Emmy Haesele

Emmy Haesele (born July 8, 1894 in Mödling near Vienna , † November 20, 1987 in Bad Leonfelden in the Mühlviertel ) was an Austrian graphic artist and painter.

Life

Emmy Haesele was the second of four children to be born: an older brother Rudolf, who died in a storm in the Dachstein area in 1922; a younger brother and sister Marie. They grew up in a middle-class family. Your father, Dr. Leon Göhring, ran a doctor's practice at Heumühlgasse 3 in Vienna (also the family's apartment). Emmy attended a high school. She was exempted from drawing lessons, but received violin lessons and was taught the French language with her siblings by a French governess. She was seen as a difficult, obstinate, and nightmarish child. She spent the year 1910/11 in a boarding school in Weimar . Before the First World War, there was an adolescent rebellion: short haircuts, motorcycling, extreme mountaineering, skiing and ice skating. With her sister Marie, she managed the first ascent of the Kleine Bischofsmütze with a women's team.

In 1916 she married her childhood friend, the doctor Dr. Hans Haesele. Haesele was posted to eastern Hungary during the First World War, but had his wife follow him to the front. She herself worked as a Red Cross nurse in a hospital. The son Heinz was born in 1917, the daughter Lieselotte (Mesi) was born in Vienna in 1918.

Haesele became a district doctor in Unken in 1919 . The family was assigned the so-called doctor's house along with a small farm from the community. The couple were interested in culture: In 1927 Emmy Haesele traveled to Paris with her husband's cousin to attend the Salzburg Festival . Twice in the twenties they drove to Darmstadt to the "School of Wisdom" by Hermann Graf Keyserling and heard lectures by CG Jung , Hans Prinzhorn , Max Scheler and Johannes von den Driesch . It was here that I made contact with the painter Oskar AH Schmitz , and this encounter inspired Emmy Haesele's first drawings.

The relationship with Alfred Kubin

Emmy Haesele: 'Sometimes mortals need the winds most - Pindaros'

In 1930 Schmitz suggested sending some of her sheets to his sister Hedwig's husband, the already established artist Alfred Kubin , in Zwickledt . Schmitz died suddenly in December 1931, and the Haeseles took on the widowed Emeline Schmitz. It was through her that contact with Alfred Kubin was resumed. In 1932, Hedwig Kubin wrote a letter of appreciation from Zwickledt, who carried out the correspondence for her husband. On May 20th, the couple went to Zwickledt with Emeline Schmitz. That was the beginning of an intensive exchange, initially related to questions of art. At the beginning of August 1933, Alfred and Hedwig Kubin came to Unken for a summer vacation . From the later letters it emerges that it was August 19, 1933 on which the love affair between Emmy Haesele and Alfred Kubin began and which Kubin lasted until 1936.

The mutual names with which the love letters were signed are well known: you my “twin original woman” (ZUW), I your “twin original man” (ZUM). The allusions to the stallion Ali (composed of Kubin's first names: Alfred Leopold Isidor) and the mare Fatima are significant, if not exactly original, because Kubin had also used these terms in earlier love affairs. For Alfred Kubin this was not the first and also not the last affair; rather, women were the impetus for his creative power. His wife Hedwig usually knew about it, but she has already been hit by the fact that he also had a love affair with her sister, Tilly Spier, or the wife of the recently deceased brother-in-law, Emeline Schmitz. The saying came from himself that he had sent the maids to Passau for an abortion . Hans Haesele also accepted the situation and tolerated the love affair between them. Only the two children became estranged from their mother. In the following years, Emmy Haesele traveled several times to Zwickledt for long periods of time. Hedwig left her house on these visits and went to see her sister in Schärding . Also vacation trips with Kubin followed, mostly to Czechoslovakia.

Politically, this time was determined by the rise of National Socialism in Austria. When the NSDAP was banned in Austria after a hand grenade attack by the National Socialists on Christian military gymnasts , many became so-called illegals, including Hans Haesele. The son Heinz was not unaffected by this either, perhaps the reason that he later volunteered for the Wehrmacht in a war from which he never came back. On one of Emmy and Kubin's trips, an unpleasant incident occurred at the Haidmühle border station . There was a National Socialist riot with shouting and singing and Emmy Haesele seemed to have followed this with approval. Kubin was appalled by this (his wife Hedwig was known to be a "half-Jewish", which led to personal threats in the later Nazi era, but which Ernst August Freiherr von Mandelsloh as head of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts in Upper Danube ultimately prevented). At least from Kubin's point of view, this was the beginning of the end of the relationship. When Emmy Haesele returned to Zwickledt at the beginning of February 1936, Kubin more or less showed her the door (“Pack your suitcases!”). A large part of the correspondence and the pictures from Kubin came to Kurt Otte in Hamburg, who stowed the documents safely away from war.

Emmy was fatally injured by this refusal, but could not leave Kubin for years. Not only did she travel to Zwickledt once, circling the house, putting down presents and writing letters. On a secret path, there was even a personal encounter at which Kubin only found the greeting “Pfitigott” for them. For a while he answered her letters, but only on questions of painting technique. When Hedwig Kubin died on August 15, 1948, new hope for a relationship arose. However, the housekeeper Cilli Lindinger did not let her into Kubin's house.

