Boris Grünwald

Boris Grünwald (born August 24, 1933 in Belgrade ; † February 12, 2014 in Filderstadt ) was an Israeli sculptor , graphic artist and university lecturer . He was also internationally active as an art jumper .

Life

Childhood and youth

Boris Grünwald (also Gruenwald, more rarely Grinvald) went through an eventful life, especially in his childhood and youth, which was severely affected by strokes of fate and political persecution. Son of a Russian architect working in Belgrade (?) - his mother and his four-year-old brother Vlado lived in Zagreb as did his maternal grandparents - he spent the years 1933 to 1938 in the children's home of the Russian Cultural Institute in Belgrade under the nickname “Boris Sosovic “Until in 1938 he took the family name of his mother Zlata Grünwald by order of the home management. In the same year he came to Zagreb to live with his grandparents, who, because of the persecution of the Jews, placed him in a private children's home founded by the German educator Annemarie Wolff-Richter after her escape from Germany in 1937, which mainly looked after Jewish children.

After the Zagreb children's home was closed by the fascist Ustascha after the occupation of Croatia by the German Wehrmacht and Annemarie Wolff-Richter was arrested, Boris Grünwald was taken to a Caritas assembly camp in Zagreb. When he started school in 1941, at the instigation of Annemarie Wolff-Richter, he was baptized a Roman Catholic under the name "Iwan Matija" in the St. Mark's Church in Zagreb , a protective measure which meant that he did not have to wear a Jewish star and thus was not recognizable as a Jew. Physically too weak to carry out the work assigned to him at the instigation of Caritas for a farmer in Bozjakovina, he was shortly taken to an orphanage in Osijek run by Catholic sisters in 1944 , from whose unbearable conditions he soon evaded by fleeing. At the age of twelve he found work with a forester in Čepin , in constant fear in an area that was at great risk from the fighting front between the partisans and the Ustaše in 1944/45. Before the end of the war, while trying to return to Bozjakovina, he came under military control in Novska , was taken to a collection camp, interrogated and mistreated. “I was supposed to prove by prayer that I was not a Jew. I knew many Catholic prayers from my time in the orphanage, and they saved my life. I was released 'as a Catholic'. ”A farmer in the Lupoglav parish took him in and he stayed with him until the end of the war until the summer of 1947. The search for his father in Belgrade was unsuccessful, he was lost during the war . Nor did he see his mother and brother, grandparents or other family members again. They were killed in the notorious Stara Gradiška and Jasenovac concentration camps .

Professional background

Although he originally wanted to be a graphic artist, he was forcibly trained as a bricklayer in communist Yugoslavia from 1947 to 1949 at a state school for construction with a boarding school in Belgrade. In the first year he was accepted as an exemplary student and worker in the Communist Youth Party of Yugoslavia, SKOJ, but in 1948 he was excluded again as a “reactionary” and constantly harassed. The military drill prevailing in the home, the political indoctrination and the exploitation as pure labor were unbearable for him. In April 1949 he tried to get into the Free Territory of Trieste . But the attempt to escape failed, he was arrested at Sveti Peter in Slovenia, had to sign unjustified accusations under threats of violence, was convicted as an enemy of the state and spent three months in prison in the Serbian town of Bela Crkva .

Released from prison, Grünwald began an apprenticeship as a mechanic in 1949, initially at a "Society for the Rescue of Sunken Ships in the Sava" in Belgrade, which he continued from 1950 in Zagreb with an apprenticeship as a car mechanic at a company and the technical vocational school and after a total of three Successfully completed his apprenticeship in early 1952.

Boris Grünwald's beginnings as a competitive athlete go back to the late 1940s : while he had already started gymnastics training in Belgrade in addition to his professional training, he intensified jumping at the Zagreb sports club “Naprijed”. In 1953 he was Yugoslav champion in this discipline. Despite his sporting success, however, he saw no professional future in Yugoslavia, especially since he had been dismissed from a job he had just started in a Zagreb car repair shop and all job applications were unsuccessful.

Stays abroad

In 1953, at the age of twenty, he left Yugoslavia and, after a stay in a collection camp for political emigrants in Trieste, traveled by ship to Australia in early 1954 . In addition to his professional activity as a car mechanic in Melbourne , he continued to participate in competitions in jumping and received a visa for the USA due to his athletic achievements. From 1956 to 1958 he stayed in Houston , Texas, New York City , Columbus (Ohio) , where, in addition to his work as an auto mechanic, he also participated in the training of the US Olympic jumping team and in competitions. Because of his achievements, he received a certificate from national coach Mike Peppe in 1958, which qualified him as an athlete and coach in artificial jumping. Since his residence permit for the USA had expired, he returned to Yugoslavia for a short time in 1958 in the hope of finding employment there as an athlete and coach, a hope that failed.

In 1959 Boris Grünwald managed to emigrate to Israel and received, until then he was considered a “stateless person”, Israeli citizenship. In the two years that he spent in Israel, he worked in various kibbutzim and most recently in Jerusalem, mainly in his learned profession. At the same time he trained as an art jumper, took part in championships and won the Israeli championships in Haifa in 1960 . Through a newspaper article, his mother's brother, who had survived the Holocaust , became aware of his nephew, who thus met uncle and aunt and unexpectedly had a family in Israel.

In 1961 Grünwald came to Germany with the intention of taking up a degree in physical education at the Sports University in Cologne . But health problems and an operation that had become necessary put an end to his sports career.

