Charles Gottfried Bunge

Charles Bunge

Charles Gottfried Bunge (born October 14, 1920 in Munich , † December 25, 1964 in Emmering ) was a German sculptor, enamel artist and painter in Emmering near Fürstenfeldbruck .

Life

Charles Bunge was born in Munich as the son of metal artist Albert Gustav Bunge and Claire Mellin from London. He had a younger brother, Gustav, who died in France in 1944 at the age of 21. The parents ran a metal art workshop for brass, copper and bronze work in Emmering. Since both of them had to look after their company intensively, the sons were often left on their own. The grandmother who looked after her was very religious and conveyed much of it to the children. Charles was considered headstrong. He followed his father in his artistic career and became a painter, sculptor and enamel artist. At first he worked in his father's workshop. His training was more self-taught and inspired by his friend and teacher Willi Baumeister (1889–1955). As a representative of non-representational painting in the 1920s to 1950s, this initiated Bunge's turn to abstraction. In 1952 Charles Bunge married the painter Elisabeth Wargau from Fürstenfeldbruck and together with her founded the workshop "Bunge-Wargau" in Emmering. The marriage had two children: Daniel (born 1956), who also painted, and Rena (1958–2014), who worked as a goldsmith.

From his war deployment on the Russian front, Charles Bunge retained, in addition to frozen feet, a war trauma, nervous rheumatism and thus a sensitivity to the weather. These experiences shaped his political and moral views as well as his social commitment. He was involved in the peace movement of the 1950s and 1960s, fought against the rearmament of the FRG and helped conscientious objectors with their justifications. He was a member of the Communist Party and the Buddhist Society. Bunge was also a vegetarian. He died on December 25, 1964 at the age of 44 from complications from a heart attack.

Artistic creation

Charles and Elisabeth (also known as Liesl Bunge) worked in their own workshop in the field of enamel art and created clocks, crucifixes, tabernacles and pieces of jewelry in enamel. Until the early 1960s, "Bunge-Wargau" was occasionally involved in furnishing modern churches and monasteries, including the parish church of St. Sebastian in Plech-Bernheck and St. Joachim in Munich-Obersendling. A very important order was carried out by the university building authority, six door handle strips for the Maximilianeum in Munich, with the stylized views of the largest Bavarian cities. Charles was artistically very diverse and productive in his unfortunately short life. In addition to his door handles, the estate includes a large number of privately created paintings, drawings, sketches, drafts and other objects; he also wrote texts and poems on the side.

literature

• Achim Feldmann: “… wonderfully unbourgeois”, the painters and enamel artists Charles Bunge and Elisabeth Bunge-Wargau , in: Münchner Schmucknachrichten 14 (2008), pp. 1–14 [1]