack of freedom. The colored lights do not shine, they have no opportunity to unfold. The outside world in the picture, the dark color, is too powerful for that. Given such paintings, in which the viewer z. B. can associate human skeletons, explain the painter Altripp in retrospect as a chronicler with visionary gifts who foresaw the massacres of war.

For Altripp's spiritual worldview and his artistic development, trips to Switzerland became important from 1935 onwards. At that time, in order to deepen his knowledge of anthroposophy , he took part in courses and conferences at the Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel . On these occasions he also traveled to Bern to see Paul Klee . These visits to Klee are considered to be formative in the years 1935 to 1939.

Anticipated Informel

Towards the end of the 1930s, Altripp's artistic development from figurative to abstract art had reached a high point. Amazingly, he already dealt “around 1936 with the problem of informal painting ”, which only emerged shortly after the war in Paris.

While Altripp pursued his abstractions in his undiscovered roof studio, the war broke out. If you look at his art of the 1930s, you can easily see that it behaves in an antipodal manner to the statecraft that was prescribed at the time .

During and after the war

During the National Socialist rule (1933–1945), his work, which he could only do secretly during this time, was considered “degenerate” . From 1940 to 1943 he did military service as a soldier. From 1943 to 1945 he was a draftsman at Opel in Rüsselsheim .

After the end of the war, the American occupiers in Wiesbaden created a central collecting point in the museum for salvaged important German works of art and looted art . When they were looking for a suitable, well-versed draftsman for registration and inventory, they agreed on Altripp, who was unencumbered by a Nazi past. As an artist, he had never served the Nazi ideal of portraying blond, blue-eyed and muscular people. A studio was set up for him in the museum, which he was also allowed to use for private purposes, like Hans Völcker before him . Altripp won the trust of Walter Farmer , the officer of the special department of the US Army that headed the Central Collecting Point, not only through his meticulous factual drawings . Altripp had the task of drawing valuable, high-quality works of art.

In 1949 he received an American scholarship from the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. From 1951 to 1971 he worked as a lecturer at the Werkkunstschule Wiesbaden .

Kidney table time

In the first years after the war he created pictures that breath a completely different spirit than those he painted in the 1930s.

They lack the earlier impression of gloom and tribulation. They no longer show anything threatening. At that time, Altripp decided to abstain from color, to start over with the color pair black and white. He experimented with different chalks and thereby laid down on the image carrier paper. From 1955 he decided to use the hardest chalk, the Pitt chalk. It is suitable for precise lines as well as for hatching or for rubbing with your fingers or a brush to achieve gray tones.

The work of his hand reflected in his pictures in gestures that took on the most varied of forms. Just as rich are the shades from glistening white to light and gray to black and pitch black.

With the shapes, it is noticeable that you cannot find a pure geometric shape. The circle does exist, but it is never circular. Triangles appear, but their sides are curved in curves. There are also rectangles, but none is right-angled, they all have unequal sides. You look in vain for a square.

Sweeping forms characterize all of his paintings from this period. They symbolize vitality and dynamism. Due to the kidney and triangular shapes, these pictures can be stylistically assigned to the kidney table age . With these chalk drawings, Altripp reveals himself, as in the 1930s, as a sensitive person who reacted to the zeitgeist like a seismograph with his art . Having passed through the informal twenty years earlier, it is only too logical that he no longer wanted to join contemporary informal painting such as that practiced by the artists of the Quadriga .

Altipp made international contacts in the 1950s. So he met his colleague Giuseppe Santomaso in Venice around 1951 and exchanged ideas with him about the Informel. He visited Gérard Ernest Schneider , whose formal apparatus is related to his, in Paris. At that time he also frequented Pierre Soulages' studio .

Illuminated miniatures

At the beginning of the 1960s, Altripp returned to color. In Ticino, Italy and Greece he had experienced the light anew. He explained: “There was translucent color, translucent matter”, and added that from this point on his pictures became colorful and “ miniature-like ”. Altripp wanted to see his colorful small formats from the 1960s onwards from the perspective of painted, precious book illustrations.

