Carl Heuer

This article is about the painter Carl Heuer. For the officer, see Carl Friedrich Theodor Heuer .

Carl Heuer (born November 14, 1907 in Unna ; † November 13, 1994 there ) was a German painter .

Life

He painted from childhood. Later he did a three-year apprenticeship as a painter, then attended four semesters at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dortmund , then in 1925 evening classes with Käthe Kollwitz at the Berlin Academy . He started out as a naturalist / expressionist , influenced by Kirchner , Klee , Jawlensky and Kandinsky . From 1936 he worked mainly as a church painter , then as an interior designer, especially for hospitals, in Luxembourg , France and Berlin . He also supplied colored designs for leaded glass windows. In between, from 1939 to 1944, he was in the war and from 1944 to 1947 in the Caucasus in Soviet captivity , where he worked as a camp painter and produced the necessary colors himself.

The main scene of his work was Unna. There he worked for 16 years in the Westig steelworks as a laboratory assistant. For around 30 years - from 1935 to 1965 - he lived and worked in what is now the district of Mühlhausen on the Mühlhausener Hellweg, which was still an independent village community in his time . Again and again he painted and drew motifs from this rural area. Since 1965 he lived on the outskirts of downtown Unna in Bornekampstrasse. In 1948 he was co-founder of the bustling Unnaer Künstlerkreis (UKK), which existed for 20 years and to whose "hard core" he belonged with the artists Wilhelm Buschulte , Heinz Draeger, Paul Düllberg, Wilhelm Meinecke, Bruno Moser and Otto Honsálek. The group of artists met once a week in the Unnaer Burg to discuss their own work and to familiarize themselves with modern art movements. Another line drawing that Buschulte made of him in 1962 comes from this period. At the opening of an exhibition on Heuer's 80th birthday on December 7, 1987 in the Hellweg Museum in Unna (with 80 exemplary works from 1931 to 1986), senior teacher Karl Kirchner characterized him in his laudation :

“Those who belonged to this group at the time will be happy to confirm that Carl was one of the most active: Always on the trail of the latest, without prejudice, restlessly active, an avant-garde, a significant stimulator, sometimes contradicting but always provoking thought - only, not always a matter of course for artists: Tolerant of the opinion of others and full of appreciation for their work, if it seemed good in its way to him. ”From the 1960s it is reported that he painted so many pictures while on vacation in Italy that - back home - he painted over a number of them with gray paint, leaving out only a few small pieces of the original; so he could paint again and at the same time created a new form of expression.

On his 85th birthday, the Westfälische Rundschau wrote (November 14, 1992): “He's always an original; one that is quite old in years, but also one that seems to spread youthful arrogance today as it was yesterday. ... Carl Heuer lives for painting and lives out in it. ..., with seemingly inexhaustible energy: Not a day in which he would not stand in front of his easel in his apartment. ... This year paints downright fanatically. And that was always his very special problem. Material costs alone usually cost more than he could earn. Especially since: "I was always a bungler when it came to demands," he says himself. "

His second wife Marlies Rauen-Heuer, born in Menden in 1939 , artist name Mara, was also a painter and once a student of his. She died just two months after him. Both bequeathed their remaining works to the cities of Unna and Menden. The city of Fröndenberg / Ruhr took over 60 of these works on permanent loan; they were exhibited in March 1996 in the Fröndenberger Rathausgalerie.

This year was something of an institution for Unna, an artistic original. With his brightly painted "art duck" (his car, a Citroën 2 CV), he was part of the cityscape as well as the Unna cultural scene. At the same time he was their “ enfant terrible ” and was considered “the most restless of the Unna painters' guild”. Most of the time he held a corn-cob pipe in his hand, liked to drink a good red wine and in the last years of his life, when he finally calmed down, jokingly answered the phone with "the old man". He died suddenly the day before he was 87 years old. Until then he stood at the easel "every day for five to six hours" (Westfälische Rundschau of January 7, 1994) . His urn was buried in the Unna south cemetery.

Services

Carl Heuer's style is based on classic modernism , each with different accents. He has dealt with all styles of his time, representational and abstract, not only painted, but also worked in plaster , clay , cement , stone, wood and with sackcloth, paper, sand like nails, and has also created many sculptures . He never committed himself and did not allow himself to be pressed into any scheme. One can best describe his style as expressive-representational. The first exhibition about his previous work took place at the beginning of November 1954 in the knight's hall of Unna Castle . Four years later - from mid-May to mid-June 1958 - another special exhibition followed for him, also in Unnaer Burg, with 35 paintings from the last nine months of his work, mostly abstract works. They had titles like "Predatory Fish", "Excited Game", "Rhythmic Vibration", "Condensed Scene" or "Encounter with Br." (Hellweger Anzeiger from May 15 and 19, 1958). What many of his works have in common is that they are permeated by a mischievous, subtle humor. He loved to paint faces, almost caricaturing himself with human weaknesses , not without sarcasm , but without cynicism . It is characteristic of him that he titled one of his exhibitions in April 1976 "Old Gags and New". Many of his picture titles do not want to be taken tragically seriously: "Greetings from Aunt Frida", "Diverse curmudgeon", "The cactus friend", "Choppy day", "The mourners", "The flail", "The player", "The Schwarzseher" or "The Carefree One". He called a number of his pictures “metamorphoses of human weaknesses”, including earlier models. On the other hand, he also painted realistically: an apple, a piece of cheese or a Melitta filter (Hellweger Anzeiger, April 6, 1976). He was also gripped by the major topic that emerged in the 1980s, the endangered environment . A number of his pictures from this period deal with her. "There were always other motifs that - often offensive - always captivated him for a long time: sometimes pictures of beds that were just being used, at the moment it is smashed glass bottles that do it to him" (Westfälische Rundschau of November 14, 1992). Even at an advanced age, his motto was never persistence, but moving forward. At the age of 85 he threw himself into a new style and painted color compositions. On his 86th birthday, he explained in an interview: "The color artist needs no motifs or by-products, he lives with the joys or misery of tones, freed from all concessions" (Westfälische Rundschau of January 7, 1994).

