Alphons Biermann

Alphons Biermann (born December 19, 1906 in Sundern , Sauerland , † March 28, 1977 in Glees ) was a German sculptor. He was the first head of the sculptor's workshop at Maria Laach Abbey and shaped the development of Rhenish volcanic stone from building material to Rhenish marble .

Life

Alphons Biermann was born in Sundern in 1906. In 1932 he married Clementine Clara Maria Preker (1904–1967). The marriage had three children: the sculptor Hans Gerhard Biermann (* 1933), the art historian Alfons W. Biermann (1935–2014) and the doctor Dorothea Marx (1938–2012). After his training at Maria Laach Abbey and subsequent studies in Munich , Biermann was appointed the first artistic director of the newly founded sculpture at Maria Laach Abbey in 1932. He was in charge until 1971. After returning home from captivity , he made a name for himself far beyond the Rhineland as a designer of new facilities for churches destroyed in the war, numerous monumental war memorials and new Christian tomb art from autumn 1945 . Alphons Biermann died on March 28, 1977.

education and study

After finishing primary school in Werl , he began an apprenticeship as a painter in 1921 with the art and church painter Hans Steinhage. In the autumn of that year his uncle, the sculptor and Benedictine Reinhold Teutenberg (1864–1935) discovered his artistic talent and took his nephew to the sculpture studio of the Maria Laach Abbey for training. The atelier of the Laach Benedictine monks worked in the style of the Archabbey of Beuron and P. Desiderius Lenz OSB. After completing his four-year apprenticeship, Alphons Biermann switched to studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Theodor Georgii (1883–1963). Extensive sketchbooks show that Biermann attended nude and drawing courses at the painter Heinrich Knirr's painting school . Paul Klee and Emil Orlik were the most famous artists from this school. At the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , Biermann also heard art history as a guest auditor.

Life's work

After several years of freelance work in Munich and Werl, the Maria Laach Abbey entrusted him with the management of the newly established external sculpture workshop, which belonged to the art workshops of the ARS LITURGICA of the Maria Laach Abbey, at the suggestion of Father Bonaventura Dreesbach OSB . Biermann started on the premises of the former Hansa brewery in Niedermendig with initially eight employees. In 1937 the abbey relocated all of the workshops to specially built extensions to the former Prussian forest ranger's office in Maria Laach in the immediate vicinity of the abbey. Alphons Biermann and his family moved into the former forester's house from the 19th century on the south side of the courtyard.

New beginning after 1945

After returning home from French captivity in August 1945, he initially devoted himself to creating new focal points for the art workshops: Instead of the production and sale of plastered devotional objects by the art publisher, the reconstruction and furnishing of war-torn churches, the erection of war memorials in many communities and the search for them were now new forms of Christian tomb and remembrance culture in the foreground of his artistic work. In the monastic director of ARS LITURGICA, Theodor Bogler (1897–1968), a graduate of the Domburg pottery at the Bauhaus in Weimar and a teacher of ceramics, he found an understanding and stimulating partner who, like him, had his own experience as an artist and combatant (1914–18 ) looked back. Theodor Bogler had his first small-scale figures and groups of figures such as the Laacher Madonna , the Evangelist's Cross or reliefs of biblical scenes with Elijah or three young men in a furnace cast in bronze or burned for sale in the majolica factory in Karlsruhe. One of the first major orders in 1946 was the large bronze high altar cross for Trier Cathedral .

The next prominent order was to furnish the chapel in the Apostolic Nunciature of Archbishop Aloysius Muench (1889–1962) in Bad Godesberg . As the doyen of the diplomatic corps, the cardinal often brought high-ranking visitors to the studio to show them the progress at work, including the first Federal President Theodor Heuss (1884–1963), who later visited the artist several times, and Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the later Pope Paul VI.

New church rooms and the liturgical reform

A major challenge after the end of the war was equipping over 30 rebuilt churches across Germany. The first stimulating model was the redesign of the Maria Laach Abbey Church under the new Abbot Basilius Ebel, elected in 1946 . In 1947 he had the neo-Romanesque high altar donated by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898 with the massive ciborium above in the presbytery of the east choir removed and replaced with a new high altar with the late Romanesque medieval canopy from the donor's grave from the west choir above. The abbot Alphons Biermann consulted with this renovation and commissioned him to create the new west-facing popular altar and the seat of the abbot behind it from the white French limestone Savonnières of the imperial altar. In the following decades of his work, further altars and new church furnishings went to Düsseldorf-Gerresheim , Neuss-Grimlinghausen , Blasweiler , Heepen and the Bischöfliches Konvikt in Trier, among others .