Until his death in 1991, Altripp mainly used the watercolor technique. It is less common to find ink works in his late work . In his repertoire of shapes and colors over the next few decades, he was no longer subject to any restrictions, instead he drew from a treasure trove of tried and tested visual material from the past, used it like set pieces and cheerfully produced an overabundance of new visual worlds.

Exhibitions

year	place	designation
1946	Dresden	General German Art Exhibition
1946	Marburg	University by Richard Hamann
1948	Cologne	Kölnischer Kunstverein: "Alo Altripp / Edgar Ende "
1949	new York
1954	Witten	museum
1955	Aachen	New Aachen Group, Suermondt Museum
1957	Aachen	Neue Aachener Gruppe, 5th annual exhibition, Suermondt Museum
1963	Munich	New group , large art exhibition in the Haus der Kunst
1965	Dortmund	Museum on the east wall
1968	Hanover	Art Association
1978	Basel	Aenigma Gallery
1980	Munich	Alvensleben Gallery
1981	Mainz	Art circle Novo
1987	Speyer	Art Association
1988	Wiesbaden	museum
1989	Awls	Fritz Winter House
1991	Mainz	State Museum
1994	Ludwigshafen am Rhein	Art Association
1998	Iserlohn	Art Association Villa Wessel
2006	Speyer	Municipal Gallery Speyer
2006	Altrip	Alta Ripa town house

Honors

• 1976 - Max Slevogt Medal of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate

literature

• Alexander Hildebrand: Artists in the City , in: Wiesbaden international, 1973, p. 23 ff
• Alexander Hildebrand: Memory and Vision , in: Wiesbaden international, 1976, p. 32 ff
• Alexander Hildebrand: Alo Altripp in Munich. Works from 1930 to 1980, in: The artwork 33 (4) 1980, p. 93
• Alexander Hildebrand: Alo Altripp on her 75th birthday. Private printing for the friends, with different. Illustrations, Wiesbaden 1981
• Alexander Hildebrand: The painter Alo Altripp , in: Wiesbaden international, 1981, p. 20 f
• Frank Teichmann, Alo Altripp: meditation pictures. Stuttgart 1986
• Clemens Jöckle. My pictures are not compositions. Alo Altripp on his 80th birthday on September 25, 1986. Heimatjahrbuch 1987, 3rd year, publisher: Landkreis Ludwigshafen, p. 119 ff
• Alo Altripp, in conversation with Renate Petzinger. , in: Exh. Cat .: Alo Altripp, A Wiesbaden painter, Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden 1988
• Alo Altripp: Memories of Jawlensky. Tape protocol of Martina Conrad, Jawlensky on her 125th birthday, SWR II, machine writing, Mainz / Wiesbaden 1989, private archive for expressionist painting, Wiesbaden
• Alexander Hildebrand: Memory of Alo Altripp, To the death of the Wiesbaden painter. Wiesbadener Leben, 3/1991, p. 29
• Alexander Hildebrand: Alexej Jawlensky in Wiesbaden reflexes on life and work (1921–1941). in exhibition catalog: Jawlensky's Japanese woodcut collection. A fairytale discovery . Edition of the Administration of State Palaces and Gardens, Bad Homburg vdH, No. 2, 1992, p. 64 f
• Alo Altripp. Retrospective. Exhibition catalog, Kunstverein Ludwigshafen am Rhein, 1994
• Walter I. Farmer: The Keepers of the Heritage. The fate of German cultural assets at the end of the Second World War. de Gruyter 2002. ISBN 3-89949-010-X
• Bernd Fäthke: Jawlensky and his companions in a new light. Munich 2004, p. 210 ff
• Clemens Jöckle: Alo Altripp - for the 100th birthday. Notes on the exhibition in the Städtische Galerie Speyer from July 6th to August 6th, 2006, MS
• Bernd Fäthke: Alo Altripp and Alexej Jawlensky. Heimat-Jahrbuch, Ed. Rhein-Pfalz-Kreis, Ludwigshafen 2006, p. 98 ff
• Alexander Hildebrand: Wiesbaden as the last stop: The Russian painter Alexej Jawlensky in the years 1921 to 1941 , in: Writings of the City Archives, Vol. 10, Wiesbaden 2007, p. 175 f
• Bernd Fäthke: Alo Altripp - Of colors, shapes and non-colors. Galerie Draheim, Wiesbaden 2009. ISBN 978-3-00-029529-4
• Michael Altripp u. a .: Alo Altripp. Exhib. Cat .: Galerie MUTARE, Berlin-Charlottenburg 2019.

