Elena Luksch-Makowsky

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Marble bust of Elena Makowsky created by Richard Luksch in 1899 the year before their wedding.

Elena Luksch-Makowsky , née Makowsky, (born November 4, 1878 in Saint Petersburg , † August 15, 1967 in Hamburg ) was a Russian painter and craftswoman who also worked as a sculptor .

life and work

youth

Elena Makowsky was the daughter of the court painter Konstantin Makowsky and grew up in Saint Petersburg. Her uncle, her father's brother, Vladimir Makowsky , was also the tsar's court painter . The brothers started their painting careers with the socially committed Peredwischniki . Elena's parents were wealthy and maintained an open house in which u. a. Rimsky-Korsakov , Mussorgsky and Rubinstein performed. Elena had an older and a younger brother. All three children were tutored by private tutors and spoke French fluently before they reached school age. They learned painting and drawing from their father. The winters were spent in Saint Petersburg, the summer months in the country.

Travel through Europe

From 1889–1893 Elena traveled through Europe with her ailing mother, who sought healing in health resorts and seaside resorts . In the summer months, mother and daughter u. a. in Bad Kissingen , Bayreuth , St. Moritz , Montreux , Vienna and Florence . In the winter months u. a. Nice at the d'Cote Azur , Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Gulf of Biscay or Biarritz sought. During this four-year stay abroad, Elena and her mother visited “many famous exhibitions and museums.” In 1892, Elena’s parents divorced. However, the mother's life with the children was financially secure.

Studied in Saint Petersburg

After returning from abroad, Makowsky entered the St. Petersburg School of Painting of the Imperial Society for the Promotion of the Arts in 1893 . There she completed the classes of ornament , watercolor and pen drawing . During this time she learned u. a. know the art critic Vladimir Stasov . In preparation for her admission to the academy, she went to Ilya Repin's private studio for painting lessons in the fall of 1895 . After receiving further training from him, she passed the examination to study at the Imperial Academy of the Arts in October 1896 .

Volga trip

Inspired by her role model Repin, Makowsky undertook - alone - a trip on the Volga downstream from Rybinsk to Samara in 1897 . She returned via Nizhny Novgorod . On this excursion she made countless sketches of the landscape, the common Russian people and Tatars . The studies made during this trip served the painter several decades later as inspiration for large paintings. When she returned from her trip to the Volga, the “railway king” Johann von Bloch bought one of her paintings and offered her a two-year scholarship abroad.

Studied in Munich and at Deutenhofen Castle

In spring 1898 Makowsky went to Munich and became a student of Anton Ažbe . In his studio she met u. a. to Ivan Bilibin , Mstislav Dobuschinsky . In addition, she came into contact with the circle of artists that gathered around Werefkin . These primarily included Jawlensky and his close friends Dmitry Kardowsky (1866–1943) and Igor Grabar . The latter became particularly important for Makowsky because it established the valuable connection to the artists of the Mir Iskusstwa for her .

Except in Munich, she stayed in the summer and autumn of 1898 in Deutenhofen Castle northeast of Dachau , where Mathias Gasteiger founded a painting and sculpture school together with Julius Exter in 1897 . There she met her future husband, the Viennese sculptor Richard Luksch . In 1899 Makowsky went back to Saint Petersburg, where she associated with the painters Filipp Maljawin , Konstantin Somow and Boris Kustodijew . She met Nikolai Roerich to work together. Her works from this period stand out with their dark contours and bright colors, so Makowsky had used French expressive elements even then . She spent June in Kursk in order to travel to the Crimea in the summer . In December she received the order from Johann von Bloch to produce a relief for the World Exhibition of 1900 in Paris. In 1900 she was back in Munich. On May 20th, the marriage with Richard Luksch took place at the registry office in Dachau. Since then she has had the surname Luksch-Makowsky. The church wedding took place in the Greek Orthodox Church in Munich . Initially the artist couple lived in Dachau. In autumn the couple moved to Vienna in the Luksch family's apartment building. In the same year she took part in an exhibition at the Vienna Secession . In 1901 their first son Peter Luksch was born.

