Eleonore Lingnau-Kluge
Eleonore Lingnau-Kluge (born April 11, 1913 in Danzig ; † 2003 ) was a German painter .
Life
Gdansk: youth, training and flight
Eleonore Lingnau was born into a bourgeois Catholic family in Gdansk. She had a carefree childhood with her four siblings. The family had a large circle of friends and there was a lot of music played. After graduating from the Danzig Lyceum (Marienschule) in 1928, Eleonore began studying piano and lute at the Danzig Conservatory “Heidingsfeld”. Her siblings were trained as actress, craftswoman, pharmacist and film technician. All children had a free hand in choosing a career.
Eleonore Lingnau appeared as a violinist in concerts and radio events and began classical training in fine arts with the Danzig painter Stanischewski in the mid-1930s . During the war years she earned her living as a graphic and technical draftsman in Danziger and in Berlin research institutions. At the beginning of 1945, with a lot of luck - she had already booked a place on the “unlucky ship” Wilhelm Gustloff - she managed a dramatic escape across the Baltic Sea with the Nautilus.
Artistic beginnings in Mölln and Hamburg
The beginnings of her artistic development lay in Mölln and Hamburg . In 1946 she registered an arts and crafts business in order to survive economically. She received recognition as a freelance painter and became a member of the professional artists' association in Berlin and Hamburg. Her first works were naturalistic representations of landscapes, portraits and nudes , which she worked out classically from the surface.
During the Möllner years she got to know the graphic artist A. Paul Weber , with whom she has been a lifelong friend since then. He exhibited her first wooden sculptures in his studio. She took courses in modeling and plastic work with the Mölln sculptor Karlheinz Goedtke . From this an artistic and friendly cooperation developed.
Around 1950 Eleonore Lingnau moved to Hamburg and studied there for two semesters at the Hamburg art school "Alsterdamm".
Image 1: Self-portrait, 1957, oil on canvas, 105 × 110
Image 2: Refugees, 1950, oil on canvas, 104 × 110
Image 3: East Prussia, 1950, oil on pressed wood, 106 × 110
Image 1: In her “Self-Portrait”, painted in oil on canvas in 1957, the artist looks at the viewer confidently and openly. The predominantly naturalistic rendering is idealized in the facial areas - corresponding to the image of women at the time.
Image 2: In the large painting "Refugees" from 1950, the content of which is linked to their escape experiences, people can be seen crowded together in a very small space. Old, young and children - wrapped in clothes and blankets. They sleep or look impassive and remain in their fate. The muted, dull colors create a uniform, gloomy mood. Eleonore Lingnau refrained from depicting the foreground and background and any plot. Not a single fate, but the common fate of all refugees is represented here. Taken from reality, but at the same time removed from it. The lines running through the whole picture are part of the representation and a characteristic of the work of Eleonore Lingnau.
Image 3: In the East Prussia image, the references to reality are obvious, but graphic elements stylize the details. In her painting Eleonore Lingnau increasingly abstracted from the phenomena of reality and nature and moved towards the fantastic and the mythical. The positive feedback from her Hamburg exhibition in 1959 inspires and strengthens her development.
Berlin: developments and artistic creation
Towards the end of the 1950s, Eleonore Lingnau moved to Berlin . During the Cold War , she dealt intensively with the political events - her poems testify to this - but in her painting she took a different path. She was fascinated by what she experienced as nature, by the big and small things of everyday life, the secrets of creation - all filtered and enriched by her active imagination. Her preferred motifs were flowers, animals, heads and faces, the mental state of people and subjects from the Bible . Stylistically, she loved the freedom of painting, sometimes more figurative, then again abstract.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Eleonore Lingnau increasingly experimented with unusual painting materials. Pictures were created on felt and hardboard , on foam-like plastics and styrofoam , but also on plucked or unprimed linen. In addition to oil paint, she used z. B. also felt-tip pens, with which lines can be drawn much finer and more intuitive. Artistically she became more and more expressive. She created her most consistent works, which were shown at solo exhibitions in Ancona, London, Paris and Berlin, among others. In 1971 she married the speech psychologist Dr. Helmut Kluge and has since drew her pictures with the name Eleonore Lingnau-Kluge. In 1981 her husband died after a long illness with intensive care.
