Arminius Hasemann

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The bear, portal of the former bus depot of the Allgemeine Berliner Omnibus AG (ABOAG) , today Arena Berlin , Berlin-Treptow, sandstone and artificial stone
Mother and child fountain, Geisenheimer / Laubacher / Rauenthaler Strasse residential complex, shell limestone
Figural reliefs at the ABOAG bus depot, clinker brick
Monkey group was created after 1922, donated to the Berlin Zoo in 1979 , sandstone
Seated negress , shell limestone, Leuchtenburgstrasse (as of 2018)
Standing faun , shell limestone

Arminius Hasemann (born September 6, 1888 in Berlin , † in 1979 before August 20, ibid.) Was a German sculptor and graphic artist .

Life

Arminius Hasemann, son of a Berlin measuring instrument maker, grew up partly in the area around the Berlin Nikolaikirche , partly in rural Zehlendorf and acquired the year- old at a boarding school near Filehne in the province of Posen . From 1906 to 1908 he then studied stone and wood carving at the teaching institute of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin . He then studied for a year with Hermann Volz at the Grand Ducal Badische Kunstschule in Karlsruhe and from 1910 to 1912 at the University of Fine Arts in Charlottenburg with Gerhard Janesch (1860–1933). The study of sculpture and graphics accompanied stays with his uncle, the painter Wilhelm Hasemann in Gutach , Florence and Carrara . The annual exhibition of the Berlin Secession in 1912 showed two marble heads by Hasemann, Condottiere and Narr .

Hasemann spent the following two years traveling. As a traveling musician, he traveled with two violinists , the Switzerland and drove over Genoa after Ceuta . A hike from Gibraltar through southern Spain ended in Barcelona . First artistic successes made further trips possible. The outbreak of World War I surprised Hasemann in Paris . He returned to Germany and took part in the war as a soldier at the front. During the war, the proceeds of the journeys appeared under the title Heaven and Hell on the country road with 42 woodcuts. The work reached four editions by 1922 and made Hasemann famous.

“An eminently expressive, genuinely woodcut style that works with highly concise means is united ... with the surging imagination of the invention and the keen observation of ingenious bohemianism and, for example, Partly purely clarified artistic effects. "

- General encyclopedia of fine artists from antiquity to the present.

One of the portfolios The Circus , published in 1920, with 20 original woodcuts is now in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco . After the war, Hasemann was interested in not only graphics but also plastic works in public spaces. Hasemann developed his style from a synthesis of Expressionism and Art Deco . Examples are the mother and child fountain in the Berlin artists' colony and the sculptural work created in collaboration with the architect Franz Ahrens for the ABOAG bus depot in Berlin-Treptow, since 1995 the Berlin Arena . Hasemann was friends with the Berlin building contractor Adolf Sommerfeld , whose father he portrayed in a bronze bust in the early 1920s, and for whose company he designed the logo in 1930. Hasemann's artistic originality declined from around 1930.

In mid-1932 Hasemann became a National Socialist . After Hitler's seizure of power, he “organized” as a cultural warden , a party function at the lowest level, wearing a hat and a weapon, in the area of ​​the NSDAP local group Zehlendorf, where he lived and worked in his father's house. However, Hasemann hardly received any public commissions during the Nazi era . Although he withheld his expressionist works when he applied for jobs, he was unable to deny his style, which was now ostracized, and he became impoverished. None of Hasemann's few works from the Nazi era have survived, either as a result of the war or because his bronze sculptures were melted down on the occasion of the metal donation by the German people from 1940.

Drafted towards the end of the Second World War, Hasemann was taken prisoner by the Soviets near Berlin. From this he got in 1946 in a leading position in the building staff for the construction of the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park . After its completion in May 1949, Richard Paulick employed him from 1950 onwards in the reconstruction of the German State Opera Unter den Linden . Hasemann designed the statues on the attic of the building. Adolf Sommerfeld, who returned to Germany from British exile, had himself portrayed by him in a bronze bust in the early 1950s.

In West Berlin , where his home and studio was located after the split in Berlin, Hasemann kept silent about the years from 1933 to 1945 and his work for the Soviet Army to public clients in his résumés. When in 1965 the ÖTV trade union requested a memorial plaque on the house where SPD chairman and Reich President Friedrich Ebert died in Joachimsthaler Strasse in Berlin, Hasemann got himself the job of honoring the politician he had once reviled with a late work. Today the plaque adorns the archive building of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn .

In old age Hasemann, who lived on a GDR pension , became an eccentric. Shortly before his death in 1979, he bequeathed the sandstone sculpture of a group of monkeys to the Berlin Zoological Garden , which was placed in front of the tropical house . Hasemann's wife died a little later. Gradually, burglars plundered the ruined house, around the mid-1980s it was torn down and the property cleared. On the initiative of former neighbors and friends of Hasemann , the Zehlendorf district office set up two open-air sculptures that Hasemann had given the working titles Faun and Negerin on the opposite green strip in front of the property at Leuchtenburgstrasse 18, and stored numerous, also large-format, plaster models of Hasemann.

Afterlife

In 2007 the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen showed in the exhibition To die beautifully! Death in 20th Century Art Works by Hasemann together with those by Joseph Beuys , Käthe Kollwitz and Andy Warhol . Hasemann's grave in the Zehlendorf cemetery had meanwhile been leveled.

