August Haake (painter)

Self-portrait by August Haake around 1912.

August Haake (born December 7, 1889 in Bremen ; † January 2, 1915 there ) was a German draftsman , portrait painter and landscape painter .

life and work

The parental home "Villa Haake" of the painter August Haake in Rockwinkel around 1910.

August Haake: "Field with crouching grain".

August Haake: "At the Wümme ".

August Haake: "Duck Houses". On the right there is a bridge over a branch of the Wümme .

August Haake: "In the Surheide".

August Haake: "Summer in Fischerhude".

parents house

August Haake was born on December 7th, 1889 as the only child of the businessman Carl HG Haake and his wife Anna Haake nee. Ehlers was born in his parents' house in Bremen at Rembertistraße 81. The father Carl Haake ran the Friedrich Haake furniture store for furniture, wallpaper, fabrics, etc. in Obernstrasse No. 1 (later in the new building at Obernstrasse No. 11). The wealthy father owned two homes, the first in the old town of Bremen second from 1909 in the Villa Haake estate in Rockwinkel in a huge park with a large lake. In the vicinity of Villa Haake there was also the estate of Uncle Carl Ehlers, where August Haake visited his grandmother Emilie Ehlers and his uncles Carl, Meno, Louis and Justus Ehlers.

Childhood and youth

August Haake experienced a sheltered childhood at home and with his grandmother. His health was unstable, and his speech impairment and speech disorder were particularly problematic for him . The stutter increased when he was excited to the point of complete speechlessness. He first attended the private school for boys of D. Müller and then the high school, which caused him despite his intelligence because of his speech impediment difficulties, he had to repeat some classes. In 1908 he left the grammar school after the 11th grade with the professional goal of a businessman and then took courses in shorthand, typewriting and bookkeeping in order to get closer to this professional goal that his father had hoped for. When he had his speech disorder treated in a special institute in Wroclaw, the special treatment did not improve his own complaints. Now his father realized that August was not suitable for the commercial profession and that he could not find a successor in his own company. He then supported his son in his career aspiration to become a painter.

Vocational training

The Bremen merchant's son Walter Bertelsmann , who worked as a freelance landscape painter in Worpswede , gave him painting lessons in his own studio and outside in front of nature in 1908 and became his adviser and friend. He advised him to take up the profession of painter and recommended that he continue to paint outdoors according to nature. In the summer semester of 1909 August Haake took a painting course with Professor Walter Magnussen at the Bremen School of Applied Arts . He then followed Walter Bertelsmann's suggestion to begin studying at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar . He studied there from the winter semester 1909/1910 to 1914 with Fritz Thedy , Ariel Melchers , Hans Olde , Theodor Hagen and Fritz Mackensen . In 1912 he became a master student of the director Fritz Mackensen ; He shared the studio in Weimar with his college friend Fritz Rusche . During the semester break he drove his light motorcycle to Worpswede to see Walter Bertelsmann and from 1911 to painting to Fischerhude, where he was with his artist friends Rudolf Franz Hartogh , Helmuth Westhoff and Wilhelm Heinrich Rohmeyer . The summers in Worpswede and Fischerhude were the most fertile times of his life for August Haake. His college friend, Rudolf Franz Hartogh , whom he met while studying in Weimar , was deaf from birth and was therefore not bothered by August Haake's stuttering.

The Junge Wilde from 1911 in Fischerhude

August Haake painted in his parents' homes in Bremen and Rockwinkel as well as in the surroundings of Weimar , Worpswede and Fischerhude . He knew Fischerhude from day trips, but in July 1911 and from July to October 1912 he rented a room in the Berkelmann inn there. He belonged in Fischerhude together with Johann Heinrich Bethke (1885–1915), Fritz Cobet (1885–1963), Rudolf Franz Hartogh (1889–1960), Wilhelm Heinrich Rohmeyer (1882–1936), Bertha Schilling (1870–1953) and Helmuth Westhoff (1891–1977) on the Junge Wilde from 1911 . They gathered around Otto Modersohn , who had become the leading figure for the young artists after he had campaigned in the artist dispute for the purchase of the painting "Mohnfeld" by Vincent van Gogh by the Kunsthalle Bremen. The pictures of the Fischerhude painters were in the tradition of the Barbizon School . In his artistic work August Haake was close to the painters Jean-François Millet , Vincent van Gogh , Lovis Corinth and Edvard Munch , but he developed his own powerful painting style and confidence in the choice of subjects. In addition to portraits and landscape paintings, he also painted village motifs with everything he found in Fischerhude and its surroundings.

