On the beach (Womacka)

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"At the beach"
Painter: Walter Womacka
Year of origin: 1962
Original size: 91 x 116.5 cm
Technology: Oil on canvas

The oil painting Am Strand is one of the most famous works by the painter Walter Womacka . It is often incorrectly referred to as “young couple on the beach” or “couple on the beach”. It has been reproduced more than three million times as an art print, postcard, and art calendar. The 1968 stamp had a circulation of 12 million.

In 2009, a reproduction of the picture was part of the portfolio of 40 works of art from the GDR , which was published by Neues Leben. As part of a new wave of ostalgias , a puzzle followed in 2010 by the publishing house Bild und Heimat.

The extraordinary success of the picture is due to the clarity and "youthfulness" of the picture as well as the current artistic development in the GDR at that time. While many painters painted scenes from working life as part of the Bitterfelder Weg , Walter Womacka created a realistic picture of two young people, which not only invited young people in East and West to dream.

Emergence

Walter Womacka reproduces a scene in his painting that he himself saw on the Baltic Sea beach in Loddin in 1960. He made several preliminary studies and finally several oil paintings in 1962. His daughter Uta and his younger brother Rüdiger were his models. A study from 1961 (pen and brush in black) is owned by the Gera Art Collection.

History and notoriety

“On the beach” by Andreas Bogdain

Shortly after its creation, the painter exhibited the picture at an exhibition organized by the Berlin Artists' Association, where some critics initially rejected it. It became known nationwide when it was featured on the front cover of NBI magazine . At the Fifth German Art Exhibition in Dresden in 1962/63, it was voted the most popular picture by 63% of visitors. In the following years it was reproduced over 3 million times a. a. sold to the USA and France and Belgium . Not only in the GDR, many families had a hardboard reproduction in their homes.

At the 19th meeting of the Presidium of the VBKD , the picture was particularly emphasized in the declaration The V. German Art Exhibition and its Teachings : "The artistic statement of the picture corresponds to the life-affirming, optimistic attitude of the artist, his joy in the beautiful in our life, his constant urge to rediscover this beauty in the working people again and again through his art, to make it aesthetically tangible and to link it closely with the ethical ideas of socialist people. Without fear of being accused of whitewashing by some, Walter Womacka consciously elevates the beauty of our life, the beauty of our adolescent youth and their inner wealth to the beauty of art and thereby comes to the aesthetic generalization of the truth of our life. "

The picture that became so popular was given to Walter Ulbricht by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED in 1963 on his 70th birthday. It was on loan to the Neue Meister gallery in Dresden , where it hung for decades. After 1990 the picture was transferred to the Federal Property Office. Since the Womacka retrospective in Eisenhüttenstadt in 2004 , it has been on permanent loan in the local museum.

The oil painting exists in several versions. An early version was shown in 2010 as part of the exhibition “Saxony by the Sea” in the Gera Art Collection . After the ZK had bought the “main picture”, Womacka received an inquiry from the director of the Neue Meister gallery in Dresden, who wanted to buy it for his gallery. He then painted a second, almost identical version of the picture. However, after the Neue Meister gallery received the original from Ulbricht on permanent loan, Womacka kept the second version of the picture and stored it behind a cupboard in his studio for decades.

A slightly modified version of the picture can be seen as a mural in Berlin's Heidekampweg. Andreas Bogdain painted a picture of the same name as a homage to Womacka.

Ulrich Plenzdorf mentions the picture in his novel The New Sorrows of Young W. There the picture is listed next to van Gogh's sunflowers as an example of the bourgeois furnishing of a bourgeois GDR apartment: "A real emetic, seriously."

literature

  • 2004: Show your colors - memories of a painter. Verlag Das Neue Berlin, ISBN 3-360-01257-7 .
  • 2009: 40 works of art from the GDR. New Life Publishing House, ISBN 3-355-01765-5 .
  • 2010: Walter Womacka - "On the Beach" puzzle - 500 pieces, A3 format. Verlag Bild und Heimat, ISBN 3-7310-0735-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Catalog "Collection of hand drawings of the GDR in the Art Gallery Gera, Part 1" (Art Gallery Gera, 1982)
  2. ^ Günter Feist and Eckhart Gillen: Kunstkombinat DDR. Data and quotations on art and art politics in the GDR 1945–1990 , Verlag Dirk Nishen, 1990
  3. ^ "Saxony by the Sea" ( Memento from January 11, 2017 in the Internet Archive ), information from the Gera Art Collection
  4. ^ Personal conversation with Walter Womacka on October 7, 2008 in his studio in Berlin
  5. ↑ Motivation of artistic facade design . In: Horizonte 20xx, edition 1/2012 . 2012, p. 10–12 ( horizonte20xx.de [PDF; 5.8 MB ; accessed on December 4, 2018]).