Image 4: Bouquet of flowers, 1960s, oil on linen, 25 × 23.5
Image 5: Going to church, 1972, oil on canvas, 63 × 29
Image 6: Meeting of the sisters, 1977, oil and felt pen on cardboard, 23 × 33
Image 4: The bouquet of flowers on the plastic plate measuring just 23 × 25 cm is one of the few images in which the artist explores the depth of color in the picture. She looked down at the bouquet. It is more a work about form, space and light, less the image of a bouquet of flowers. The applied red, orange and green tones highlight the flowers, here reinforced by white lines that cover the entire surface of the picture.
Image 5: Religious topics remain an integral part of their repertoire. The vertical format with the rows of people rising and falling radiates a mystical dynamic. The colors are applied so thinly that the shapes seem to dissolve in the canvas. A black framework of lines spans the picture like a cobweb. Perhaps the picture is also a metaphor for the eternal cycle of growth and decay.
Image 6: The meeting of the sisters shows two women embracing, one in a wedding robe. Two men can be seen in the background, half real, half masked. Strong black lines divide the mysterious scene into individual puzzle pieces. Eleonore Lingnau-Kluge began to set decorative details.
The pictures created from the 1980s onwards can be assigned to the mature work. She painted more intuitively and spontaneously and also switched from oil to acrylic paints . Many pictures were made on Japanese paper . In a conversation with her sister Irene Teutloff, the artist now explained her work process: “A thought, a memory moves something in me and provides the impetus. While the picture is being created, the content reveals itself to me ”. This created forms in which she discovered something new again and again. She worked leaves, flowers, mythical creatures and faces out of the color fields with a thin felt pen or brush.
Image 7: Amrum / Way to the small lake, 1985, watercolor on paper, 24 × 32
Image 8: Amrum / Sturm, 1985, watercolor on paper, 24 × 32
Image 9: Sternenwunder, 1988, oil and felt pen on pressed wood, 140 × 100
Image 10: The beings, 1991, acrylic on pressed wood, 60 × 50
Photo 7, Photo 8: She captured a few days on Amrum in the mid-1980s in a series of watercolors. You can feel their enthusiasm for trying out all the nuances of light. It gives the sky a lot of space and captures the typical pale light of the North Sea. Movement, wind, clouds and colors are worked out intensively. The land seems to be pushing back the sea. Her Amrum watercolors are more than just drawings. With their complex design of light, space and color, they can be viewed as paintings.
Image 9: Some of the pictures from this period, which also include star wonders, are difficult to fit into their overall work in terms of style and, at 140 × 100, leave the usual format. The artist, who was interested in astrology, was impressed by a mystical vision in the starry sky. In the picture, stars and beings seem to merge with each other, heaven and earth are held together by luminous energy.
Image 10: Ambiguous dream images with hidden figures and faces are typical of her mature work. Only after looking at it for a long time do two profiles with curved lines and lips in the sea of flowers become visible in “Die Wesenhaft”. At the same time, they disappear again between strong color fields of white, pink, green and ocher. The artist used the pure colors with little added water and a few thick brushstrokes.
Yet she has never limited herself to the semi-fantastic. In her work there are also many realistic observations from everyday life, e.g. B. market traders, punks , mothers with children, still lifes etc. Eleonore Lingnau-Kluge was a generous, humorous and humble person who was completely fulfilled by exchanging ideas with friends, family and nature. She didn't like long trips, but every change of location inspired her. In addition to painting, Eleonore Lingnau-Kluge drew and sketched a lot in old age. Stylistically, her drawings are a reminder that she was trained at a school for fashion and commercial graphics in the 1950s. Unlike her paintings, her drawings are more illustrative in their approach.
