Beppe Assenza

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Beppe Assenza (born March 19, 1905 in Modica , Sicily , † September 23, 1985 in Dornach ) was a Sicilian painter.

Biographical

Rosario Giuseppe Assenza was born as the eldest son of Giorgio and Angela Assenza. He grew up in Modica with seven younger siblings. At the age of thirteen he received his first painting lessons from his uncle Orazio Spadaro, his mother's brother. In 1923 he began studying painting in Milan . In 1925 he had his first exhibition in the Galleria Borgonuovo . Three years later he won a competition in Syracuse and got his first orders for the government palace and for various churches. These works were still carried out in the classical forms of the Renaissance . Assenza's life at this time was characterized by intensive interaction with other artists, scientists and writers. Many artistic projects were developed together. He designed volumes of poetry by poets and a journal for science and art with woodcuts .

Because he no longer wanted to pursue his previous artistic path and wanted to break away from the traditions of his classical training, Assenza left Italy to study the new art forms of Impressionism and Expressionism in Germany and France. In 1937 Assenza returned to Italy. As early as 1933, Beppe Assenza met Karl Stirner , who was visiting Syracuse for several months. The then 29-year-old received new ideas from Stirner. The two had a friendship that lasted for several years. Stirner may have helped to awaken the need in Assenza to broaden his artistic horizons abroad.

After his return he moved to Rome , where he maintained his contacts in Germany, especially with Stirner. He also kept his studio in Munich. Here he got to know the works of Franz Marc , August Macke , Emil Nolde , Alexej Jawlensky , Paul Klee and others for the first time through the exhibition Degenerate Art . The engagement with Gertrud Merkle was broken up again by her National Socialist sentiments. As a result, Assenza also closed its Munich location. In Rome in 1937 he met Bianca Emanuele, whom he married in 1950. In the following years Beppe Assenza became acquainted with Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and dealt intensively with his explanations about the nature of color and, in connection with it, Goethe's theory of colors . In the years 1943 to 1947 he created many monochrome pictures in blue, red and shades of brown.

Due to the unexplained circumstances of his partner Bianca, she was still bound in a marriage and at that time the annulment of an existing marriage without the consent of the husband was as good as impossible, and his restless artistic search got Beppe Assenza in 1942 into a deep mental and life crisis . A breakdown made a short hospital stay necessary. Due to lost draft papers, Assenza was spared military service during the Second World War .

The incipient cancer of his wife Bianca prompted him to go with her to a special clinic in Arlesheim , Switzerland and to stay by her side until her death in 1958. Despite its high recognition in Rome, Assenza decided to stay in Switzerland. A studio that became vacant moved him to settle in Dornach . His artistic new beginning began here. In 1959 Beppe Assenza met his student Gerta Hörstel, whom he married in 1961.

Soon Beppe Assenza again gained a high international reputation. In 1969 he was invited to continue running a private painting school as a painting school at the Goetheanum . It soon had four classes and within a short time it became a well-attended art school with many students. Over the following years, over thirty sketchbooks emerged from this work. Also in 1969 Assenza moved into a newly built studio house that a wealthy heiress and former pupil built for him. From around 1970 the ten years of the main phase of his work followed with intensive exhibition activity and an ever-increasing number of students. In 1978 the picture monograph Beppe Assenza was published with a biographical outline and texts on art that Herbert Witzenmann procured. This volume of works was published in England a year later.

In 1982 Beppe Assenza suffered a heart attack which forced him to take a two-month break. A year later he separated from his second wife Gerta. The preparatory work begun in 1984 for a painterly exercise book could no longer be completed. Beppe Assenza died on September 23, 1985.

plant

Beppe Assenza's efforts - his lessons with Spadaro, his stays in Milan, Rome and abroad as well as the suggestions from his friendship with Karl Stirner - had not fulfilled his hopes for a teacher who would accompany him in developing his skills. He therefore always saw himself as an autodidact. At the beginning his development took place in concrete-figurative representations with great attention to detail, but his works in the period from 1933 to 1941, in which strong expressive images were created, showed the first approaches to get away from the representational and let the color speak for itself . The intensive preoccupation with Goethe's color theory and Rudolf Steiner's remarks on this further influenced this tendency.

For a while, Assenza used the so-called crumpling technique, among other techniques. The painting paper is placed in water, drained and then wadded up and then laid out on a painting board. Since around 1964 Assenza has hardly used oil paint, but preferred watercolors and various mixed techniques. In addition to canvas, he used paper and wood as a substrate.

