Artur Wachsberger

Artur Wachsberger (born May 7, 1891 in Opava , † 1943 in Haifa ) was an Austrian architect and art historian .

Live and act

Artur Wachsberger came from a merchant family and attended school in Troppau before starting his studies in Vienna . He graduated from Berlin in 1914 with a doctorate. He then worked as the head of the Berlin Art History Institute for East Asia. His dissertation on Stylistic Studies of Wall Painting in Chinese Turkestan was published in 1916.

Wachsberger was involved in the establishment and inventory of the Cologne Museum for East Asian Art. In Cologne he met his future wife Anna Maria Lehmann; their son Artur Alexander was born before the marriage, which took place in Vienna. Artur Wachsberger was a first lieutenant in the Austrian army during the First World War .

After returning from the war, he worked in his father-in-law's wallpaper business . This business, founded in 1892, passed to Wachsberger and his brother-in-law Fritz Lehmann around 1923. In the following years it was expanded to become one of Cologne's leading furniture stores. Among other things, the Lehmann company became the general agent of the Viennese company Haus und Garten , which belonged to the architects Josef Frank and Oskar Wlach .

In December 1928, Josef Frank completed the renovation of a commercial building for Carl Lehmann at 48 Hohenzollernring ; He probably owed the commission to Artur Wachsberger. Frank put a modern facade in front of the Wilhelminian style building and redesigned the sales rooms in the spirit of avant-garde modernism . This was probably in the spirit of Wachsberger, who had belonged to the avant-garde circles around Max Ernst , Theodor Baargeld , Franz Wilhelm Seiwert , Heinrich Hoerle , Hans Hansen and Alfred Tietz since he settled in Cologne . Since 1919 he was a member of the Society of the Arts and gave lectures for these. In 1919/20 he worked on Karl Nierendorf's magazine Der Strom . In 1919 his book Man and Community was published in Nierendorf's Kairos-Verlag.

Artur Wachsberger promoted the arts by organizing competitions through his company Gustav Carl Lehmann. Among them was a 1921 invitation to tender looking for designs for artistic wallpaper. The results could be seen in March 1921 in the Cologne Museum of Decorative Arts, with whose director Karl Wirth Wachsberger was close friends.

Furthermore, Wachsberger belonged to the committee for the Cologne factory schools to which Konrad Adenauer was subordinate. Among other things, this ensured that Wachsberger was also involved in the international press exhibition Pressa ; Wachsberger was a member of the art committee at the time.

In 1929, an exhibition entitled Growing Apartment and Single Device was held in the State House of the Fair . Wachsberger, who was a member of the exhibition committee, showed numerous products from his company there. In the same year, products from Lehmann were also shown in the exhibition Room and Wall Picture.

Women's wardrobe in the Reemtsma house

As an interior designer, Wachsberger was involved in the design of the Villa Hans Carl Scheibler at Germanicusstrasse 3, a Bonatz building . In 1929 he worked on the redesign of the Villa Alfred Tietz, Parkstrasse 61. He was also involved in the design of Dolly Haas' apartment in Berlin and in furnishing the Philipp F. Reemtsma house in Hamburg, which was built from 1930 to 1932 based on designs by Martin Elsaesser .

In addition to the Carl Gustav Lehmann company, Wachsberger also ran a cabaret shop in Minoritenstrasse, which had been founded in 1908 by Felix Krüger and operated as the Kunststätten Krüger & Distel G. mb H. from 1920 after Rolf Distel had joined as a partner. Ten years later, Distel sold the business back to the Gustav Carl Lehmann company. Since then, Anna Maria Wachsberger has been working there in particular.

In 1932 Artur Wachsberger traveled to Palestine. He emigrated there in 1933, accompanied by his wife and daughter Ina, who was born in 1921. His son, now called Fred, stayed behind in Germany and continued to run the company in Minoritenstrasse as managing director, whereas the Gustav Carl Lehmann company on Hohenzollernring was now run solely by Fritz Lehmann. But later Fred Wachsberger also emigrated.

Artur Wachsberger opened a furniture store in Tel Aviv in 1934 , which was named The Cultivated Home . Among others, he employed Paul Engelmann as an interior architect and designer .

Artur Wachsberger died in 1943 as a result of a heart attack . His wife and daughter returned to Cologne after the Second World War . Anna Maria Wachsberger ran the art workshops there until the 1960s in Grosse Budengasse 11. Ina Wachsberger, who married the architect Georg Koep , worked there for a time as a clerk and also as an interior designer. Fred Wachsberger also returned to Cologne and became a sales representative.

literature

• Wolfram Hagspiel: Cologne and its Jewish architects. Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-7616-2294-0 , pp. 434-440

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Architects Lexicon : Oskar Wlach , accessed on April 11, 2017
2. ^ Maria Welzig: Josef Frank (1885-1967) - Das Architektonische Werk , Böhlau Verlag , Cologne / Weimar 1998, ISBN 3-205-98407-2 , p. 164.
3. ^ Sokrates book distribution: Lehmann Poster , Cologne , accessed on April 11, 2017
4. ^ Picture book Cologne: Carl Detzel: Kittys Bierbar and Variete "Kaiserhof" - Hohenzollernring 48 , accessed on April 11, 2017
5. ↑ This year is given by Wolfram Hagspiel. Max Zweig, however, explains that Wachsberger did not emigrate until 1934. Cf. Eva Reichmann (Ed.), Max Zweig, works in individual volumes. Autobiographical and scattered writings from the estate , Igel Verlag 2002, ISBN 978-3896211552 , p. 63.