Anita Albus

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Anita Albus (born October 9, 1942 in Munich , also Anita Fleitmann ) is a German writer and illustrator .

biography

Anita Albus' father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were chemists. The great-grandfather was a student of Justus von Liebig . She lived with her family in Wolfratshausen until 1950 , when they moved to Iserlohn , where the father came from. Anita Albus studied free graphics at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen from 1960 to 1964 and began her artistic work as an author of children's books. In 1965 Albus returned to Munich. She became known for her meticulously painted depictions of plants, birds and butterflies - among other things, she illustrated Christoph Ransmayr's novel The Last World . In 1997 she published her essay volume Die Kunst der Künste ( Eichborn Verlag ). Since 2004 she has also been a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry . Anita Albus lives alternately in Munich and Burgundy .

The painter Anita Albus found role models in artists of the early modern age, especially of the 16th and 17th centuries: She trained herself on the artistry of these painters, who created images of nature with astonishing precision in still lifes and in natural history encyclopedias. Just like those “old masters” from the pre-industrial era, Albus - as a chemist-painter, so to speak - produces her own colors using traditional recipes from natural pigments . With their - in contrast to industrially produced pigments - inhomogeneous structure and a special layering technique on the painting surface, Albus creates unique color effects and the effects of an apparent three-dimensionality in your pictures. If the subtitle of one of her books The Botanical Drama is: Twenty-four Flowers Painted & Described from Life , then that characterizes the creative process of the painter Albus as an incorruptible naturalist. It is not insignificant for the masterful effect that Anita Albus takes months to complete even the smallest picture formats.

Anita Albus usually first published her paintings in her own books: Syntheses of natural history, artistic and narrative approaches and modes of representation. It should not be left unmentioned that museums and galleries are largely closed to their work. Her masterfully representational works, committed to a great occidental tradition, defy the mainstream of the modern avant-garde art business.

Since 2016, the Kunsthalle Kiel has received 63 works by Anita Albus on permanent loan thanks to the Karl-Walter and Charlotte Breitling Foundation . These were presented in an exhibition from May to October 2017.

Location in art

Claude Lévi-Strauss does not simply locate Albus in the realm of classical naturalism . In her "meticulous striving for accuracy" she also connects with the depiction of the enigmatic and has influences from surrealism . The art critic Julia Voss certifies Albus "to see as the still life painters could see" without attempting a mere imitation of nature. Rather, according to Voss, the art consists in making "discoveries" visible through painting.

From rare birds

Her book About Rare Birds, with reports and pictures of extinct and endangered bird species, received a lot of attention . Her work is "one of those syntheses of natural history, artistic and narrative viewing and representation that have become more and more rare since the 19th century, which brought us Linné's " Lappländische Reise ", Audubon's depictions of the American bird world and Brehm's" animal life ", said Ulrich Baron.

The book contains both historical bird pictures, for example the portrait of a pair of beaking pigeons by the American ornithologist and draftsman John Audubon , as well as his own pictures, painted with paints that Albus made himself according to old recipes. In her literary ornate portraits she tells four stories of extinct bird species, including the passenger pigeon and the spear birds , as well as six very rare species, including bald ibis , corncrake and hawk .

In her analyzes of certain species, the author proceeds “in such a way that she confronts scientific narratives - old and new - with mythical and literary knowledge. This has the advantage that, on the one hand, she does not bury the huge wealth of knowledge contained, for example, in Indian myths, and, on the other hand, it classifies it in the history of natural history, which she is also concerned with. "With each of her books she demonstrates anew, how scientific accuracy and sensual knowledge, natural history, cultural history and painting can still merge wonderfully today. ”In the summer of 2015, Julia Benkert made a documentary about her work and life.

Works

  • Heaven is my hat, earth is my shoe. Illustrations. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1973.
  • The garden of songs. A book for children and others. It includes 11 old German folk songs. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1974.
  • Eia popeia et cetera. A collection of old lullabies from the people. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1978.
  • The botanical spectacle. Greno, Nördlingen 1987.
  • Farfallone: ​​A Novel in Letters. Hanser, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-446-15223-7 .
  • Love bonds. Stories, Hanser, Munich 1993.
  • The art of the arts. Memories of painting. Diana, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-453-15036-8 .
  • Paradise and paradox. Miracles from five centuries (= The Other Library ), Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-8218-4522-8 .
  • From rare birds. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-10-000620-8 .
  • The lot of lust. An attempt via Tania Blixen. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-000621-9 .
  • The botanical spectacle. Twenty-four flowers painted & described after life. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-000622-6 .
  • In the light of darkness: About Proust. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-10-000624-0 .
  • Owls and cathedrals. Stories, essays and marginalia. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-000634-9 .
  • Sun butterflies and moon moths. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2019, ISBN 978-3-10-000633-2 .

Exhibitions

Awards

Quote

"In Anita Albus' pictures we see things in a way that we have forgotten or forgotten."

- Claude Lévi-Strauss

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ mausihexe1.blogspot.com
  2. ↑ Julia Voss: More real than reality. In: FAZ.net . March 27, 2012, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Julia Voss: With Albus' eyes. Speech at the opening of the exhibition “Of rare birds and plants. The artistic work of Anita Albus. ”In the Detlefsen Museum, Glückstadt on March 25, 2012.
  4. ^ Off to the Kunsthalle in Kiel to see the pictures by Anita Albus. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . June 15, 2016, p. 14.
  5. ↑ Anita Albus - The Art of Seeing. (No longer available online.) Kunsthalle zu Kiel, archived from the original on August 20, 2017 ; accessed on August 20, 2017 .
  6. ^ Claude Lévi-Strauss : Introduction. In: Anita Albus. Watercolors 1970–1980. Catalog for the exhibition in the Stuck Villa, Munich. Insel, Frankfurt / M. 1980, ISBN 3-458-04868-5
  7. ^ Julia Voss : Anita Albus exhibition in Glückstadt. More real than reality. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. March 27, 2012
  8. ↑ Reviews u. a. in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Focus, ZDF Read! , Süddeutsche Zeitung, Deutschlandfunk, Berliner Zeitung .
  9. ↑ Rheinischer Merkur . October 6, 2005.
  10. ↑ Cord Riechelmann: Constant transformation. The painter and writer Anita Albus tells of sunken, threatened and endangered birds. In: The daily newspaper . December 31, 2005.
  11. ↑ Katharina Narbutovic: Arpschnarp, please report! Anita Albus pursues natural history as a cultural history. In: Der Tagesspiegel . February 14, 2006.
  12. ↑ Bavarian television website
  13. ↑ My texts are not filigree Anita Albus in conversation with Sandra Hoffmann, Deutschlandfunk, May 5, 2015, accessed May 6, 2015.
  14. ↑ Good quality of nuts and dried figs Press release Berlin of December 13, 2010
  15. ^ Yearbook - German Academy for Language and Poetry 2007 . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2008, p. 265 ( google.com [accessed July 31, 2010]).
  16. ↑ sueddeutsche.de accessed on April 6, 2019
  17. ↑ Quoted from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of July 25, 2009, p. 29.
personal data
SURNAME Albus, Anita
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and illustrator
DATE OF BIRTH October 2, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich