Bruno Wersig

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Bruno Wersig (born February 15, 1882 in Altwasser , Silesia ; † July 13, 1970 in Landau an der Isar ) was a German painter and etcher who idealized his enthusiasm for nature in his pictures.

Live and act

Wersig lived for some time as a disciple of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach on Capri , whose philosophy of life reform had a lasting impact on his further life and art. There are also indications of a friendship with Edmund Steppes through their mutual acquaintance with Diefenbach's daughter, Stella von Spaun. However, Steppes himself later kept his distance from the radical doctrines of nature and limited himself exclusively to his works in their mystification .

Years later, with the help of a scholarship, Wersig finished his studies at the Art Academy in Leipzig at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and began painting in a small studio in the heart of Schwabing . At first he lived a bourgeois life and started a family, but was increasingly unable to reconcile his views on life with it. Ultimately, he failed both as an artist and as the head of the family, and at the age of 53 he retired to a simple life on Waginger See . In 1961 his daughter Hildegard brought him into her family, where he stayed until his death in 1970.

Childhood, apprenticeship and wandering years

Wersig was born as the eighth and last child of Karl Wilhelm Wersig and his wife Johanna Wersig, in Altwasser, at the foot of the Giant Mountains . His father worked as a capsule lathe operator at the Carl Tielsch porcelain factory . After graduating from elementary school, he also began working there as an apprentice porcelain painter .

At the age of 16 he left his home and went to Dresden , and then to Berlin to join family members. He made his living as a clerk and waiter. Then he moved on to Heringsdorf on the Baltic Sea, in the Rhine Palatinate , the Thuringian Forest and finally to Leipzig . There he began studying at the Leipzig Art Academy in 1901 .

In 1903 Wersig was called up for military service. In 1906 he worked again as a waiter in Berlin (Cafe Josty) to make a trip to Italy possible. On Capri he met the artist and life reformer Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach and spent from January to June 1907 as an apprentice to the master. Diefenbach deeply impressed him with his outlook on life and his idealism as a nature apostle and reformer , and determined his further thinking and life. However, he could not accept Diefenbach uncritically, and so he went to Austria with the family of Diefenbach's daughter, Stella von Spaun . There he lived for the next six years, with small interruptions, in Gratwein / Styria and later in Michelbach (Lower Austria) . In 1912 he returned to Capri with the von Spaun family, where he lived and drew in a cave for a few months, until war broke out in 1914 and he was drafted.

In 1916 he was dismissed after a serious wound and was able to do so with a scholarship ( Prince von Pless Hans Heinrich XV., Baron zu Fürstenberg) in the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1919 under the guidance of Peter von Halm (radiography school, painting technique) and Carl von Marr (painting), finish his studies.

Civil phase of life

In a Schwabing studio he painted landscapes with the idealism he had acquired and his strong relationship with nature. In 1922 he married the teacher Therese Scherbauer and began the middle-class part of his life: in 1924 his daughter Hildegard Traute Wersig was born; 1927 the move to Freimann . From here he made frequent trips to the mountains, to paint and study. In 1928, Clement Novio, a French art critic of the Revue Moderne , Paris, described the works by Bruno Wersig in the Glaspalast as follows:

“In contrast to other, modern painters, he does not try to turn the landscape into a decidedly decorative painting ... He has grasped the universal rhythm of nature. He expresses this rhythm himself in his less attractive works. "

- Letter from Clement Novio, Paris, October 24, 1928 ( original in French )

It is nature and its motifs that fascinate Wersig. When he was in Stuttgart at the beginning of 1930 to study a copy of Caspar David Friedrich's Giant Mountains Landscape, he wrote in a letter to his wife:

“There is a sensation in the lines and colors that could be called religious. Solemn, for all its simplicity, is the deep, closed feeling for nature. I realized again that I did not become a painter out of love for art - which as a young person you hardly understand - but out of love for nature. "

- Letter from Bruno Wersig to Therese Wersig, Stuttgart, May 20, 1930.

In search

Through a mystical experience and the returning memory of Diefenbach and his spiritual comrades, his uncompromising attitude towards his family and those around him began. He demanded radical changes, found civil and social life to be harmful, ate no more meat, no longer smoked and wanted to take his daughter out of school. His spiritual development and the interpretations resulting from it now increasingly asserted itself in his pictures . The description of the Alpine Museum, Praterinsel Munich, about his work Wettersteingebirge is indicative :

“Wersig comes from the New Objectivity landscape. The blue mountains are reminiscent of the remote mountains of the world landscapes of a Brueghel. Wersig creates an idealized and remote picture of the world. "

In 1930 he got a provisional guardian . His persistent unwillingness to compromise finally led to incapacitation in 1931 on the grounds of an established mental weakness . He ended his activity as a painter and only felt called to educate other people. During this time he read and wrote a lot.