He was twenty-nine years old when he decided to study sculpture, which he completed from the winter semester 1962/63 to the summer semester 1969 at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart under Rudolf Daudert and Rudolf Hoflehner , supported from 1966 by a three-year DAAD Scholarship . During these years he received extensive support from Ernst Ludwig Heuss , son of Federal President Theodor Heuss : The close connection to the Heuss family resulted from Grünwald's past in the children's home of Annemarie Wolff-Richter, who was murdered in 1945 in the Jasenovac concentration camp, and whose daughter Ursula was Ernst Ludwig's wife Heuss and was an authentic contemporary witness of the Zagreb events.

During his studies in Stuttgart, Boris Grünwald was commissioned by the Buttenhausen community to design a memorial on the site of the Buttenhauser synagogue , which was burned down by the National Socialists in November 1938 . According to his words, he created the monumental stone sculpture with relief depictions of menorah , star of David and mandatory tables out of personal and historical ties to Judaism. “Understanding and compassion would have given him the strength and determination to accept and master this artistically difficult task.” The memorial was unveiled in 1966 in the presence of the musicologist Karl Adler , who was born in Buttenhausen .

After completing his studies, Boris Grünwald moved to the USA with his wife Ute Gruenwald and two small children in the fall of 1969 , where he initially worked as an auto mechanic again in Columbus (Ohio), until he was appointed professor for sculpture at Ohio State University in 1970 received. A renewed study of sculpture from 1971 at this university, parallel to the perception of an assistant position, he completed in 1972 with the degree of a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) . In Columbus he encountered the work of the then 79-year-old “naive” woodcarver Elijah Pierce, son of a slave, he organized several exhibitions and helped it to gain international attention.

In 1974 he was given a teaching position at the Museum Art School, Portland / Oregon. A nine-part, large-format group of sculptures made of aluminum as a symbol of “Against Violence”, which he was first published in. From this time, when he was on the road a lot with a bus full of works with his family as an “itinerant sculptor”, as one critic called him Presented in the spring of 1976 in Ojai , California . This was followed from 1976 to 1978 teaching as an associate professor of sculpture at the University of California, Santa Barbara .

In 1986 Boris Grünwald returned to Germany. The decisive factor was his appointment to the Stuttgart Art Academy as a teacher and head of the bronze foundry, an office he held until 1998. He then lived as a freelance sculptor and graphic artist in Filderstadt near Stuttgart.

Private

Boris Grünwald was married to the painter Ute Gruenwald for the first time and had a daughter and a son from this connection, and a daughter came from his second marriage to the sculptor Evamaria Grünwald.

To the work

Boris Grünwald wrote about his trips to Greece and his encounter with antiquity, the inspiration for his artistic work, in the exhibition catalog "Hommage à Rudolf Hoflehner" in 1996:

“Dealing with the Greek archaic: self-awareness over time and space. Because humans and gods are fatefully linked, as friends. Representing himself in stone and bronze - pointing to the future with a smiling face. Striving for beauty with thoughts, heart and hand, to the essential, to the symbolic, to the symbol. Lost world? Ephemeral values? No, unshakable bridge between origin and present. Man, persecuted by Dionysus, the destroyer, and Apollo, the healer and bearer of hope. "

- Boris Grünwald : Quoted by Günter Randecker in: Alb-Bote, February 19, 2014

Solo exhibitions and participation in exhibitions (selection)

• 1970 The Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio
• 1972 Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio; Light Gallery, Manhattan, NY; Ohio State University, Ohio; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Columbia College, Chicago Illinois
• 1973 Greer Gallery, East Lansing, Michigan
• 1975 White Gallery, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
• 1977 Comara Gallery, La Cienega, Los Angeles
• 1978 Century City, Los Angeles
• 1981 Morgenstern Gallery, Hamburg
• 1982 Cochise Fine Art Center, Bisbee, Arizona
• 1996 Homage to Rudolf Hoflehner, State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart
• 2000 Gallery "Altes Rathaus Musberg", Leinfelden-Echterdingen (with Evamaria Grünwald)

Works in public and private collections

Works by Boris Grünwald are in public and private collections in the USA and Germany.

literature

Boris Gruenwald: sculptures, sculptures . Kornwestheim: Druckhaus Münster [printing], 1994.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Boris Grünwald: CV . Typescript, October 31, 1997.
2. ↑ Günter Randecker: A piece of memory lives on in the memorial stone: Buttenhauser memorial: the sculptor Boris Grünwald died in Bonlanden at the age of 80 . In: Alb-Bote , February 19, 2014.
3. ↑ http://www.moma.org./docs/press_archives/4783/releases/MOMA_1972_0012_10A.pdf , accessed April 24, 2019.
4. ^ Riki Willard: Supra-sized sculptures comment on society . In: Ojai Valley News, March 21, 1976, p. 4th
5. ↑ Martin Kalus: Followers of the classical archaic: Part II: The artist couple Evamaria and Boris Grünwald are converting an old carpenter's workshop in Bonlanden . In: Stuttgarter Nachrichten , Filder-Zeitung - Culture, No. 58, May 18, 2001, SV
6. ^ Evamaria Schwarz: Sculptures, drawings . Kornwestheim: Druckhaus Münster [printing], 1994.
7. ↑ Quoted from: Günter Randecker: A piece of memory lives on in the memorial stone: Buttenhauser memorial: the sculptor Boris Grünwald died at the age of 80 in Bonlanden . In: Alb-Bote, February 19, 2014.
8. ^ Henry J. Seldis and William Wilson: Art Walk: La Cienega Area . In: Los Angeles Times , April 1, 1977, part IV, p. 6th