Death and burial

After August Haake had used white lead as a white pigment in his paintings for seven years , he noticed symptoms of lead poisoning in the autumn of 1914 . He probably had a habit of sharpening his brushes between his lips before painting. He died on January 2, 1915 at the age of 25 years and 26 days during a gastric operation in the St. Joseph Foundation that became necessary due to lead poisoning . He was buried in the Riensberg cemetery in the Schwachhausen district of Bremen , exhumed in 1916 and buried in Oberneuland in the cemetery of the St. Johann church in the now completed family crypt.

August Haake met the music student Hipo Döhrmann in Weimar . She became his last girlfriend. With the help of the Bremen concert master Oscar Pfitzner , whose daughter he knew, he found her an apprenticeship in Bremen. He was with her for the summer of 1914 and introduced her to his parents. After his funeral in the Riensberg cemetery, Hipo Döhrmann revealed himself to August's parents as his fiancée. She was welcomed by Carl and Anna Haake like their own child. Carl and Anna Haake built Hipo's parents on their own land in the neighborhood so that Hipo's parents could always be close by. After the death of Carl and Anna Haake, Hipo Döhrmann inherited the Haake house and the surrounding park in addition to household items . She married and had a son in this marriage, who later squandered her mother's inheritance piece by piece and reduced her widow's pension.

estate

August Haake's estate, kept in his parents' house, contained over 350 drawings and paintings. His parents wanted to be close to him in their grief and brought together his artistic legacy in their Villa Haake in Rockwinkel to preserve them as his legacy there. Except for a few pictures in the possession of his painter friends, which were later in their estate and were ascribed to them, Haake's works were not accessible to the public for many years. After the death of his parents Carl and Anna Haake the estate went from August Haake first with the paintings, drawings and letter documents to the brother of August's mother Carl Ehlers and after his death on August Vetter and base Meno Ehlers and his wife Sibylle Ehlers . They gradually sold the estate, making it available to the public. Around 52 years after August Haake's death , Volkert HU Koch acquired the major part of the artistic estate and reproduced some of the works in his biography August Haake 1889–1915 , published in 2006 . Few works are in the possession of the art association Fischerhude in Buthmanns Hof eV, the other works are privately owned.

Signatures

For the attribution of August Haake's works , the provenance , i.e. the origin of the works from the estate kept in his parents' house, plays a decisive role, as August Haake has only very rarely signed his works since 1907. Earlier drawings and paintings are sometimes monogrammed with H or AH . The time of origin of the works can often not be determined due to a lack of dating.

Unfortunately, August Haake's father failed to limit and safeguard the son's work collected in his house by publishing a catalog raisonné. There is likely to be a risk that counterfeits will hit the market. That is why the collector Volkert HU Koch tries to create a catalog raisonné by August Haake .

There is an attempt to draw conclusions about the attribution of paintings from August Haake's habit . August Haake owned a light motorcycle with which he drove to the landscape motifs, which he then painted on the spot. He was in the habit of piercing the painted cardboard in two places under the upper edge in order to pull a piece of string through both holes and knot it behind the picture. Before driving back, he pulled the string over his head and hung the freshly painted and still damp painting on his back to bring it home intact. Under the name Haake signature, the two drill holes are provisionally evaluated as a signature replacement by August Haake . They already helped to attribute the unsigned picture Duck Houses in the Wümme , which was in the estate of his artist friend Wilhelm Heinrich Rohmeyer , to August Haake . However, it cannot be ruled out that his artist friends made his habit their own.

Posthumous appreciation of his works

Volkert HU Koch:

• " August Haake proves to be an excellent portraitist in his paintings and drawings, but his real talent and artistic focus should be on the landscape. This is how he sees himself, as he repeatedly emphasizes in his letters. He is always inspired by 'his' northern German landscape, and he feels happy in the' artist colonies' like Worpswede and Fischerhude. Both places are known to represent the numerous painters' colonies at home and abroad that were inspired by Barbizon. August Haake developed an expressive painting style, which immediately does not match his lack of self-confidence. But it is precisely the limitations that he repeatedly experiences from his language problem, stuttering, that possibly lead to his own impetuous brushwork in the years from 1910/11 onwards. Art becomes with him, the speech-impaired, an intense means of expression of his person - therein lies the paral lele to his friend and colleague of the same age, Rudolf Franz Hartogh. Even if August Haake was not allowed to advance his artistic development, he left us with a rich and mature work - measured by the short time it took to create it. "

