Christian Griepenkerl

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Christian Griepenkerl by Franz Würbel , 1882
Portrait of Anton Faistauer , c. 1907. That year Griepenkerl rejected Adolf Hitler's application to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

Christian Griepenkerl (born March 17, 1839 in Oldenburg , † March 21, 1916 in Vienna ) was a German - Austrian painter and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Life

Christian Griepenkerl was born in Oldenburg in 1839, came from an old Oldenburg family and received his first artistic impetus from the painter Ernst Willers (1803–1880). Because of his advice, Griepenkerl went to Vienna at the end of 1855 to attend the school of Carl Rahl , who had directed a private master school for monumental painting since 1851 . Rahl involved several of his students in the preparation and execution of his pictures and thereby shaped their personal artistic development. Griepenkerl worked on the frescoes in the staircase hall of the Imperial and Royal Court Weapons Museum (today: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum ) as well as in the Palais Todesco and in the palace of Baron Simon von Sina . After the death of his teacher (1865), he completed his unfinished work on his own.

In 1874 he became a professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, where from 1877 he worked as the director of the special school for history painting. His subject area was allegorical representation using ancient mythology and portraits .

Thus, Griepenkerl became the teacher of an entire generation of painters in Vienna. His most famous students include Carl Moll (1880/81), Alfred Roller , Max Kurzweil , Carl Otto Czeschka (1894–99), Richard Gerstl (1898/99), Egon Schiele (1906–08), Anton Faistauer (1906–09 ) and Alexander Pock . According to contemporaries, Griepenkerl gave his students “solid craftsmanship”, but because of his “antiquated views” his students protested and later also resigned, which led to the founding of the new art group.

He was a member of the Academic Association of German Art Academics Athenaia.

Posthumously he also became famous for his rejection of Adolf Hitler's application to the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1907, when Hitler was still admitted to trial drawing , he assessed the verdict “Trial. insufficient. Few heads ”disparagingly, in 1908 his statement about Hitler's application became even clearer:“ Not admitted to trial ”.

Work

His first work at the Academy Oedipus , of Antigone out , was taken so approvingly of his teacher Carl Rahl that he him by the fresco work employed in the stairwell of the "kuk weapons Museum" (1864) and in the palaces Todesco and Sina.

A larger work are the compositions Rahl performed by him and Eduard Bitterlich in the new opera house , which took a full four years to complete, namely the ceiling of the auditorium and the curtain of the tragic opera (destroyed in 1945). It was only after Rahl's death (1865) that Griepenkerl began independent monumental work, for which he was called in by the architect Hansen for the palaces Ephrussi , Epstein and Franz Klein , for the Hörnstein Castle and for the Sina Palace in Venice . In the latter he executed the ceiling paintings: Poseidon's wedding procession, storm demons and protective spirits of the sea, which are of noble form and high grace, but have deficiencies in the drapery and in the lighting. Just as important are his wall paintings in the villa of the Grand Duchess of Toscana in Gmunden and his picture: The wedding of Aphrodite and Adonis , in the dining room of the Villa Simon near Hietzing. For the staircase of the Augusteum in Oldenburg , he executed decorative paintings (completed in 1878) in oil on canvas, which on the ceiling depict Venus Urania as the ideal of all beauty, surrounded by four images from the Prometheus saga , and on three walls (similar to the Hémicycle from Delaroche) represent, in historical order, an ideal gathering of art heroes of all time. This was followed by a cycle of paintings from the Prometheus saga for the conference room of the new Academy of Sciences in Athens, which was distinguished by its great conception of form and lively composition.

Oldenburg Augusteum

Griepenkerl's ceiling painting in the stairwell of the Oldenburg Augusteum (1877/78)

Griepenkerl's painting of the stairwell in the Oldenburg Augusteum became the main work of monumental wall and ceiling painting in the region there. This first museum building in Oldenburg, whose name is reminiscent of Grand Duke Paul Friedrich August , who died in 1853 and which was intended to house the Princely Paintings and Sculpture Collection as well as the exhibition building of the Kunstverein, was completed in 1867 by the Bremen architect HE Klingenberg in the Florentine palace style. The artistic decoration donated by Grand Duke Nikolaus Friedrich Peter could not be attached until a decade later due to lack of money, when its Oldenburg author had already become a professor at the Academy in Vienna and had carried out several large decoration orders there. These included those for the Palais Epstein, which were the little changed designs by his teacher Carl Rahl and Theophil Hansens for the “Old Palace” in Oldenburg, which in 1861 did not come to the execution planned by Griepenkerl. At that time, however, he had delivered several portraits and portrait copies for the ducal court, which were preceded in 1859 by portraits of the Hoyer family of councilors and merchants who were related to him. He created decorative paintings for their country house on Everstenholz, which was demolished in 1973, and a Gambrinus picture for the entrance to Hoyer's Oldenburger Weinhaus .

The painting of the Augusteum was preceded by a competition in which the Delmenhorst painter Arthur Fitger also participated. For the decoration of the relatively large staircase that ran through both floors, Griepenkerl planned a ceiling painting divided into picture fields as well as figurative representations on the three inner sides of the wall on a different scale. The theme was the development of the visual arts on a historical basis. The painter assumed a central-symmetrical division of the ceiling, in whose round middle field Venus Urania was placed as an allegory of the fine arts, while in the surrounding rectangular fields four themes from the Prometheus saga, in the small round fields in the corners putti with attributes visual arts found acceptance. Art heroes from all eras, from Homeric times to the present, found their way onto the wall surfaces, with the architects of the building and the Oldenburg-associated artists Rahl, Willers, Hansen and Griepenkerl themselves immortalized. The staircase paintings thus also became a document of the insistence on artistic traditions, the validity of which neither the client nor the artist who performed them had any doubts. This adherence to a legal system that was binding for content and form had to lead to conflicts with the new generation, which from 1900 also made freedom of design a requirement in Vienna. One of the most important Austrian representatives of this expressive young art was Egon Schiele , who was Griepenkerl's student from 1906 to 1909 in the last phase of his long teaching activity at the Vienna Academy.

Honorary grave of Christian Griepenkerl in the Vienna Central Cemetery

Honors

literature

Web links

Commons : Christian Griepenkerl  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgen Derschewsky: biographies Oldenburg artist . Piper Verlag GmbH.
  2. ↑ Walter Kalina: Alexander Pock. Military painting as a profession. In: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (Ed.): Catalog for the exhibition of the same name, Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-902551-31-3 , p. 12.
  3. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume II: Artists. Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6813-5 , p. 428.
  4. ^ Brigitte Hamann: Hitler's Vienna; Apprenticeship as a dictator . Piper Verlag GmbH, 1998.
  5. ↑ The architect. 1895.
  6. ^ Gerhard Wietek : 200 years of painting in the Oldenburger Land . Landessparkasse zu Oldenburg, 1986.
  7. ^ Robert Budig: Graves of honor at the Vienna Central Cemetery . Compress, 1995.
personal data
SURNAME Griepenkerl, Christian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Austrian painter and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna
DATE OF BIRTH March 17, 1839
PLACE OF BIRTH Oldenburg
DATE OF DEATH March 21, 1916
Place of death Vienna