Success in Vienna

In 1901 Luksch-Makowsky took part in the Xth Exhibition of the Secession with large-format portraits and became its first female member. 1902 participation in the XIII. and XIV. Exhibition of the Secession with wall reliefs . In March 1902 she took part in the fourth exhibition of Mir Iskusstva in Saint Petersburg with paintings and sketches , of which she also became a member. At the exhibition were u. a. Her friend Grabar from the Ažbe School, as well as such important artists as Alexander Benois (1870–1960), Alexander Golowin , Maljawin, Konstantin Korowin (1861–1939), Leonid Pasternak , Valentin Serow and Michail Vrubel represented. In 1903 Luksch-Makowsky created a calendar sheet for Ver Sacrum and received its own issue from this magazine. During the year she also worked for the Wiener Werkstätte . On the XVII. At the Vienna Secession exhibition, she and her husband were given a room of their own in which they showed metalwork and the iconographically meaningful painting Adolescentia , the life-size portrait of a naked youth, which is now in the Vienna Belvedere . Stylistically, she chose a very progressive mixed form of painting with dots and contours. In 1904 she returned to handicrafts for the Wiener Werkstätte and made enamels for jewelry boxes, metal drifting and mosaics for furniture. In 1905, from May to August, she worked on three monumental reliefs for the facade of the Vienna Citizens' Theater . She also took part in the XIII. Exhibition of the Secession. In 1906 Luksch-Makowsky turned to the renewal of Russian folk picture sheets , the Lubki . In a modern cloisonnistic way , in the style of Gauguin's surface painting , she designed her picture sheets and provided them with explanatory text - Russian proverbs - entirely in the original Lubki style.

Hamburg

Richard and Elena L., portrait (1908) by Dührkoop
The painter and sculptor Elena Luksch-Makowsky in front of her painting "Adolescentia"

In 1907 Richard Luksch was appointed professor at the School of Applied Arts in Hamburg, whereupon the artist couple and their two sons moved to the Hanseatic city. There the newcomers learned a. a. know the writer Richard Dehmel and his wife Ida . They were also friends with Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann and his wife Alexandra Povòrina and the writer Marie Hirsch . At that time Luksch had his family photographed by the prominent Hamburg portrait photographer Rudolf Dührkoop . In 1908 Luksch-Makowsky was represented at the Vienna Art Show with her modern Lubki. Up until the First World War, she mainly dealt with the Russian folk picture sheets and the topic of “women's fate” . “Both topics are strongly linked to her biography.” In 1910 she went on a trip to Russia with her two sons and visited a. a. Saint Petersburg , Pavlovsk , Tsarskoye Selo and Moscow . On another trip to Russia in 1913/14, Luksch-Makowsky u. a. the Rostov , Uspenskij or Valaam monasteries , which demonstrate their growing interest in traditional Russian religious customs and works of art. Since 1914 she was a member of the Hamburg Russian-German Association 1898 eV and was artistically committed to the Russian parish, z. B. she designed the equipment of the provisional church in Harvestehude with icons and worship equipment.

Public contracts in the 1920s

After the First World War, Luksch-Makowsky got less and less private commissions. In the meantime, the daughter Maria Luksch was born in 1918. The marriage with Richard Luksch was divorced in 1921. 1922–1928 Luksch-Makowsky painted pictures based on her sketches, which had been created during her previous stays on Russian country estates and the Volga trip in the years 1897–1898. In 1925 a model was created for a memorial for Russian prisoners , from which she had hoped in vain for a public contract. In 1926 her sculpture “Frauenschicksal” was put up in Hamburg's city park . In the same year she achieved a particular success with the design of the Senate plaque medal for faithful work in the service of the people . In 1930 she was commissioned to create two groups of bronze fountain figures for the Wiesendamm elementary school designed by the architect Fritz Schumacher in the Jarrestadt housing estate in Hamburg .

