August Macke House
The August-Macke-Haus (officially: Museum August Macke Haus ) is a museum in Bonn , which is set up in a house formerly inhabited by the expressionist painter August Macke and operated by the August Macke Haus Bonn eV association. In addition to the permanent exhibition of the Mackes studio, there are also special exhibitions on Expressionism , Rhenish Expressionism and / or Rhenish painting . The August Macke House stands as a monument under monument protection .
history
On October 5, 1909, August Macke married his long-time girlfriend, Elisabeth Gerhardt . The couple first lived on Tegernsee, then again in Bonn. Macke painted more and more, increasingly found his direction and urgently needed a studio . This was set up in the attic of the house of his mother-in-law, Sophie Gerhardt, built in 1877/78 at Bornheimer Straße 88 (today 96); the renovation was carried out according to plans by the Bonn architect Hermann Schmitt . The father-in-law, the entrepreneur Carl Heinrich Gerhardt, had bought the house in 1884 as his company's archive and furnished it for the purpose. He died in 1907.
In February 1911 Macke moved into this house with his wife and son Walter. The studio was Macke's first and only. The few years he was able to work there became his most productive. Most of his work was done there. He also often painted his surroundings, the view from the house, the streets and the garden. At the time, Macke had made relatively long and long journeys to get to know modern painting, innovative artists and new surroundings. Now he had a place to receive his friends: the Bonn student Max Ernst , Guillaume Apollinaire , Robert Delaunay , Gabriele Münter , Paul Klee and Franz Marc came to visit. With the latter, Macke painted the approximately 4 × 2 meter large mural Paradise on the studio wall in 1912 . It was removed in 1980 and is now in the LWL State Museum for Art and Cultural History in Münster . A copy in original size is on display in the Macke Museum.
In 1914, shortly after the war began in France , Macke fell at the age of 27. After two years, his widow married a friend of her husband's, Lothar Erdmann , and lived with him and Macke's two sons (Erdmann's two children later came) in the same house until 1925, when she moved to Berlin . The house was then rented, but not the studio. Her second husband died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1939 . Elisabeth returned to the house in 1948 and set up in the studio, in which she lived until 1975, before moving back to Berlin, where she died in 1978.
It was not known in Bonn that August Macke had lived and worked in the city. Two students, Gerhard Pfafferott and Arn Strohmeyer , knew about it and wrote a letter to Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke in 1972 that they wanted to donate a plaque on which the painter's stay in the city should be noted. The bronze plaque commemorating August Macke was attached to the house in the presence of the students and Ms. Erdmann-Macke and is still hanging there today.
The house, which had not been listed until then , was acquired by a building contractor from Berlin who wanted to remove the core and convert it into a restaurant after the above-mentioned mural was translocated . Margarethe Jochimsen , chairwoman of the Bonner Kunstverein , founded a citizens' initiative to put the house under a preservation order and thus prevent renovation. In 1989 the association “August Macke Haus” was founded, which is responsible for the museum's artistic program. In the same year the house was bought by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the sponsor and building contractor Herbert Hillebrand in order to be properly renovated, to have Macke's only studio restored and to make it accessible to the public.
On September 26, 1991, the August-Macke-Haus was officially opened in the presence of the then Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Johannes Rau . Margarethe Jochimsen was the founding director. The financial institution of the house, the "August Macke Haus der Sparkasse Bonn Foundation", was founded in 1994.
Facility
In the August-Macke-Haus, Macke's studio has been restored, including furniture from his Tegernsee days. A basic archive of Rhenish Expressionism is available in addition to a reference library . Special exhibitions are held regularly at this memorial and research site.
literature
- Margarethe Jochimsen: The August Macke House in Bonn: A piece of federal capital's cultural policy . In: Critical Reports , Volume 16, No. 3/1988, ISSN 0340-7403 , pp. 46-56. ( online ) [only partially evaluated for this article]
Web links
- August Macke house in Bonn
- The mural Paradise from the studio of the August Macke House in the LWL State Museum for Art and Cultural History Münster
Individual evidence
- ↑ List of monuments of the city of Bonn (as of March 15, 2019), p. 12, number A 1452
- ↑ Students donated Macke memorial plaque floerken.de, according to General-Anzeiger Bonn , January 17, 1972, accessed on October 29, 2013.
Coordinates: 50 ° 44 '15.3 " N , 7 ° 5' 10.1" E