N. Schwabe:

• " Haake's work is determined by its ties to Bremen, Worpswede and Fischerhude. In the longing for originality, for places far away from technical progress and industrialization, he, like the artists of the first Worpswede generation, finds that in the barren, northern German landscape, What he is looking for. He and the other young artists around Otto Modersohn have role models in the Barbizon School . It is the content-artistic return to Jean-François Millet and Vincent van Gogh that is still possible in the seclusion of Fischerhude. From 1911, Through the contact with Modersohn, Haake developed his own remarkably powerful painting style and the confidence in the choice of motifs. The brushwork is loose and broad, based on the Worpswede painters and Hartogh , but what is in his boldness and the painterly treatment of light and shadow strongly reflects the model of Corinth and van Gogh . "

Participation in exhibitions

• 1910 Weimar: Exhibition of the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School Weimar
• 1912–1914 Hamburg, Galerie Commeter: Exhibition by the Association of Northwest German Artists
• 1912 Weimar, Tiefurt Castle : Exhibition of the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School Weimar
• 1913 Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen : Bremen art exhibition 1913
• 1914 Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen: International Exhibition Bremen 1914
• 1914 Bremen, Kunsthalle Bremen: Bremen art exhibition 1914
• 1967 Bremen, Böttcherstraße : Sales exhibition of the works of August Haake
• 1989–1990 Fischerhude, Fischerhuder Kunstkreis eV in the Fischerhuder Gallery: Rudolf Franz Hartogh and August Haake - an artist friendship from Fischerhuder.
• 2006 Fischerhude, Kunstverein Fischerhude in Buthmanns Hof eV: retrospective
• 2011 Fischerhude, Kunstverein Fischerhude in Buthmanns Hof eV: The young wild ones from 1911

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The family lived at first at Rembertistraße 81 and later at Altmannstraße 17.
2. ↑ The address of Villa Haake was Rockwinkel No. 7. Later it was renamed Rockwinkeler Chaussee No. 65. Today the Krummacher Weg runs across the property in Oberneuland, and a modern corner bungalow stands above the foundations of Villa Haake .
3. ↑ Carl Ehlers' city apartment was in Bremen at Humboldtstrasse 32.
4. ↑ The purchase of the painting “Mohnfeld” by van Gogh in 1911 sparked an art dispute among painters and museum people all over Germany. Otto Modersohn strongly advocated the purchase because it was "one of the most stimulating pictures of modern art", as he put it in response to the "protest of German artists".
5. ↑ Source: Volkert HU Koch: August Haake 1889–1915. Published by the Kunstverein Fischerhude in Buthmanns Hof eV Verlag Atelier im Bauernhaus, Fischerhude 2006. Page 126.
6. ↑ Source: Volkert HU Koch: August Haake 1889–1915. Published by the Kunstverein Fischerhude in Buthmanns Hof eV Verlag Atelier im Bauernhaus, Fischerhude 2006. Pages 131–132.
7. ↑ This includes the picture In der Surheide by August Haake from 1914, which bears the portrait study Eva Pfitzner by Rudolf Franz Hartogh on the back .
8. ↑ The oil painting Brown Field under Blue Sky (around 1913), for example, is monogrammed AH in the lower right corner .
9. ^ Volkert HU Koch: August Haake 1889–1915. Verlag Atelier im Bauernhaus, Fischerhude 2006. Pages 55 and 73.
10. ^ Volkert HU Koch: August Haake 1889–1915. Verlag Atelier im Bauernhaus, Fischerhude 2006. Page 77.
11. ↑ The quote was taken from: N. Schwabe: August Haake. In: De Gruyter: General Artist Lexicon. The visual artists of all times and peoples. Volume 66, pages 514-515.
12. ↑ The summer exhibition of the Kunstverein Fischerhude commemorates Fischerhude's departure into the modern age. Die Junge Wilde from 1911. ( Memento from September 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive )

literature

• Wolf-Dietmar Stock, Werner Wischnowski: Fischerhude. Artist in silence. Galerie Verlag, Fischerhude 1986.
• Wolf-Dietmar Stock: A very promising talent. Memories of the Fischerhude painter August Haake (1889 - 1915). In: Between Elbe and Weser: Home and Culture. Journal of the regional association of the former duchies of Bremen and Verden. Ed .: Landschaftsverband Stade eV - Stade. Vol. 25 (2006), No. 3, pp. 2-3 with ill.
• Volkert HU Koch: August Haake 1889–1915. With an introduction by Thomas Deecke and contributions by Birgit Nachtwey and Wolf-Dietmar Stock. Published by the Kunstverein Fischerhude in Buthmanns Hof eV Verlag Atelier im Bauernhaus, Fischerhude 2006. ISBN 3-88132-264-7 pp. And 3-88132-263-9 pp.
• N. Schwabe: August Haake. In: De Gruyter: General Artist Lexicon. The visual artists of all times and peoples. Volume 66, 2010, pages 514-515.

Web links

Commons : August Haake  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Fischerhude artist
• August Haake