Arthur Fitger

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Arthur Fitger

Arthur Heinrich Wilhelm Fitger (born October 4, 1840 in Delmenhorst , † June 28, 1909 in Horn near Bremen ) was a German painter and poet .

Life

Faithful Ekkehard

Fitger was born as the son of the postmaster and Delmenhorst innkeeper Peter Diedrich Fitger († 1865) and his wife Clara Maria Caroline born. Plate used Dony († 1891) was born. His younger brother Emil Fitger (1848-1917) later became editor-in-chief of the Bremer Weser newspaper for many years . His sister was the writer Marie Fitger (1843–1929); from 1890 she ran the household in the Horner Heerstrasse in Bremen.

Fitger attended elementary and principal school in Delmenhorst and then the grammar school in Oldenburg , where he lived with building officer Otto Lasius (1797-1888). In 1858 Fitger went to the Academy in Munich , where he studied primarily with Moritz von Schwind (1804–1875), went to Antwerp in 1861 and then to Paris . From 1863 to 1865 he stayed in Rome on a scholarship from the Grand Duke of Oldenburg , and after having lived alternately in Vienna and Berlin in the following years , he took up permanent residence in Bremen in 1869.

Fitger's paintings are essentially of a decorative and monumental kind and for the most part belong to the fantastic area; we highlight, among other things, a moody children's frieze depicting the metabolism, as well as a frieze : the night and its entourage, both in the ducal castle of Meiningen ( Schloss Elisabethenburg ).

In Bremen he decorated the Rembertikirche with two representations: the prodigal son and the good Samaritan, the stock exchange with allegories referring to the sea, the seafaring house and the imperial post office. From easel paintings, Barbarossa's awakening, which the war year 1870 inspired him to do, became known to wider circles; In 1875 he was given the task of decorating the Ratskeller with wall paintings. From 1883 to 1884 he executed large wall paintings in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg together with Valentin Ruths .

Fitger had his artistic breakthrough as early as around 1870, he was now also receiving commissions from wealthy private houses in Bremen and soon had to take painting assistants in order to be able to fulfill the large number of commissions. He jokingly remarked that with the helpers he had created "kilometers of frieze compositions, hectares of ceiling paintings , hundreds of allegorical figures and thousands of putti ".

Originally based on Peter von Cornelius (1783–1867) and Bonaventura Genelli (1798–1868), he later joined the modern coloristic direction and sometimes competed with Hans Makart (1840–1884) in the use of colors .

Tomb in the Riensberg cemetery

Fitger also cultivated poetry and made himself known in this field in wide circles. His plays: Adalbert von Bremen (Oldenburg 1873; 2nd edition with the aftermath Hie Reich! Hie Rom!, 1875), Die Hexe (das. 1878, 4th ed. 1885), Von Gottes Gnaden (2nd ed., das. 1884) have been performed frequently. He has also written several festivals ( Albrecht Dürer , Johann Kepler and Michelangelo ) as well as the little epic poem Roland and the Rose (1871) for the Bremen Artists' Association . Most valuable are his poetry collections, rich in fresh tones : Fahrendes Volk (2nd edition, Oldenburg 1883) and Winter Nights (that. 1880).

Fitger was buried in the Riensberg cemetery . His tomb is adorned with a bronze sphinx with wings and a horseshoe tail, inspired by his paintings (grave location U 192-195).

Honors

Fitger and Hanseatic taste in art

Arthur Fitger, in 1876
Mocking postcard for the Bremen art dispute , 1902, Arthur Fitger as Don Quixote, the Worpswede painters bend with laughter

Anyone who visualizes the cultural life of Bremen around 1900 inevitably comes across Arthur Fitger, who at that time, comparable to a local painter prince, dominated the scene and had a lasting effect on Hanseatic art taste with his reviews published in the press. His word had weight and, as chairman of the Kunstverein, his assessment shaped the conservative attitude of the Bremen audience.

He had no mercy on the “newfangled” artists who were based on the Worpswedern or the contemporary French, and his exhibition reviews often turned into extremely polemical criticisms . The most striking example is the scathing commentary on the attempt at an exhibition by Marie Bock and Paula Becker in the Bremen Kunsthalle at the end of 1899, which appeared in the Weser newspaper edited by his brother Emil Fitger and indicated in a condescending tone:

“The vocabulary of a clean language is not enough for the work of the two women mentioned, and we do not want to borrow from an unclean language. Just as Fitger's criticism was unable to prevent the Worpswede artist community from breaking through, just as little did his judgments and the views of the upper-class merchant families under his influence prevent the ambitious young Bremen bourgeois daughters from finding their role models and teachers among the maligned painters in the nearby artist village of Worpswede in order to bravely set out on new shores as a ' painting woman ' ... "

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Arthur Fitger  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edith Laudowicz : Fitger, Marie. In: Bremer Frauenmuseum (Hrsg.): Women story (s). Edition Falkenberg, Bremen 2016, ISBN 978-3-95494-095-0 .
  2. ↑ Alt-Delmenhorst - Pictures • Stories • Anecdotes. Verlag Siegfried Rieck, Delmenhorst 1981.

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personal data
SURNAME Fitger, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fitger, Arthur Heinrich Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and poet
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1840
PLACE OF BIRTH Delmenhorst
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1909
Place of death near Bremen