Debt in the Nazi era

In 1933, shortly after the seizure of power , Luksch-Makowsky tried to come to terms with the new rulers. So she accepted a private commission to design an Adolf Hitler plaque. However, due to disputes between the client and the artist, the model was destroyed. In 1934 she applied to the professional association "Bund Deutscher Maler und Graphiker eV" to be accepted by the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts . There it was listed with the "membership number M 9134". However, membership did not help her to get government contracts. She had to go into debt and kept her head above water with private portraits. She rarely succeeded in exhibiting and selling her artistic work, for example to the building officer Konstanty Gutschow during the autumn exhibition in 1941 at the Kunstverein in Hamburg .

After 1945

Elena Luksch-Makowsky's grave in the Ohlsdorfer Friedhof (AH 21-near chapter 7)
Gravestone back in
the women's garden

After the war, Luksch-Makowsky devoted himself to studying the culture of the Hanseatic city around 1800 in her adopted home - as he did many years ago in her native Saint Petersburg. Old cityscapes that she borrowed from the Museum of Hamburg History served as inspiration for Paintings that she imaginatively brought to life through staffage. In 1954 she received a retrospective at the Museum für Völkerkunde from the Association of Hamburg Women Artists - founded by Ida Dehmel in 1926 - where she a. a. the painting Volga ship from 1953 showed. In 1965 she took part in the exhibition "Hamburg Artists" at the Kunstverein . After her death, Luksch-Makowsky left an artistic estate that contained almost all of her paintings - except for her commissioned paintings. Her pencil and color sketches are numerous. The written legacy includes memoirs, letters, newspaper articles, etc. a. m. Works of hers rarely appear on the art market.

Elena Luksch-Makowsky died in Hamburg in 1967 and was buried there in the Ohlsdorf cemetery, together with her son Peter Luksch (1901–1988) and daughter-in-law Maria Luksch (1918–2009). Elena Luksch-Makowsky's tombstone with a motif from the three-part lithograph series Der Krieg was re-erected in 2014 in the women's garden .

literature

  • Joachim Heusinger von Waldegg : Richard Luksch and Elena Luksch-Makowsky. An artist couple from the turn of the century in Vienna. In: Ancient and Modern Art. Vol. 17, H. 124/125, Vienna 1972, p. 40 f.
  • Joachim Heusinger von Waldegg, Helmut Leppien: Richard Luksch / Elena Luksch-Makowsky (= Hamburg artist monographs. No. 10). Hamburg 1979.
  • Silke Straatman: Russian toys from the 19th century and "Russian proverbs" - a collection by Luksch-Makowskaja. In: Communications from the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology. 1990, p. 131 ff.
  • Athina Chadzis: The painter and sculptor Elena Luksch-Makowsky (1878-1967). Biography and work description (PDF; 57.0 MB) , dissertation Universität Hamburg 2000.
  • Isabella Schwinghammer: Elena Luksch-Makowsky (1878-1967) The paintings Dipl.Arb. Univ. Vienna 1996.
  • Isabella Schwinghammer: Elena Luksch-Makowsky. The first female artist of the Vienna Secession. In: Belvedere Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, 3rd volume, issue 2/97, Vienna 1997
  • Isabella Swetina: Elena Luksch-Makowsky. In: Britta Jürgs (ed.) Because there is nothing left as nature intended. Portraits and writers around 1900, Berlin 2001, pp. 141–158.
  • Maria Derenda: Writing life - writing profession. Historical self-testimony research as an access to the professional history of visual artists around 1900 using the example of Elena Luksch-Makowskaja, in: Veronika Helfert u. a. (Ed.): Women's and gender history un / disciplined ?: Current articles from young research, Innsbruck 2016, pp. 93–118.
  • Maria Derenda: Art as a Profession. Käthe Kollwitz and Elena Luksch-Makowskaja. Campus, Frankfurt / New York 2018, ISBN 978-3-593-50830-6 .