In Assenza's newly developed understanding of art, every form was related to a color and every color was related to a form. He seldom renounced the figurative element in his pictures, but always tried to create new aspects of form. Even in the brushstroke, form was revealed to him and thus the choice of brush was already a decision for her. His critics often accused Assenza of painting in an inartistic way, because he did not paint abstract pictures, but merely colored his existing intentions for form. On the other hand, Gerta Hörstel said in an introductory text to an exhibition that "the dynamism of color, from which Assenza's painting is shaped, is able to preserve its pure originality in the pictures, whereby the color becomes the carrier of form and expression. It is color itself that creates the light-dark form-generating and at the same time brings about that strong structure ... "

Assenza's artistic path can be divided into four periods. His academic style of painting, in which he reproduces his motifs exactly. By meeting Karl Stirner, he achieved an increase in the expressiveness of the colors. In portrait painting he developed an increase in expressiveness. In his final phase he gains a new approach to color and from it develops his own formal language.

Beppe Assenza summed up his development with the following sentence: "My painting is the result of leaving aside all the techniques acquired over decades in favor of the form in the picture that emerges from the color".

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1925 Milan, first exhibition in the Galleria Borgonuovo
  • 1932 Rome, La Mostra Internatzionale d'arte sacra
  • 1934 Rome, La Mostra d'arte figurativa
  • 1935 Syracuse, Beppe Assenza mostra personale
  • 1936 Venice, Biennale
  • 1938 Rome, Quadriennale
  • 1940 Catania, del pittore
  • 1943 Rome, Mostra personale
  • 1946 Syracuse, Quarta mostra internazionale arti figurative
  • 1953 Caltanissetta, Mostra nationale
  • 1961 Winterthur, gallery in the White House
  • 1962 Copenhagen, Santina Gallery
  • 1968 Dornach, Goetheanum
  • 1970 Hamburg Neue Sparkasse
  • 1971 Berlin, Anthroposophical Society
  • 1975 Basel, Galerie zum Bäumlin
  • 1980 Wuppertal, Gallery 32
  • 1984 Ottersberg, art college
  • 1985 Dornach, Goetheanum. Overall view of the 80th birthday

literature

  • Marcelle Probst: For Beppe Assenza's 70th birthday . In: The Goetheanum. Dornach 3/1975.
  • Herbert Witzenmann: Beppe Assenza - Introduction and Aphorisms . London 1979, ISBN 0-85440-340-X . (English)
  • Herbert Witzenmann: Beppe Assenza - A work monograph. Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-7725-0676-3 .
  • Eve Ratnowsky: encounter with Assenza's work . In: The Goetheanum. Dornach 12/1985.
  • Klaus Hartmann , Greet Helsen Durrer: Beppe Assenza - A life for painting . Dornach 2005, ISBN 3-85704-180-3 .
  • Reto Andrea Savoldelli: Flood of colors and pillar secret. neobooks Self-Publishing, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-8476-4944-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ K. Hartmann, G. Helsen Durrer: A life for painting. 2005, p. 36.
  2. ↑ a b Kulturimpuls Research Center
  3. ↑ K. Hartmann, G. Helsen Durrer: A life for painting. 2005, p. 44.
  4. ↑ K. Hartmann, G. Helsen Durrer: A life for painting. 2005, pp. 84-87.
  5. ↑ K. Hartmann, G. Helsen Durrer: A life for painting. 2005, p. 131.
  6. ↑ K. Hartmann, G. Helsen Durrer: A life for painting. 2005, p. 195.
  7. ↑ K. Hartmann, G. Helsen Durrer: A life for painting. 2005, p. 92.
  8. ↑ K. Hartmann, G. Helsen Durrer: A life for painting. 2005, p. 71 u. 88
  9. ↑ K. Hartmann, G. Helsen Durrer: A life for painting. 2005, p. 141.
  10. ↑ K. Hartmann, G. Helsen Durrer: A life for painting. 2005, p. 170.
  11. ↑ K. Hartmann, G. Helsen Durrer: A life for painting. 2005, p. 155.
  12. ↑ K. Hartmann, G. Helsen Durrer: A life for painting. 2005, p. 258.
  13. ^ Beppe Assenza. In: Herbert Witzenmann: Beppe Assenza. Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979, ISBN 0-85440-340-X , p. 126. (English)
personal data
SURNAME Assenza, Beppe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 19, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Modica , Sicily
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 1985
Place of death Dornach