He tried to bring the general development of the fine arts to Unna; he went public with lectures on contemporary art. On the side he was in demand as an art connoisseur with keen judgment. He was represented at many art exhibitions in Unna and the surrounding area.

Works

There is no catalog of his works - he signed "ch". Work-obsessed and productive as he was, this would be very long. Listing or cataloging was not his nature anyway. He painted and drew almost everything, to order or spontaneously on his own initiative. A number of his works are owned by the city of Unna. By far the majority are widely scattered privately owned. The pulpit of the Unna City Church, which he redesigned in color in 1936, two views of the City Church - painted around 1960 - in the Hellweg Museum, a large glass window in the Fröndenberg- Langschede school from 1958 with the inscription NOT FOR can be seen in public space THE SCHOOL FOR LIFE WE LEARN and a large mosaic in the break hall of the Pestalozzi-Gymnasium in Unna (today Peter Weiss Comprehensive School) from 1964. He also carried out restorations, for example in 1950 on the damaged 6 m high mural in the Protestant Parish church of Holzwickede , which was created in 1924 by the well-known church painter Rudolf Schäfer ( Westfalenpost dated May 20, 1950). Some of Heuer's work is no longer available, such as the many public cinema posters that he painted "snappy and stylish" in the post-war years. He couldn't sell as much as he produced. His studio under the roof at Bornekampstrasse 18 was always overflowing with pictures. He himself coined the phrase: “Sold a lot and gave away a lot.” When moving and later shortly before his death, he let the local newspapers announce that he was giving away some of his pictures free of charge.

Works by him can be purchased in the Unna antiquarian bookshop "Bücherzentrum" and at the Kunstverein Unna.

literature

• Josef Cornelissen: Mühlhausen / Uelzen - history, nature and much more . In: Publication series of the city of Unna , Volume 18. 2. revised. and exp. Edition, Unna 1989, ISBN 3-927082-18-X . 186 p. DIN A 4. p. 71/72.
• Josef Cornelissen (editor): Carl Heuer - a painter from Mühlhausen . In: Series of publications by the Association for Home and Nature Mühlhausen / Uelzen , Unna 1987. 12 pp.
• Un-art (editor): The fine arts in Unna after 1945 - The artist groups Unnaer Künstlerkreis and Un-art , Unna 1992.
• City of Unna (editor): Invitation to the exhibition from December 6 to 20, 1987 in the Hellweg Museum in Unna on the occasion of Carl Heuer's 80th birthday.
• City of Fröndenberg (publisher): Invitation to the vernissage on February 6, 1994 in the town hall of Fröndenberg .

Newspaper reports

• Hellweger Anzeiger dated December 17, 1949 (with the pictures "Memory of France" and "Doll on a red chair"), June 30, 1951 (with a picture of the painting "In der Stadtkirche zu Unna"), October 7, 1951 (for the 6th Exhibition of the Unnaer Künstlerkreis), February 13, 1954 (full-page report on Heuer by Herbert Exner with two photos of the artist and the pictures "Southern birds", "Mourners", "Siblings", a portrait of a woman and an abstract representation), 2. and November 11, 1954 (with the pictures "Dorfstrasse" from 1939, the graphic "Nude Study" and the abstract oil painting "Connections"), September 17, 1955 (report on an exhibition in Fröndenberg with an illustration of "Girl Portrait"), 15th ( on the opening of his special exhibition in the Unnaer Burg) and May 19, 1958 (photo of Heuer with pipe and abstract painting), June 13, 1958 (reproduction of the glass window in the new school in Fröndenberg-Langschede), September 15, 1958 (with abstract Picture "Composition"), April 6, 1976 (for this year s exhibition "Old gags and new things" in the district and city library on the old market in Unna, two pictures), December 5, 1987 (for his 80th birthday), January 11, 1995 (death of Marlies Rauen-Heuer with photo);
• Ruhr Nachrichten , Unna edition, from 28./29. April 1962 (joint exhibition by Heuer and Rauen in the Unnaer Burg, reproduced the pictures "In front of the backdrop" by Heuer and "Bouquet" by Rauen; with a portrait of Heuer von Rauen), October 19, 1964 (exhibition in the Unnaer's break hall Pestalozzi-Gymnasium, today Peter Weiss Comprehensive School, paintings and experiments with plaster of paris and stones, photo: Heuer in front of his favorite picture) and April 5, 1976;
• Westfälische Rundschau , Unna edition, from July 23, 1949 (with a draft for a wall hanging), March 30, 1976 (for Heuer's exhibition "Old Gags and New" in the district and city library on the old market in Unna, photo with Heuer in the studio ), November 14, 1987 (for his 80th birthday), November 14, 1992 (for his 85th birthday, photo of Heuer with a pipe in his studio), January 7, 1994 (for his 86th birthday, photo of Heuer in his studio), November 16, 1994 (Tod Heuer), March 1, 1996 (exhibition of part of the artistic estate of Heuers and Rauens in the Fröndenberger Rathausgalerie and photo of the two);
• Westfalenpost from May 20, 1950 (restoration of the mural in the church of Holzwickede).