Anna Feldhusen

Anna Feldhusen

Self-Portrait 1899

Anna Feldhusen (born November 17, 1867 in Bremen , † June 12, 1951 in Bremen) was a German painter and etcher .

biography

Art education

As a young girl Anna Feldhusen decided to become a visual artist.

Early on she went to Munich  /  Dachau to the painter Caroline Kempter (1856–1925) and studied with Maximilian Dasio (1865–1954) and Oskar Graf (1870–1955). For a senior daughter of the 19th century, this training path was considered “something completely impossible”. That may have applied to the “normal” bourgeois daughter. The young women, however, who knew about their artistic qualities, had the courage and the will to choose a different "non-bourgeois" life. In order to get a good education and achieve outstanding performance, they were ready to take this step out of the security of social recognition. The self-portrait of 22-year-old Anna Feldhusen as a painter at the easel, 1899, testifies to this freedom and her self-confidence. She probably recognized her talent for graphics herself. So she went to Worpswede to see Fritz Mackensen (1866–1953) and Hans am Ende (1864–1918) to be instructed in etching. Anna Feldhusen also stayed regularly in Dötlingen in the summer months and took drawing lessons from Georg Müller vom Siel (1865–1939). In Dötlingen she often stayed with her painter friend Marie Stumpe (1877–1946), whose husband was a successful tobacco importer in Bremen and only came to her summer house on the weekends in Dötlingen.

Work

Anna Feldhusen ran her own studio all her life. In addition to the Bremen work space, she kept her studio in Munich and used the stimulating atmosphere of this place in the winter months. She fought directly and indirectly for the rights of women artists by joining the “Bremer Malerinnenverein” in 1902, the “Bremer Künstlerbund” in 1922 and the GEDOK in 1929 . Anna Feldhusen was also a member of the Association of Düsseldorf Artists. For a long time she was the only painter who applied for and received a trade license as a painter. She signed her pictures with the note: Bremen painter and graphic artist. She sold her art well into old age.

Many of them were familiar with Anna Feldhusen from the Bremen Cathedral Parish's Christmas bazaar, where her prints could be bought. She was and is still in the memory of several generations with her views of home in Bremen school books. The current account book of the artist press in Worpswede is evidence of their high productivity. It shows over 150 orders with more than a thousand sheets. From 1903 to 1943 she regularly sent exhibitions, mostly sales exhibitions, in the graphic cabinet of the art gallery and in the art show on Böttgerstrasse. Some of her etchings have been included in the model collection of the trade museum. She illustrated calendars, magazines and reading books.

Dachau artists' colony

"The air here is a real painter's air, the light a real painter's light!" Said the Munich art historian Wilhelm Hausenstein about the Dachau moss. Attracted by the flair of the mythical and the primeval, many artists moved to the idyllic artists' colony of Dachau north of Munich. Between peat cutters and broom-makers, Germany's most sought-after artist colony emerged here - after Worpswede .

Carl Spitzweg , Wilhelm Leibl , Max Liebermann , Emil Nolde and Lovis Corinth are just the most famous names. Hundreds of painters set out to discover the original, the magic of the simple in the hinterland of Dachau. They watched the farmers doing their hard work in the fields and the peat cutters extracting the precious fuel. They loved the shimmering light and the simple nature and brought a bit of freedom to the country: the painters from the moss. But the real novelty of this new generation of artists was: They painted outside in nature. The plein air painting spilled eastward from France in no time, and the wonderful light and shimmer of nature in the moss did the rest. The painters made their works more and more impressionistic: They painted green moss streams, the evening fog and birch forests bathed in changing light and also liked to choose fleeting, temporary motifs. The objects increasingly dissolved into dots of color, movement and areas of light.

Initially, the Dachau residents eyed the artists who had moved there with suspicion. But over time the skepticism subsided. Some painters even managed to get into the city's magistrate. For the Dachau people, however, the many “ painters ” took much more getting used to than the men who painted : They wore broad hats and reform clothes or even trousers, smoked pipes in public and often lived in “wild marriage”. Together with their male colleagues, they led the life of bohemians outside the doors of the big city of Munich. Instead of bars, dancers and cafe houses, they now painted cows, sheep, moor and trees - not infrequently they paid the farmers a tip for their animal models. Anna Feldhusen felt very comfortable in this “climate”. She moved the center of her life to the Worpswede artists' colony . But she kept her small apartment in Dachau so that she could return to Dachau for a few weeks at any time.

plant

Old oak

The work by Anna Feldhusen available today consists of a large graphic and a very small pictorial part. The graphic part consists mainly of Bremen cityscapes and landscapes around Worpswede. The picturesque part should consist of still lifes with flowers and landscape paintings, mostly with moor and heather motifs, in watercolor and oil. Anna Feldhusen was a versatile eraser. She used the possibilities of technology in different ways. The city views, often limited excerpts from Bremen's old town, are precise reproductions of the situation. Small parts, very precise and well composed, in the system they often only get their mood quality through the additionally introduced color. These are primarily line etchings. The color, which is often complementary, is either directly applied as a color etching in multi-color printing or subsequently with watercolors over it. However, the graphic structure of lines always remains central, the color is simply added to the composition. Often different single-color prints were created from one plate. This part of her work has been passed down through a large collection in the Focke Museum .

For her landscapes in and around Worpswede, the graphic artist Anna Feldhusen primarily used a different technique. Many of the well-known pictures are not line etched , but executed in aquatint . The motifs are accordingly more generous and laid out more linear than flat. They are far less detailed. The quality of expression is not achieved through different colors, but also through the velvety, technology-related blackening. Worpswede's romantic legacy resonates in these atmospheric leaves. Both the cityscapes of Bremen and the landscapes around Worpswede have been traded at auctions in Bremen with increasing success since the late 1970s .

The exhibition “ Hermine Overbeck-Rohte and Bremen painters around 1900” provided a first impression of their painterly work. It showed landscapes and flower still lifes collected from private collections.

literature

• Nils Aschenbeck : Dötlingen artists' colony . Aschenbeck & Holstein, 2005, pp. 26 and 50, ISBN 3-932292-78-2 .
• Inge Jacob: Anna Feldhusen . In Hermine Overbeck-Rohte and the Bremen painters around 1900 . Edited by the Fritz and Hermine Overbeck Foundation, Bremen 1992.
• Inge Jacob: Feldhusen, Anna . In: Women's history (s) , Bremer Frauenmuseum (ed.). Edition Falkenberg, Bremen 2016, ISBN 978-3-95494-095-0 .
• Bärbel Schönbohm in: ... and they did paint! . 2007, pp. 62-64, ISBN 978-3-00-021669-5
• Vollmer, Volume II (E – J), page 87

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Partly cited from BR-online_ artist colonies in Bavaria