Web links

• Literature by and about Alo Altripp in the catalog of the German National Library
• Alo Altripp exhibition in 1998 in the Villa Wessel in Iserlohn
• Kunstverein Pfalz on the exhibition in Altrip ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• Heimat- und Geschichtsverein Altrip eV with a description of the dispute over the name and the late reconciliation with the home community
• Section about Alo Altripp on the Altripp family's website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ “Jöckle: My pictures are not compositions. Alo Altripp on his 80th birthday on September 25, 1986 . 1987, p. 119. "
2. ^ "Teichmann: Alo Altripp: Meditation Pictures . 1986, p. 9. "
3. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Marianne Werefkin, Munich 2001, p. 66 f.
4. ^ "Jöckle: Alo Altripp - for the 100th birthday . 2006, p. OS "
5. ↑ Martin Hildebrand, exhib. Cat .: Otto Ritschl: 1885–1976, Bildwelt und Weltbild, Jahrhunderthalle Hoechst, Frankfurt-Hoechst 1985.
6. ↑ Wolfgang Grätz (ed.), The Nassau Art Association, Fine Arts in Wiesbaden, From the Bourgeois Revolution to Today, The Nassau Art Association, Wiesbaden 1997.
7. ↑ Bruno Russ, In a series with Jawlensky and Ritschl, The Wiesbadener aller Alo Altripp would have been 100 years old on Monday, Wiesbadener Tagblatt September 22, 2006.
8. ↑ Otto Ritschl, Biographisches, in: Kurt Leonhard, Otto Ritschl, Das Gesamtwerk 1919–1972, Stuttgart 1973, p. XVI f.
9. ↑ ^{a b} “Altripp: In conversation with Renate Petzinger . 1988, p. 8. "
10. ↑ Bernd Fäthke: Alo Altripp and Alexej Jawlensky. Heimat-Jahrbuch, Ed. Rhein-Pfalz-Kreis, Ludwigshafen 2006, p. 98 ff.
11. ↑ Bernd Fäthke: Alexej Jawlensky. The Wiesbaden years. Draheim, Wiesbaden 2012.
12. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Alexej Jawlensky, heads etched and painted, Die Wiesbadener Jahre, Galerie Draheim, Wiesbaden 2012, pp. 19 f and 41 f, fig. 20.
13. ↑ Wassily Kandinsky, About the Spiritual in Art, especially in Painting, Munich 1912, (2nd edition), (The first edition was published by Piper in Munich at the end of 1911 with imprint 1912), p. 80 and footnote 1.
14. ↑ Ulrich Schmidt, Städt. Museum Wiesbaden, Gemäldegalerie, catalog, Wiesbaden 1967, no p.
15. ^ Arnulf Herbst, On the history of the Wiesbaden Collecting Point, in: Art in Hessen and on the Middle Rhine, No. 25, Darmstadt 1985, p. 11 ff.
16. ^ Ulrich Schmidt, On the history of the Wiesbaden picture gallery, in .: Städt. Museum Wiesbaden, Gemäldegalerie, catalog, Wiesbaden 1967, no p.
17. ^ By order of the American military government in Germany "party members had to be singled out."
18. ↑ Walter Farmer, The Preservers of the Heritage. The fate of German cultural assets at the end of the Second World War, Schriften zur Kulturgüterschutz / Cultural Property Studies, Berlin 2002, ill. Pp. 237 and 238.
19. ^ New Aachen group. 5th annual exhibition January 1957 . Exhibition catalog Suermondt Museum, Aachen. Eschweiler 1957.
20. ↑ Large Art Exhibition Munich 1963 , Süddeutscher Verlag Munich, official exhibition catalog 1963 (p. 105: Altripp, Alo, Wiesbaden. Catalog No. 500: A863 / 62 X , watercolor, 24 × 18 cm; 501: A180 / 63 III , watercolor, 18 × 24 cm)