Edgar Ehses

Edgar Ehses (born May 23, 1894 in Trier , † January 13, 1964 in Wiesbaden ) was a German painter .

biography

Ehses came from a bourgeois house of winery owners and leather manufacturers. He attended high schools in Trier and Grand-Halleux in Belgium. At a young age he traveled to Italy and Belgium and had a long stay in London . These trips left a lasting mark on him. As a volunteer, he went to the First World War , which he survived unscathed as a front soldier. From 1919 he attended the painting class at the arts and crafts school in his hometown. His teacher, Professor August Trümper, was strongly influenced by Paul Cézanne . Ehses remained friends with him until his death. After further studies at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1921 to 1923 with Willy Spatz and Franz Kiederich, Ehses moved to Berlin, the center of modern art in Germany. His first exhibition took place here at the end of 1923. Ehses made friends with Eduard Bargheer, Werner Gilles and Fritz Mühsam. With his wife, the fashion designer Martha Stang, he lived in Paris from 1928 to 1929 and from 1931 to 1933 . These years expanded and perfected his artistic spectrum. The friendship with Georges Braque and the impressions of Gris and Modigliani led to an independent artistic expression. The Nazis interrupted his work. Edgar Ehses secured his income with fashion designs. He spent the last years of the war as a customs officer on the Dutch border. He returned to Trier from bombed-out Berlin . The war almost completely destroyed his early work.

His first exhibition after the war took place in Baden-Baden in 1945 and was sponsored by the cultural council. In 1946/1947 exhibitions followed at Galerie Rosen and Galerie Schüler in Berlin. From then on Edgar Ehses exhibited in the Berlin galleries. Numerous exhibitions followed in Hamburg , the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Düsseldorf , Munich , Stuttgart and Wiesbaden. Edgar Ehses stood at the side of prominent colleagues such as Alexander Camaro , Bernhard Heiliger and Werner Heldt for discussion . In 1948 he was accepted by the New Berlin Group, which included Karl Hartung, Karl Hofer and Max Pechstein as chairmen. Edgar Ehses was involved in other important artistic movements in his era. He became a member of the Palatinate Secession as well as the New Darmstadt Secession. Numerous important artists such as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff , Otto Ritschl and Erich Heckel accompanied his path. Closer relationships developed with Alo Altripp and Kaatz.

Ehses was particularly influenced by his deep connection and his exchange with Karl Hofer . In 1963 a large presentation of his works took place in Trier. After his death, exhibitions at the Wiesbadener Kunstverein and the Heidelberg Art Cabinet were dedicated to his work. Ehses went through naturalism, which showed its proximity to France in the early pictures, to an abstract classicism. In the last years of the war and after the war, figurative abstractions were created. They demonstrate the reflection on the Roman heritage, people in the moment of freezing, landscapes made up of massive blocks, captured with the outline typical of Ehses. They testify to the artist's humanistic gaze, an expression that conveys a surprisingly self-confident and positively penetrated force for the post-war period. In the mid-1950s, the painter turned to a much more abstract interpretation. His trips to Ibiza in 1957 and 1959 changed the artistic expression. He developed from the figurative representation to a new world of forms. Edgar Ehses himself put it this way: “What I felt could no longer be expressed figuratively”. Ehses developed a sign language in which space disappears. This also bridges the gap to the next phase of his oeuvre: around 1960 he achieved his virtuoso late style, into which he brought his artistic experience and developed it into a reduced abstraction. Ink watercolors, Chinese ink from the lightest gray to the deepest black, not showing any organic brush strokes, are scarcely colored. The lecture was getting easier. Ehses implements tensions and an inexhaustible wealth of forms safely and expressively in the smallest of formats. The signature and date are included as essential attributes in the composition. In his abstract works in particular, the artist's musical element becomes visible. The artist himself called his work: "Little Chamber Music". Edgar Ehses can be compared with Bissier, Baumeister or Miró. Ehses work retains its high and consistent artistic expression until the final phase of his work.

literature

• Catalog raisonné Edgar Ehses, German National Library, catalog Galerie Rosen, 1946, letter from Karl Hofer to Edgar Ehses

Web links

• Literature by and about Edgar Ehses in the catalog of the German National Library