Emil F. Karsten

The portrait of Mr. A. after clearing his self-image.

Dialog II with ice skating devil

Emil F. Karsten (born December 12, 1910 in Essen , † August 13, 1993 in Bad Lippspringe ) was a German painter , graphic artist and calligrapher and professor at the University of Design in Bremen .

Triptych ARAL Cup

Neckar fantasy

Life

After finishing school, Karsten initially worked as a construction technician. From 1934 to 1937 he initially studied architecture at the Folkwang School in his hometown of Essen and later attended the decorative painting class . He financed his studies by working as a miner and cinema painter. After serving in the Wehrmacht, doing military service and imprisonment (1937–1946), he went to Stuttgart and studied there from 1946 to 1949 at the State Academy of Fine Arts . His main fields of study were free and applied graphics. He was a master student of F. H. Ernst Schneidler .

From 1949 Karsten was a visiting professor for the history of writing at the later South German Librarian Teaching Institute, which was founded in 1942 as the Stuttgart Library . He headed this institute from 1954 to 1956. In addition, he worked as a freelancer for numerous publishers, including a. in Stuttgart and Tübingen, active as an illustrator and cover designer. From 1956 he was a lecturer at the State Art School Bremen , where he taught font graphics and drawing. In 1969 the institution was renamed the Academy for Design . In 1970 it was converted to the Bremen University of Design , where Karsten held a professorship until he left in 1976.

Karsten lived in Stuttgart from 1946 to 1986 and in Bad Lippspringe from November 1986. There were numerous public purchases of his works as well as 18 international solo and group exhibitions.

painting

During Emil Karsten's study time in Essen, the first portraits were made , such as the pencil drawing My Mother in 1935 . After Karsten had created further portraits during the war, he also dealt with other motifs and free compositions in his subsequent studies in Stuttgart. In 1950, for example, under the influence of Professor Schneidler's teaching , the picture Geometric Composition , painted in tempera , was created, which Karsten ascribed a key role in the development of style. The work Kosmischer Wirbel (oil on canvas) , which was also created under Schneidler's influence, contains similar principles of order . Influenced by the artistic work of the former Stuttgart academy teacher Adolf Hölzel , who died in 1934 , the pictures Planten un Blomen and Vogelbild (oil on linen) were created. Karsten experimented with different painting techniques. This resulted in works in the style of pointillism with surrealist elements, which Karsten understood as a "congenial addition to calligraphy". The ARAL Cup triptych . Karsten described the race in Horst-Emscher (oil on cardboard) as one of his most important works.

Surrealistic compositions also determined his later pictures, which he created both during his lectureship in Bremen and during his retirement and in which he often sought a connection to writing.

calligraphy

Part of Karsten's overall oeuvre was an early creative examination of the font. The enthusiasm for the differentiated world of form of the letters was for him an incomparable means of a pronounced understanding of form and the ability to form. Not only formal correctness and accuracy are important, but conventional, i.e. H. historical certainty equally (interview by Prof. Emil Karsten). In the handwritten creation story of OVID, Karsten succeeded in trying to achieve an adequate, up-to-date written form with the formal update of a historical script. He said our time (1980) is no longer interested in fonts and forms of writing. Once again, this has to do with the progress made in the field of electronic means in the entire field of printing, with computer type, photo typesetting and mechanized letterpress printing. The unstoppable development is naturally at the expense of the demanding aesthetics of the text and print image. The previously self-evident demands, for example for well-balanced spaces between the individual letters and words, for an appealing ratio of the print area to the edge of the paper, for a choice of type that makes sense to the nature of the printed text, are rarely used.

In 1965 he took on the design of a new chronicle text in the Bremen town hall , which was designed by the state archive director Karl H. Schwebel on the occasion of the Hanseatic city’s millennium in the same year and executed by Karsten on a wall in the upper town hall of the old town hall . He used a font he had created in Gothic style .

