Benno Walldorf

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Benno Walldorf (born April 26, 1928 in Gießen ; † June 9, 1985 in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe ) was a German painter and graphic artist who also worked as a jazz musician and photographer.

With a largely autodidactic training, he came up with an independent, colorful visual language in the 1960s that combined elements of magical realism with influences from Surrealism and Pop Art, and created numerous murals in public and semi-public spaces.

Career

Walldorf comes from a well-known family of showmen. The early impressions from the showman and circus milieu would later have a strong influence on his design language and motifs.

He received a commercial apprenticeship, but became interested in art at an early age, stimulated by his grandfather, who traded in antiques, and began to paint. He received sporadic lessons in Marburg, but actually had no artistic training. In 1956 he moved to Frankfurt. In the 1960s he found increasing recognition as a painter and was finally able to make a living from painting. In the 1970s, the era of "art in architecture", he received numerous commissions for wall paintings; he created the first for the union building of the IG Chemie, Papier, Keramik in Hanover.

In the last year of his life he worked in the cultural office of the city of Hattersheim , where he was entrusted with the organization of all kinds of cultural events. Parts of his estate are in the Institute for Urban History in Frankfurt am Main and in the Lippmann + Rau Music Archive in Eisenach.

Motivation

In the course of the 1960s, Walldorf developed an original, independent pictorial vocabulary that ran through numerous oil paintings of the time in ever new variations. Chairs, checkerboard patterns, and dice are to be mentioned here above all.

Very occasionally he also made portraits, for example of his wife and of the gallery owner Hanna Bekker vom Rath .

A large-format paraphrase on Tischbein's well-known Goethe painting in the Frankfurt Städel , with various ingredients of a “typical Walldorf”, was created in 1967 for the exhibition “Goethe Today” and is now owned by SEB AG, Frankfurt am Main.

Graphic artist

Aside from occasional excursions into other techniques, Walldorf paid particular attention to screen printing, the intense direct color of which suited him particularly well. Outstanding among the numerous works is the “Circus” portfolio, the sheets of which are named after well-known jazz pieces.

One episode remained collages in the style of Max Ernst , in which he used a reprint of the department store catalog that Ernst had also used for his well-known collage novels.

Musician

Walldorf learned, also autodidactically, alto saxophone , played after the war in clubs of black GIs in his hometown and later switched to soprano saxophone . In the 1950s he became part of the lively Frankfurt jazz scene. He first played with the Burgundy Street Paraders around Roland Schneider , from whose pool of musicians he formed his own band, which existed as a band in the band . At the German Amateur Jazz Festival in Düsseldorf in 1957, he was named the best soprano saxophonist. The following year he founded his "Benno Walldorf Blues Combo", which also existed under the name "Benno Walldorf Jazz Combo" in various line-ups until the end of his musical career. The group initially played with an unusual line-up: Walldorf on soprano saxophone and clarinetist Dietrich Geldern formed the front line , which was initially accompanied by a rhythm section consisting of two guitars and a double bass. In 1958, the band received "downright applause" at the German Jazz Festival (reinforced for this occasion by Peter Trunk on bass and Albert Mangelsdorff on guitar). A well-known photo shows the musicians on the tarmac at Frankfurt Airport, where they play to welcome the musicians of the American Folk and Blues Festival . Walldorf, who always played music as an amateur, remained stuck with older idioms of jazz all his life, which he mastered at a high level with an impressive tone. Influences from Sidney Bechet and his idol and later friend Benny Waters are unmistakable. In 1984 he had to give up playing for health reasons and said goodbye to the music scene with the LP "Farewell Sweet Saxophon".

Photographer

In the 1950s, Walldorf bought a Rolleicord and taught himself how to take photos, again autodidactically. In addition to city shots, street scenes and people shots for the press and occasionally book publishers, it is above all his portraits of musicians that establish his status as a photographer. As a musician at eye level and in direct contact with famous colleagues from the USA, he succeeded in creating impressive portraits of jazz greats ( Stan Getz , Louis Armstrong and many others) especially backstage .

Gallery elephant

Walldorf, who showed business acumen throughout his life and had already run a jazz record shop with an attached gallery in Frankfurt in the late 1950s, founded the Elefant gallery in 1971 with his wife Helga Walldorf in the basement of his house in Bad Homburg. Invited artists were asked to produce a graphic with an elephant motif, which was also sold to friends and customers of the house by subscription. An impressive series emerged from which the work of Conrad Felixmüller stands out.

Mural

  • Union building of the IG Chemie, Paper, Ceramics in Hanover (mural in the foyer)
  • Stadtbad West, Giessen
  • University of Konstanz, Philosophical Faculty, University Library
  • Deutsche Bank, Bad Homburg branch
  • Humboldt School Bad Homburg
  • Technical City Hall Frankfurt, public passage (endangered by the imminent demolition of the building)
  • Friedrich-Ebert School Wiesbaden

Exhibitions and awards

  • Giessen Congress Hall
  • Promotion Prize of the State of Hesse (together with Thomas Bayrle ) 1967
  • Goethe today, Carmelite monastery Frankfurt 1967
  • Galerie Remmele, Giessen 1969
  • Bonner Kunstverein (catalog), 1972
  • Joy of playing. The photographic work of the painter Benno Walldorf, Gotisches Haus, Bad Homburg, 2000/2001
  • The Sound of Frankfurt, Karmeliterkloster (including jazz photos from Walldorf),
  • Benno Walldorf. Magic of Things: "MADE IN GERMANY" and paintings, English Church Cultural Center, Bad Homburg, 2013

Records, etc. a.

  • Recorded with Benny Waters, EP, 1962
  • Benno Walldorf Blues Combo, 1976
  • Farewell Sweet saxophone, with singer Jean Shy, 1983
  • Benno Walldorf Jazz & Blues Combo 1957-1984. Happy again - but the blues? , Double LP 1985

Literature and Sources

  • Fritz Usinger: The painter Benno Walldorf
  • Esther Walldorf: Leaflet for the exhibition in the museum in the Gothic House, Bad Homburg
  • Jürgen Schwab (Ed.): The Sound of Frankfurt . Exhibition catalog
  • Esther Walldorf: "Happy again - but the blues?" Benno Walldorf (1928-1985) . In: Archive for Frankfurt's History and Art . Volume 69: Art and artists in Frankfurt am Main in the 19th and 20th centuries . ISBN 978-3-7829-0545-9 .
  • Wolfgang Zöll, Esther Walldorf, Helga Boss-Stenner: jazz o´mania . Stories over 80 years of jazz in Bad Homburg and the Vordertaunus. Frankfurt am Main 2010.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgen Schwab The Frankfurt Sound. A city and its jazz history (s). Frankfurt am Main, Societätsverlag 2005, p. 133
  2. ↑ See Jürgen Schwab The Frankfurt Sound. A city and its jazz history (s). Frankfurt am Main, Societätsverlag 2005, p. 134 and Michael Rauhut, Reinhard Lorenz (editor) I've had the blues for a while - traces of music in Germany , Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 2008, p. 269

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Walldorf, Benno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH April 26, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH to water
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 1985
Place of death Bad Homburg vor der Höhe