Further life

In October 1943 Emily volunteered for military service and trained as a flak weapon helper and was deployed near Munster . From October 1, 1944, she was back in Unken to provide family support to her daughter, whose husband had died in the war. Hans Haesele was deployed in the Balkans during the war, was missing since 1944 and never came back. Emmy had him pronounced dead in 1948 and received a war widow's pension .

After the end of the war, she was imprisoned in Salzburg for one year in 1945 because of a denunciation of illegal possession of weapons. Her daughter was also sentenced to six months in prison for complicity. In Unken she was evicted and had to leave the doctor's house. When she was released on March 21, 1946, she was left with nothing. She and her six-year-old grandson found shelter high above Unken in the so-called Ematergütl until September.

In 1948 she moved to Bad Aussee to live with her sister Marie Zelenka . She stayed here with her grandson until 1956. On Easter Sunday 1950 she, who came from a Protestant family, decided to convert to the Catholic faith. For them, this was linked to the hope of finally getting rid of Kubin. She also wanted to solve her alleged complicity in the death of her husband and son. She was baptized at Christmas by Pastor Samhaber in Wernstein am Inn . In 1956 Emily moved to her parents' apartment in Vienna, where she looked after her mother in need of care until her death in 1963.

Alfred Kubin died on August 20, 1959. She did not attend his funeral. It was not until 1962 that she re-entered Kubin's house through the mediation of Pastor Samhaber, this time receiving a friendly welcome from the housekeeper Cilli. The visit was repeated again in 1969.

In 1968 she was accepted into the professional association of visual artists.

In 1979 she suffered an accident with a broken thigh and a broken right hand, which meant the end of drawing for Emmy Haesele. At the age of 85 she decided to move to her daughter Mesi († 2008) in Bad Leonfelden. In the last few years the Salzburg gallery owner Ferdinand Altnöder sought Emmy Haesele's acquaintance. He became the administrator of her artistic work.

One day she tripped over one of her cats and fell so miserably that she had to be taken to the hospital in Linz. The 93-year-old died here as a result of the accident. She was buried in Bad Leonfelden .

Artistic development

Emmy Haesele: 'Useful Animals' (1973)

Emmy Haesele began drawing intensively around 1931. She started with medium and small formats, worked with colored pencil and chalk. The themes were taken from her childhood: underwater creatures, wandering fish between high walls, undeniable female figures , but also conflagrations and snakes as symbols of threat and seduction. Then came the phase in which she practically became a student of Kubin, learned from him and enjoyed his recognition.

After separating from Kubin, there was a feverish creative phase. Even if she didn't see it that way, she was influenced by Kubin in terms of subject matter and design. But with her ink drawings in watercolors or with the combinations of pen and watercolor or pen and colored pencil she achieved new forms of expression that Kubin did not know or use. The themes she designed are depressing: disasters, earthquakes, shipwrecked people, predatory fish, “Frau Sorge”, legless or one-legged cripples ... tightrope walkers and harlequin figures.

She was only able to work to a very limited extent over long periods; everyday life involved too many tasks. Continuous creative periods resulted in Bad Aussee and after the death of her mother in Vienna.

Exhibitions

• 1948: First vernissage in Linz in the small library of the Neue Galerie with 32 pictures, organized by Wolfgang Gurlitt
• 1951: Haesele exhibition in the Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz, organized by Walter Gurlitt
• 1961: Exhibitions in Vienna (including in Ernst Fuchs' gallery ), Feldkirchen, Salzburg, Sweden
• 1987: with Hans Franta, Galerie Altnöder, Salzburg
• 1987: Kammerhof Museum , Bad Aussee
• 1989: Galerie Altnöder, Salzburg
• 1989: Heimatmuseum Bürgerspital, Leonfelden
• 1989: Around Kubin, Weidan Gallery, Schärding
• 1990: St. Anna Chapel, Passau
• 1993: Lower Austria Documentation Center for Modern Art, St. Pölten
• 1994: Galerie Lehner, Linz
• 1994: Salzburg Museum Carolino Augusteum, Salzburg
• 1995: with Alfred Kubin, Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando : Gods, People, Dreams, ETCETERA Gallery, Munich
• 1995: On paper I, group exhibition, Altnöder Gallery, Salzburg
• 1995: Raiffeisenkasse Unken
• 1997: Galerie Lehner, Linz
• 1998: Zwickledt Castle (Kubin House)
• 2002: with Margret Bilger, Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando, Galerie Altnöder, Salzburg
• 2005: Alfred Kubin and his circle of friends, Galerie Altnöder, Salzburg
• 2010: Alfred Kubin and the artists Emmy Haesele, Clara Siewert and Margret Bilger. Nordico - Museum of the City of Linz

Individual evidence

1. ^ Professional Association of Visual Artists Austria (BV) [1]
2. ↑ Exhibition brochure with picture directory, 8 pages
3. ↑ Article in OÖ Nachrichten of February 16, 1994

literature

• Brita Steinwendtner: You angel, you devil. Emmy Haesele and Alfred Kubin - a love story. Innsbruck: Haymon Verlag, 2009, ISBN 978-3-85218-586-6 .
• Barbara Wally: Emmy Haesele 1894-1987. Life and work. Salzburg: Galerie Altnöder with the office of the Lower Austrian provincial government, cultural department in Salzburg, 1993. ISBN 3-85460100-X

Web links

Commons : Emmy Haesele  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Emmy Haesele in the catalog of the German National Library
• Art net [2]
• Gallery Altnöder [3]