Awards

• 1956: 1st and 4th prize for his graphic works at the National Olympic Art Competition in the House of German Art in Munich

Exhibitions (selection)

Solo exhibitions:

• Writing and image , Oldenburg, State Museum for Art and Cultural History in Oldenburg Castle, 1962
• Calligraphy - writing and image , Bremen, State Library 1962
• Text and image , Essen, youth center 1964
• Bremen, Galerie Schnoor 1968
• Hamburg, Gallery for Contemporary Art 1969
• Bremerhaven, Kunsthalle 1971
• Münster (Westphalia), gallery for contemporary art 1973
• Essen-Ruhr, trade association for visual artists in North Rhine-Westphalia
• Bremen, Studio Stavendamm 1976
• Bietigheim, town hall

Group exhibitions:

• Kunsthalle Tübingen
• Munich, House of German Art 1956
• Bremen, Kunsthalle 1960/61
• Basel, International Art Fair 1962 and 1973
• Brussels, International Art Fair 1964
• Brussels, 1st Belgian Art Fair 1974

Publications

• Emil F. Karsten, Karl Bachler (examination of the work), Günter Jacki (explanations of the written part): oil paintings, graphics, writing . Cantz'sche Druckerei, Stuttgart 1982.
• Emil Karsten, Karl Bachler (foreword), Siegfried Salzmann (picture descriptions): Oil paintings from 1967–1970 . Self-published, undated (after 1970).
• Werner Klose: Margrave Willehalm. The story of a knight. Wolfram von Eschenbach retells. Illustrations: Emil Karsten. Heliopolis-Verlag, Tübingen 1955, DNB 452458447 .

Picture explanations

• The portrait of Mr. A. after eliminating his self-image , oil on cardboard, 1973 (79 × 114 cm). “… The picture relates with friendly irony to a star of the modern art market: It was not Karsten who invented the copy deformed like in the centrifuge, but a protagonist of the Vienna Fantastic School. “Rudolf Hausner, who is grappling with an Adam complex. His whirling flat heads can provoke ridicule «, says Emil F. Karsten…“, »Weser-Kurier«, 142, June 19, 1973. - The picture was exhibited at the 1973 Basel art fair.
• Dialogue II with ice skating devil , oil on cardboard, 1968 (101 × 100 cm). The ice-skating devil with his mouth wide open, the vest and watch chain of the bourgeois honest man struggled to keep his balance.
• Triptych ARAL-Pokal , oil on cardboard, 1972 (270 × 150 cm). Comment by the artist: “I grew up as a child in the Horst-Emscher district of Gelsenkirchen and went to school there. Like all other young people, I was interested in the racetrack and horse racing. The memory of the horses racing by with the colorful jockeys left a deep impression on me. I carried these impressions with me for so long that I captured the motifs in pictures at an advanced age. From my childish perspective, I had the impression that stomping horse's hooves had become siblings with the wheels of a train. I lived next to a railway line. I would call the Aral-Pokal acting method an offset realism. The continuous line in the background is marked by a mine (left), through the church and school of Horst Emscher, through the ruins of Schloss Horst and on the right the Gelsenberg AG. "(Aral)
• Neckar-Phantasie , oil on cardboard, 1982 (74 × 73 cm) with the Marbach power station in the background.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} (ed.): Study money earned as a miner. New teachers at the art school . In: » Weser Courier « . June 1, 1956, p. 6 .
2. ↑ Culture Notes of the Day . In: »Weser Courier« . January 28, 1976, p. 15 (Quote: "Professor Emil Karsten from the Bremen University of Design [...]").
3. ↑ Sonja Luyken: Harmony between writing and image. Emil Karsten shows new work in Essen . In: »Weser Courier« . November 13, 1964, p. 17 .
4. ↑ The new chronicle text adorns the old town hall wall . In: »Weser Courier« . April 13, 1965, p. 13 .
5. ↑ See list of exhibitions in the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven from 1964 to 1999 >> 1971. In: www.kunstverein-bremerhaven.de. Kunstverein Bremerhaven , accessed on November 25, 2015 . 
6. ↑ Senator for Education (Ed.): State Art School Bremen. Exhibition in the Kunsthalle Bremen December 10th - January 7th [1961]. Kunsthalle Bremen , Bremen [1960] (exhibition catalog, with information on: D. Colberg-Tjadens, Dieter Tölke, Gerhart Schreiter, Helmut Reischel, Felix Müller, Walter Niemann, Hans Warkus, Wolfgang Jarchow, Lothar Klimek, Walter Ohlsen, Jobst von Harsdorf , Gerhard Scholz, Georg Höge, Emil Karsten, Gerd Dahlmann, Johannes Schreiter).

Web links

Commons : Emil F. Karsten  - Collection of images, videos and audio files