Web links

Commons : Elena Luksch-Makowsky  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Athina Chadzis, the painter and sculptor Elena Luksch-Makowsky (1878-1967), biography and work description, Dissertation, University of Hamburg, 2000, p 20
  2. ↑ Athina Chadzis, the painter and sculptor Elena Luksch-Makowsky (1878-1967), biography and work description, Dissertation, University of Hamburg, 2000, p 22
  3. ↑ Jeremy Howard, Elena Makovskaya-Luksch, in: Dictionary of Women Artists, Vol. 2, London 1991, pp. 900 ff
  4. ↑ Today we know more than 100 Ažbe students again see: Bernd Fäthke, Jawlensky and his companions in a new light, Munich 2004, p. 243 f, note 233
  5. ^ Bernd Fäthke, In the Vorfeld des Expressionismus, Anton Ažbe and painting in Munich and Paris, Wiesbaden 1988
  6. ↑ Athina Chadzis, the painter and sculptor Elena Luksch-Makowsky (1878-1967), biography and work description, Dissertation, University of Hamburg, 2000, p 40
  7. ↑ Helmut R. Leppin: Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Between Bilderbogen and Stilkunst, Hamburg artist monographs on the art of the 20th century, published by the Lichtwark Society, Vol. 10, 1979, p. 14
  8. ↑ Alexej Jawlensky, Memorabilia, in: Clemens Weiler (ed.), Alexej Jawlensky, Heads-Face-Meditations, Hanau 1970, p. 106
  9. ↑ Athina Chadzis, the painter and sculptor Elena Luksch-Makowsky (1878-1967), biography and work description, Dissertation, University of Hamburg, 2000, p 40
  10. ↑ Elmar D. Schmid, Julius Exter, Life and Work, in exh. Cat .: Julius Exter, Aufbruch in die Moderne, Neue Galerie der Bayerische Landesbank, Munich 1998, p. 30
  11. ↑ Joachim Heusinger von Waldegg , Elena Luksch-Makowsky's painting “Adolescentia” (1903), on a new acquisition by the Austrian Gallery, communications from the Austrian Gallery, vol. 18, no. 62, 1974, p. 117
  12. ↑ Grigori J. Sternin, Das Kunstleben Russlands zu Anfang des Twentietest Century, Dresden 1980, p. 232 f
  13. ↑ Isolde Schmidt, Luksch-Makowsky, Elena, in exh. Cat .: Paths to Modernism and the Ažbe School in Munich, Museum Wiesbaden 1988, p. 123
  14. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Jawlensky and his companions in a new light, Munich 2004, p. 84 f
  15. ↑ At the end of the 19th century the Lubki tradition was still upheld in Moscow. At that time there were several Lubki publishers in Moscow, while there was not a single one in St. Petersburg. See: Orlando Figes, Nataschas Tanz, Eine Kulturgeschichte Rußlands, Berlin 2003, p. 201
  16. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Marianne Werefkin, Munich 2001, p. 132 f, fig. 144 and 145
  17. ↑ Athina Chadzis, the painter and sculptor Elena Luksch-Makowsky (1878-1967), biography and work description, Dissertation, University of Hamburg, 2000, p 204 ff
  18. ↑ Athina Chadzis: The painter and sculptor Elena Luksch-Makowsky (1878-1967), biography and work description. Dissertation University of Hamburg 2000, p. 286
  19. ↑ Athina Chadzis, the painter and sculptor Elena Luksch-Makowsky (1878-1967), biography and work description, Dissertation, University of Hamburg, 2000, p 365
  20. ^ Peter Luksch at Forum for Artists' Legacies
  21. ↑ http://www.garten-der-frauen.de/kunst.html#luksch
personal data
SURNAME Luksch-Makowsky, Elena
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Makowsky, Elena (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian painter and craftsman
DATE OF BIRTH November 4, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH 15th August 1967
Place of death Hamburg