War memorials

From 1946 on, Biermann designed more than 40 war memorials. The first large war memorial, a cemetery cross in local basalt from 1949, is in the cemetery of the municipality of Burgbrohl , another one in Kollig in Rhineland-Palatinate . One of the most important tombs was the high cross on the Düsseldorf Südfriedhof , which was financed by a Düsseldorf community foundation after an exchange of letters with the Düsseldorf councilor and initiator Hans Borgs-Maciewski with the life-size crucifixion group and was inaugurated in 1952. In 1950 Biermann had created the family grave of the founder, who in his capacity as the director of the grammar school in Wuppertal was known as the savior of Jewish children, in the form of the Good Shepherd in the same cemetery.

For Niedermendig , a top address in the mining and use of volcanic rock as building material, in 1950 he designed a three-meter-high monumental basalt stele with a larger-than-life figure of Michael in local basalt in the middle of a fountain in front of the town hall with the panels of the fallen in the background. The artist moved entirely away from the traditional form of mostly bricked war memorials with martial symbols of the war craft before and after the First World War and, like in Düsseldorf, created large Christian cemetery crosses with figurative design, such as in Einruhr or Niederzissen in the Eifel .

In 1956 in Rolandswerth he laid a massive ship made of the same basalt column on the banks of the Rhine with the names of the fallen on the side planks of the barn as a memorial. The larger-than-life, single-standing Three Women at the Grave from 1966, carved from monumental basalt steles at an exposed location in the cemetery in Langerwehe near Düren, are a very idiosyncratic form of the memorial . The municipality of Wirfus received a large Pietà in 1957 , the municipality of Müllenbach in 1959 a basalt Madonna in protective cloak as a war memorial.

Renewal of the tomb culture after 1945

Alphons Biermann always carried small sketchbooks with him on the war front in Russia from 1942 to 1944, in which he entered tiny sketches of sculptures and monuments with pencil, the forms of which he took up again in his later work. With the repertoire of these drawings and with his imagination and knowledge of Christian motifs, he gave essential new impulses in hundreds of examples of German tomb and sepulchral culture after 1945. His example in the search for new forms - especially figurative in the local materials (basalt, tuff or red sandstone from the Eifel instead of granite or marble) - was not only followed by his own students, mostly sons of freelance colleagues. Christian tombs were also his first commissions right after the reopening of sculpture in 1946.

One of the first orders for figurative tomb design in 1950 was the renovation of the tomb of the first President of the Prussian Rhine Province Johannes Horion (1876–1933) in the Düsseldorf Südfriedhof. There followed tombs for the founder of the Johnnesbrothers, Johannes M. Haw (1871-1949) in Leutesdorf , for the Underberg family in Rheinberg , for the family of the banker Hermann Josef Abs in Berkum near Bad Godesberg, for the founder of the Bitburger brewery Bertrand Simon (1882–1958) as well as a large number of tombs for priests and the fallen. In total, Alphons Biermann created well over 900 tombs.

More work

Biermann created his own wooden cross as early as 1951 for the meeting room of the Saarland State Parliament in Saarbrücken. Various communities received large, free-standing sculptures in basalt at the same time. He created his most extensive figural fountain system in 1960 for the inner courtyard of the former monastery on Jakobsberg near Boppard . Some of his works found their way overseas, especially to the USA .

Honors

• 1967 Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon

literature

• P. Drutmar Cremer OSB: On the history of the art workshops, the art publisher, the book and art shop ARS LITURGICA Abbey Maria Laach. Home year book of the Ahrweiler district 2006, p. 74 ff.
• P. Drutmar Cremer OSB: Spirit and Art. Memories of Alphons Biermann (1906-1977) in Maria Laach . Home yearbook of the Ahrweiler district 2008, pp. 71–74.
• Alfons W. Biermann: sculptures of faith from Eifel volcanic rock. For the sculptor Alphons Biermann Maria Laach on the 100th birthday. Die Eifel, Yearbook of the Eifelverein, pp. 34–41 (with illus.) In co-op. with Hans Gerhard Biermann.

Web links

• Sculpture Abbey Maria Laach
• Maria Laach Abbey
• Book and art shop Maria Laach