Carl Alexander Simon

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Self-Portrait with a Tyrolean Hat (1830)
Charlotte Kindermann, the painter's bride
Study of the Trees of Llanquihue , 1852

Carl Alexander Simon (born November 18, 1805 in Frankfurt (Oder) , † October 1852 in Patagonia ( Chile )) was a German painter and poet.

Life until 1841

Carl Alexander's father was a city and district surgeon in Frankfurt an der Oder. His older brother Johann Paul Friedrich died as a circle surgeon in Lebus in 1849 . The younger brother Johann Franz Ottomar was in Berlin as a chemist in closer contact with Alexander von Humboldt . He died, as it is said, "insane" in 1843 in Vienna.

Simon's artistic interest was aroused by his father's collection of graphics and drawing lessons from Friedrich Ludwig Geissler at the Friedrichsgymnasium in Frankfurt ad O. Geissler had published a text in 1820, which thematized the fine arts in relation to a "German popular education". Simon received a scholarship that enabled him to study at the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. In addition, he pursued philosophical studies, which he deepened after 1824 when he moved to Munich for further painting training as a pupil of Peter Cornelius .

Around 1828 Simon had met the pastor's daughter Amalie Charlotte Kindermann (1811 - 1892), whose family came from Kunersdorf . Her father refused to marry because Simon could not financially support a common household. In an act of renunciation, but also because he had planned a study trip, he traveled to Italy for four years with his friend, the composer Carl Banck . The poems he wrote during the trip were set to music by Banck, but only published in various song cycles from 1834 onwards . After his return, Simon married Amalie Charlotte in September 1832, with whom, according to various sources, he had twelve children between 1829 and 1850. The couple moved to Berlin in 1833.

From Berlin to Weimar

When Simon presented two of his pictures at the Berlin art exhibition, he was criticized in several sheets. Willibald Alexis polemicized against him, calling Simon the first painter of young Europe . Alexis consciously established a connection between Simons and the political and revolutionary collection movement Young Europe . In 1835, Simon turned to Weimar, where he had personal contacts. There he left the most famous of his artistic traces. He participated in the design of the so-called poets' rooms in the residential palace . Above all, however, the drafts for the reconstruction of the Wartburg , which are handed down in his manuscript “The Wartburg, an archaeological sketch”, are considered to be a remarkable testimony to early castle research . Simon's extensive research, with sketches and watercolors, also includes considerations for a redesign. The people should be taught morality and virtue and the Wartburg should be turned into an (uninhabited) temple of national culture and history. Despite the initial support from Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna , his plans have not been implemented as he wished.

Stuttgart 1842 to 1849

Disappointed, he moved with his family to Stuttgart in the spring of 1842, where he unsuccessfully applied for a chair at the academy . Among like-minded friends, Simon distinguished himself as a Republican and Democrat. He now lived mainly from his pictures and drawings, which among others served as a template for the publisher Carl Mayer in Nuremberg. In mid-October 1845, the “Nuremberg Correspondent from and for Germany” issued a report reprinted by many newspapers that a society of art lovers in Stuttgart had drafted the liberal plan, based on Simon's sketch of a huge, allegorical painting entitled “The Liberation of the human spirit ”should be carried out. The sensational project was not implemented. He also wrote articles for democratic newspapers, including about his visions of a future art: Gone is the time of thrones and superstition, and so is their art. […] The story of the princes has played out. The story of the peoples begins. Freedom and the people will produce an art that the earth has never seen, not even in Greece .

When in May 1847 there were “bread riots” in Württemberg, some of which were suppressed by armed violence , he was one of the signatories of a protest note. He was supposed to be expelled from the country as a non-Württemberg resident, but obtained a provisional extension of residence for himself and his family through his lawyer Friedrich Römer . Nevertheless he left his family, town and country and wandered through France under poor conditions until March 1848. Back in Stuttgart, he joined the democratic Stuttgart district association, which other associations from Württemberg joined in June 1848. Soon afterwards, with the establishment of the Provisional Central Authority in Frankfurt, the republican - democratic idea of ​​the state fell behind. In the Stuttgart district association, this led to violent disputes at a meeting chaired by Simon at the end of June, as some of the delegates were of the opinion that democracy no longer had a chance in Germany. This forced the emigration question internally and Simon suggested that a commission be set up to examine this question. As an employee of Gottlieb Rau's democratic daily newspaper “Die Sonne”, he now advertised the first edition of his book “The emigration of democrats and proletarians and the German-national colonization of the South American Free State of Chile”. On July 12, 1848, the Stuttgart district association was banned.

One last time Simon appeared as a speaker at popular assemblies during the September riots. He again escaped imminent arrest by fleeing to France. Returning secretly in the spring of 1849, he finally considered emigrating. After the failed revolution, Simon added the motto of the second edition of his emigration pamphlet, revised in 1849/50 and with an appendix by the geographer Traugott Bromme: If you cannot take the tyrants from the peoples, take the peoples from the tyrants . Simon writes that nature does not turn its eye to the coincidences of color or language, but to the life of mankind as a whole and that one should not waste one's energies in a national-patriotic delusion , because nationalities are only a means to a greater end . He regards the entire American continent as irreversibly republican in spite of all the social, economic and ethnic disputes still to be expected. But he doesn’t skimp on speculations from the psychological point of view . Above all, the cold, speculative materialism of the North American race feels repulsed by the German emotional person who is more associated with the Roman race (p. 43).