Image 11: Human weaknesses, 1992, acrylic, colored pencil, watercolor on paper, 21 × 29
Image 12: Attraction, 1991 Acrylic and ballpoint pen on cardboard
Fig. 11, Fig. 12: The age wisdom of an eighty-year-old observer is shown in cartoon-like scenes such as "Human weaknesses" or "Attraction". In her drawings, the artist seems to be smiling at the well-known detours and errors of the younger generation.
To the complete works
When Eleonore Lingnau-Kluge died in November 2003, she left behind around 400 works, including paintings, drawings and watercolors , as well as sketches, wooden sculptures and poems. Her artistic creativity was based on her own natural and spiritual view of life. At first controlled, groping and serious and over time more and more relaxed and calm. Her painting is figurative in its origins, as it begins in the lived reality. In essence, however, it is more inward-looking. In her pictures she drew from a rich fund of motifs and dream scenes, which acted like a counterbalance to the decisive experiences in the artist's early adult life: the pre-war years without a mother, the traumatic war experiences, the father's misunderstood path, the loss of home and the New beginning in 1945. She locked these gloomy images deep inside and - with a few exceptions in the post-war years - no longer brought them to light. With this decision, she opened up paths into fantasy worlds and abstraction for her artistic work in almost 60 active years.
Exhibitions
- 1957 Volksheim eV Hamburg
- 1959 Group exhibition of contemporary painting, Halle am Schulenbrooksweg, Hamburg-Bergedorf
- 1968 Club A18 of the student village of the Free University of Berlin
- 1968–1969 Galleria “Europa Arte”, Ancona, 3rd Biennale delle Regioni
- 1971 BH Corner Gallery, London
- 1977 Mouffe Gallery, Paris
- 1979 Salon Willi Diedrich, Berlin
- 1983 Small Orangery / Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin
- 1986 Bremen City Library; Feddersen Foundation, Hamburg
- 2014 Meyenburg Castle
- 2018 Galerie Mutter Fourage, Berlin; Galerie am Bollwerk, Neuruppin; Bruno Taut Gallery, Berlin
- 2019 Galerie Kunst-Kontor, Potsdam; Wolfshagen Castle, Prignitz
Prices
- Megaglia e Diploma di menzione, Ancona 1969 Ancona
- Palme d'Or des Beaux-Arts, 1971 Monte Carlo
- Diploma of Honor, 1971 London, “Participant hors concours” at the “Grand Prix international paternoster”, London 1971.
Publications
- Fate. I was given a second life. In: BZ 1992, p. 16.
- Poems. In: But at the end of this street. Holzinger Verlag, Berlin 1993.
- There are days. In: Metabolism August 1993, p. 45.
- Love, the whole point. Holzinger Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-926396-39-3 .
- Eleonore Lingnau-Kluge 1913–2003. Paintings, watercolors, drawings. Berlin 2018. ISBN 978-3-00-059999-6 .
items
- Klebe / Wieczorek: Pictures from the exhibition on Schulenbrooksweg. In: Hamburger Abendblatt, January 26, 1959.
- Schultz, Michael: Dreamy visions in oil. On the exhibition by Eleonore Lingnau-Kluge in the Small Orangery from June 30th to July 20th 1983. In: Art magazine No. 6, 1983.
- o. A .: Dreamy visions. In: Neustädter Echo, November 28, 1986.
- Martin, Ulrike: Ambiguous dream images. In: Berliner Woche, March 7, 2018.
- Rabensaat, Richard: Images like music. In: Potsdam Latest News, March 23, 2019.
- Grote, Lars: Pictures after the second birth. In: Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung, April 1, 2019.
- Beck, Kerstin: It shows creation in all its facets. In: Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung, May 21, 2019.
- Gommert, Natalie: Joy and life-affirming power. In: potsdamlife, 2/2019.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lingnau-Kluge, Eleonore |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 11, 1913 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Danzig |
| DATE OF DEATH | 2003 |