From 1935 on, Wersig lived alone, with a few interruptions, in Waging am See . In search of like-minded people, he spent some time with Johannes Müller , a Protestant theologian and director of a "sanctuary for personal life" in Elmau . For a short time he also joined the Jehovah's Witnesses , where he collected ideas for his philosophy of life .

Exhibitions

Piccola marina, Capri, by Bruno Wersig
  • As a member of the Munich Artists' Cooperative, he exhibited in art exhibitions in the Glaspalast : 1923: Der Einsiedler (oil, copy after Carl Spitzweg ); 1927: Easter time (oil, tempera); 1928: slopes (oil), Heath Hill (oil), Lech landscape (oil); 1929: Almenmatten (oil).
  • in Darmstadt as part of the exhibition "Flowers and Art", 1928
  • Art exhibition of the German Art Society Lübeck, 1929
  • Exhibition with his work Wettersteingebirge under the motto: "Blood and Soil" - Culture, 20s / 30s; in the Alpine Museum of the German Alpine Club , on the Praterinsel in Munich , 1999
  • In the Mohr-Villa cultural center in Munich-Freimann, with Gusto Gräser under the title: "Sincerely and steadfastly straight ahead" - nature prophets in Freimann. Gusto Gräser, Bruno Wersig and the effect of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, January - March 2010

Works in collections and museums

Wetterstein Mountains by Bruno Wersig
  • Since 1913/14 drawings in the archive of the Albertina , Vienna (inventory no.21540 Church in the moonlight , 21541 motif from Capri and 21542 staircase to the terrace )
  • His work Before Sunrise in the Wetterstein Mountains (oil on canvas) can be found in the Historical Alpine Archives of the Alpine Clubs in Germany , Austria and South Tyrol

literature

  • Bruno Wersig: Handwritten notes on the Capri diary, January to May 1907.
  • Catalogs of the Munich art exhibitions, Glaspalast, 1923, 1927, 1928 and 1929.
  • Historical alpine archive of the alpine clubs in Germany, Austria and South Tyrol.
  • 05547 Bruno Wersig. In: Matriculation database of the Academy of Fine Arts (ed.): Matriculation book. Volume 3: 1884-1920. Munich ( matrikel.adbk.de , Digitale-sammlungen.de )
  • Felix Lorenz: Spring on Capri. In: Modern Art. Issue 18, Volume XXVIII, No. 56, 1914, pp. 219–224.
  • Bruno Wersig: My origins. Handwritten records dated February 9, 1934.
  • Bruno Wersig . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 12, Saur, Munich a. a. 1995, ISBN 3-598-22752-3 , p. 521.
  • Brigitte Fingerle-Trischler: Nature Prophets in Freimann. Gusto Gräser, Bruno Wersig and the effect of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. Mohr-Villa Freimann 2010.
  • Ruth Negendanck, Claus Pese: Magic Island Capri, In the footsteps of German-speaking artists. Wienand Verlag 2018, ISBN 978-3-86832-425-9 , pp. 232-233, student for a short time.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wersig, Bruno . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 35 : Libra-Wilhelmson . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1942, p. 423 .
  2. ↑ a b Bruno Wersig: From the notes of a Munich painter. In: The picture. Monthly magazine for German art, past and present. 1934, pp. 149-160.
  3. ^ Andreas Zoller: The landscape painter Edmund Steppes (1873-1968) and his vision of a "German painting". Dissertation in the Department of Fine Arts at the Braunschweig University of Applied Sciences, 1999.
  4. ^ Claudia Wagner: The artist Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851-1913) - master and mission. With a catalog of all known oil paintings. Inaugural dissertation at the Department of Art History at the Free University of Berlin, 2005 ( fu-berlin.de ).
  5. ↑ Catalog of the German Alpine Museum, 1999, category Alpinism in the network of political constellations: Alpinism in the Hitler State, pp. 365–366
  6. ↑ Wersig, Bruno. In: Dressler's art manual . Volume 2, ninth year 1930, p. 1086.
personal data
SURNAME Wersig, Bruno
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wersig, Bruno Oskar (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and etcher
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Altwasser , Silesia
DATE OF DEATH July 13, 1970
Place of death Landau on the Isar