Carl Christian Thegen

Christoph Carl Christian Thegen , first name: Krischan , pseudonym as painter: Carl Christian , (born November 16, 1883 in Bad Oldesloe ; † on the night of September 7th to 8th, 1955 ) was a German amateur painter.

Life

Christian Thegen was a son of master shoemaker Hans Daniel Christian Thegen (born September 21, 1828 in Bad Oldesloe; † March 5, 1909 there) and his wife Catharina Maria Magdalene, née Hamelau (February 6, 1845 in Rethwischfelde near Bad Oldesloe; † 17 April 1924 in Bad Oldesloe). The couple married on November 16, 1877.

Thegen grew up in a poor family. At school he showed little success in learning and received a grade of 4 in drawing, which corresponded to "poor". Until the end of his life he had the intellectual level of an auxiliary student. Ernst Buchholz wrote about this in 1966 that Thegen was a man who “cannot be imagined as primitive enough in terms of outward appearance and intellectual development”.

Thegen did not receive any professional training and worked for frequently changing employers. He preferred to work where he suspected adventure or could deal with animals. At the age of 19 he worked as an assistant at the Belli circus and then for several years as a keeper in Hagenbeck's zoo . During this time he may have helped with animal transport abroad. For a short time he had his own carousel with which he drove through the country. During the First World War he did military service and tended horses in the train .

From 1918 to 1939, Thegen took on different activities at constantly changing locations without a permanent residence. So he was on the road as an unskilled worker, drover or agricultural worker. In 1939 he went to a sanatorium and nursing home where he lived until 1947. He then returned to doing odd jobs such as gardening or harvesting. Before the end of his life he received a disability pension.

On the night of September 7th to 8th, 1955, Thegen climbed into a hayloft where he wanted to sleep. He died in a fall from his sleeping place.

Today a street in Bad Oldesloe reminds of the painter who died in an accident. Carl Christian Thegen found his final resting place in the Evangelical Lutheran Cemetery of the parish in Bad Oldesloe.

Working as an artist

Thegen was lifelong as a person who liked to paint. However, he did not start painting until May 1932, when he met Emil Maetzel . Thegen told the Hamburg painter that he could also draw himself. Maetzel then provided him with work utensils and a work room. He taught him to paint in watercolors and encouraged him to continue working.

With his career, Thegen is a typical example of a naive painter in the original sense. He started without a corresponding training and had no special goals, but painted out of pure pleasure in this occupation. He used Sundays and public holidays for this and worked mostly obsessively after the end of his daily work. He showed no ambition and was not worried about whether he would succeed in the pictures.

One motive for Thegen's paintings was certainly that he was looking for self-affirmation. His fellow men knew him and called him "Krischan", but did not show him any appreciation. They judged him as a bizarre, non-conformist personality and ridiculed him as an original figure on the fringes of society. The pictures therefore offered him the opportunity to be noticed.

Works

Thegen initially worked to order from a book with sketches of his motifs. He had only a few lovers, including the Hamburg painters Ivo Hauptmann and Fritz Kronenberg . He received between one and five marks for his pictures. His clients Ernst Buchholz and the art teacher Hans-Friedrich Geist helped Thegen to get his first exhibitions and publications in 1947 in Lübeck and in 1948 in Hamburg and Berlin .

Thegen created numerous pictures. These show him as a big child who lived in his own world without worries. The thoughts, wishes and ideas expressed in it are reminiscent of the works of an approximately twelve-year-old. He often painted adventures that took place in foreign countries and showed cowboys, Indians, trappers or torerors. Pictures with domestic motifs show artists or traveling showmen.

To a much lesser extent, Thegen captured scenes from his own living environment, including motifs from the lives of farmers, animals or hunting. Scenes from the limited educational horizon he was given, including biblical stories, fairy tales or fables, are seldom found.

Thegen's pictures contain forms of representation that are otherwise known to children. He depicted people and animals schematically in profile and showed them as linear outlines. He chose the size of the figures and their relationships to one another depending on their meaning. He always chose blue as the color of his eyes. Only backdrops full of characters such as trees, grass or suns can be seen around the figures.

Thegens only depicted the essentials in his pictures and used the simplest means: with a carpenter's pencil he draws the motifs, often on a poor surface such as leftover wallpaper. He was painting safely, from memory, in one go without interruptions or corrections. He colored the sketch he created with unmixed watercolors.

Thegen converted his ideas into formats up to the size 100 × 100. In combination with the combination of extensive, large shapes and colored surfaces, this gave them a monumental effect. The quality of his pictures fluctuated. In his best works, he succeeded in choosing colors in a targeted manner, dividing the available area harmoniously and giving the animals in focus lively, differentiated movements.

Thegen left several hundred pictures. The majority of this was in private households. Among the few museums that initially owned his works were the Museum of German Folklore , the Swiss Museum of Folklore and the Museum of Art and Crafts , both based in Basel . The Ernst Buchholz collection in Hamburg owned around 100 pictures, and the Geist collection in Lübeck held another 50 .

Thegen only became known and appreciated after his death. Today he is considered one of the best German naive painters.

literature

• Thegen, Christian . in: Schleswig-Holstein Biographical Lexicon . Volume 4. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1976, pp. 218-220.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Susanne Rohde: Who was Carl Christian Thegen? shz.de from January 3, 2012. Accessed April 10, 2017.
2. ^ Press service: Prominent graves from January 3, 2012. Retrieved on June 28, 018.
3. ^ Susanne Rohde: Who was Carl Christian Thegen? shz.de from January 3, 2012. Retrieved April 11, 2017.