In May 2019, the Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen parliamentary group in the district council of Steglitz-Zehlendorf applied for the removal of the sculpture of the crouching negress and suggested that it be handed over to the Ethnological Museum . Her cultural-political spokesman, Carsten Berger, justified the project: The black woman was portrayed as “naked, ape-like and simple-minded” and “very well suited to conveying racist stereotypes”. Berger recalled Hasemann's work as a cultural warden of the NSDAP from "1932" and said that this "found approval after the war and paid employment with the SED regime". Therefore neither “the sculpture nor Hasemann's artistic vitae“ justify ”its exhibition and appreciation”. The art historian Susanne Kähler contradicted this . According to Art Deco, the sculpture from the 1920s depicts "in a realistic manner [an] older, muscular but at the same time emaciated black woman," wearing a wrap hanging over her shoulders whose gaze is "proudly raised". Hasemann had “reproduced the African in a very idiosyncratic manner”, with Kähler pointing out the “tendency that was not untypical of the art of the 1920s, and from today's perspective, racist tendency”. The sculpture "can be described as extraordinary in its sculptural qualities". The BV followed the Greens' request in May 2020.

In June 2020, according to witnesses, strangers knocked off the figure's head with a baseball bat and smeared it with paint. The head that was severed and not secured by the alerted police has since disappeared. The presentation of the damaged figure announced by the curator of the permanent exhibition “Unveiled” in the Spandau Citadel did not take place.

Works

Woodcut volumes and folders

  • Heaven and Hell on Landstrasse , with 41 (24 full-page) original woodcuts, Berlin and Leipzig. Behr, 1915. 28 × 21 cm. Illustrated original cardboard tape. VIII, 118 pages
  • The circus , 20 woodcuts, with prefaces by Karl August Meißinger . Berlin / Leipzig, Behr and Feddersen, 1920
  • Eros Thanatos, a dance of death , 12 woodcuts, Berlin, R. Seitz & Co., 1921
  • Don Quixote von der Mancha , 20 woodcuts, Berlin, 1922

Woodcuts from 1912/14

  • Gypsy girl
  • Farewell to women
  • The cart
  • The Philosophers of the Highway
  • Tippelbrother's farewell
  • Death on the highway
  • Cocottes on the quay in Lucerne
  • Storm in the Mediterranean Sea
  • Arabs, Spaniards and Jews in Melilla
  • On the desert beaches of Andalusia
  • Fonda at sunset
  • Donkey ride through cactus hedges

Berlin works of art in public space

  • 1922: Group of monkeys in Berlin-Tiergarten, zoo grounds, sandstone sculpture
  • 1927/38: Eight brick figures, including a conductor and a female conductor in Berlin-Treptow
  • 1927/38: Bear in Berlin-Treptow, gate sculpture made of shell limestone and artificial stone
  • Around 1927: Fountain and portal figure at the parish hall of the church Zur Heimat in Berlin-Zehlendorf
  • Around 1928: Mother and child fountain in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Rauenthaler Straße, sculpture made of shell limestone
  • Statues on the German State Opera in Berlin-Mitte
  • Sitting Pan in Heinrich-Lassen-Park in Berlin-Schöneberg
  • Set up around 1985 opposite his former house in Leuchtenburgstrasse, Zehlendorf, the shell limestone figures : crouching negress and standing faun

Others

  • around 1930: Trust , Berlin, group of sculptures made of teak, oiled, 4 pieces
  • 1965: Memorial plaque for Friedrich Ebert, bronze, Bonn, Friedrich Ebert Foundation

literature

Web links

Commons : Arminius Hasemann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archive for the history of individual travel - AGIR contains a representation of Hasemann's hikes, to be determined with the search function
  2. ↑ Hasemann, Arminius . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 16 : Hansen – Heubach . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1923, p. 100-101 .
  3. ↑ eArt.de contains a biography of Hasemann until around 1925.
  4. ↑ Celina Kress: Between Bauhaus and Bürgerhaus. The projects of the Berlin contractor Adolf Sommerfeld. On the continuity of suburban urban production and rational building in Germany 1910–1970 (Diss. TU-Berlin, 2008, p. 51 f., Footnote 179, depositonce.tu-berlin.de PDF).
  5. ↑ Celina Kress: Between Bauhaus and Bürgerhaus. The projects of the Berlin contractor Adolf Sommerfeld . (Diss. TU-Berlin, 2008, p. 51 f., Footnote 179, depositonce.tu-berlin.de PDF).
  6. ↑ Memorial plaque for Friedrich Ebert , information from the district office of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf with illustration, requested on January 11, 2018.
  7. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Schwalm, Ullrich, Ferdinand (eds.): Beautiful to die? Death in 20th Century Art. Book accompanying the exhibition in the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen from February 11 to April 15, 2007. Goch Boss Druck und Medien, Recklinghausen 2007, ISBN 978-3-939753-10-0 .
  8. ↑ This Nazi art should finally get off the streets. Report in the BZ of June 14, 2019 ( bz-berlin.de ).
  9. ^ Motion from the Green Group on May 8, 2019 ( berlin.de PDF).
  10. ↑ Susanne Kähler : Crouching Negress . Article with illustration on the website Bildhauerei in Berlin (BiB), requested on April 20, 2020.
  11. ↑ Decision of the BV of January 22, 2020, ( berlin.de PDF).
  12. Jump up ↑ The head of the "Negerin" sculpture in Zehlendorf was chopped off . Berliner Morgenpost from June 18, 2020.
  13. ↑ A beheaded sculpture should not be placed on the Spandau Citadel . Report of the Berliner Morgenpost from August 26, 2020.
  14. ↑ Bear . Information on the BiB website , accessed on June 20, 2020.
  15. ^ Fountain and portal figure at the parish hall of the Ev. Church “home” . Information on the BiB website , accessed on June 20, 2020.
  16. ↑ Seated Pan . Information on the BiB website , accessed on June 20, 2020
  17. ↑ Standing Faun . Information on the BiB website , accessed on April 20, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Hasemann, Arminius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sculptor and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 1979
Place of death Berlin