Life and death in Chile

After another stopover in France, Simon left Hamburg on an emigrant ship in March 1850 and reached Chile on May 31, where his brother-in-law Franz Kindermann had lived in Valparaíso since 1836 . Together with him or at his suggestion, Simon founded the Stuttgart "Society for German Emigration and Colonization" in 1848. In addition to Simon, the co-founders were the Stuttgart bookseller and publisher Friedrich Cast and the young Oskar von Wächter .

Settlement land originally planned, but confiscated by the state, underestimated natural disasters, personal disputes and official mistrust of the “madmen” and “communists” led to the end of the project, which Simon represented so euphorically. Nevertheless, drawing and painting again, he began to roam the southern regions in search of a place for his ideal company. His last known sketch is dated February 7, 1852. Thanks to his previous acquaintance with the governor Bernhard Eunom Philippi , he succeeded in joining an expedition to the Strait of Magellan as a draftsman and chronicler. From Punta Arenas from to be broken Simon in late October 1852, and a few days before Philippi with two "Patagonian Indians" and dismissed convict. Both Simon and a little later Bernhard Philippi and his companions found violent deaths in the wild.

The writer Friedrich Gerstäcker , who traveled to South America several times, later spread the rumor that Simon was not killed but that he was held and treated well by an indigenous people for years. Since similar rumors spread about the Philippi who died on the same expedition, this version can be doubted. In November 1851 there was a mutiny in Punta Arenas, the so-called "Motín de Cambiaso", as a result of which the city was destroyed and indigenous people were murdered. The hatred and aversion to people in uniform may therefore have been great in the region. In this respect, Simon, who is carrying a guitar and painting utensils, falls out of place.

Works

Paintings and sketches

  • The Singers' War at the Wartburg . Wall painting in oil (1838)
  • Sketches for the design of the Wartburg

Fonts

  • The emigration of democrats and proletarians and German-national colonization of the South American Free State of Chile , Stuttgart 1848
  • Emigration and German-national colonization of South America with special consideration of the Free State of Chile , Bayreuth 1850 (Online: [5] )

literature

  • Jutta Krauß: "Life, Action or Death" - the Wartburg renewer Carl Alexander Simon , in: Wartburg - Yearbook 2003, Regensburg 2004, pp. 89-107
  • Grit Jacobs: "Nothing that has been is history, but what has been great". Carl Alexander Simon: The Wartburg. An archaeological sketch , in: Wartburg - Jahrbuch 2003, Regensburg 2004, pp. 108–157
  • Jutta Krauss, Grit Jacobs, Christian Hecht: Carl Alexander Simon: "I am a sketch and I have created sketches". Accompanying document for the special exhibition on the occasion of the 200th birthday of a Wartburg visionary , Wartburg Foundation Eisenach, Eisenach 2005

Web links

Commons : Carl Alexander Simon  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jutta Krauß: "Life, action or death" - the Wartburg renewer Carl Alexander Simon , in: Wartburg year book 2003, Regensburg 2004, pp. 89-107, here pp. 92f
  2. ↑ Grit Jacobs: "Nothing that has been is history, but what has been great". Carl Alexander Simon: The Wartburg, an archaeological sketch , in: Wartburg-Jahrbuch 2003, Regensburg 2004, p. 108 - 157, here p. 109
  3. ↑ Jutta Krauß 2003, p. 98
  4. ↑ Th. Musper: Carl Alexander Simon (a forgotten painter of late romanticism) , in: Die graphischen Künste, 52nd year, Vienna 1929, pp . 23-31. Online: [1] . A takeover from Nuremberg and a critical commentary in Moritz Gottlieb Saphir's “Humorist” of October 18, 1845. Online: [2]
  5. ↑ Quoted from Gottfried Fittbogen : Alexander Simon and Willibald Alexis , in: Journal of the Association for the History of Berlin. New series of messages, No. 2, Berlin 1940, pp. 63 - 75, here p. 64. Online: [3]
  6. ↑ Jutta Krauß 2003, p. 100
  7. ^ Paul Sauer (archivist) : Gottlieb Rau and the revolutionary uprising in Württemberg in September 1848 . Published by the Swabian Cultural Archives of the Swabian Alb Association, Stuttgart 1998, p. 43
  8. ↑ Jutta Krauß 2003, p. 101f
  9. ↑ Gottfried Fittbogen: From Philippi to Anwandter. The development of the idea of ​​German immigration in southern Chile , in: Ibero-American Archives, Vol. 10, No. 3, Berlin 1936/37, pp. 271 - 286, here p. 281. Despite the place and year of publication a reasonably accurate representation
  10. ^ Eugenio Pereira Salas: El pintor alemán Alexander Simon y su tragica utopía , in: Boletino de la Academía Chilena de la Historia, No. 77, Santiago de Chile, p. 11
  11. ↑ Jutta Krauß 2003, p. 104f
  12. ↑ Jutta Krauß 2003, p. 105
  13. ↑ Friedrich Gerstäcker: Eighteen Months in South America and its German Colonies , Third Volume, Leipzig 1863, p. 9. Online: [4]
personal data
SURNAME Simon, Carl Alexander
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German poet and painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1805
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt (Oder)
DATE OF DEATH October 1852
Place of death Patagonia ( Chile )