Erich Schmidt-Kestner

(Friedrich August) Erich Schmidt-Kestner (born January 15, 1877 in Berlin , † October 24, 1941 in Nordhausen am Harz) was a German sculptor .

Life

Schmidt-Kestner is a son of the Berlin high school professor Johannes Eusebius Samuel Schmidt , a brother of the writer and pilot's captain Hans Schmidt-Kestner , a grandson of the educator and head of the Huguenot school in the French Cathedral on Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin Eusebius Schmidt and in the fourth generation a descendant of the Charlotte Buff , married Kestner , who set a monument to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in The Sorrows of Young Werther .

Schmidt-Kestner studied at the Berlin Art Academy and at the Düsseldorf Art Academy . In 1904 he received a small gold medal at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition . In 1905 he also received a gold medal at the international art exhibition in Munich for his work The Girl Stepping Out . After completing his studies, he was awarded the Rome Prize on March 15, 1905 . This gave him the opportunity to live in Italy for two years and to deepen his work. Up to the age of 50 he worked as a freelance artist in his hometown of Berlin from 1908 to 1926, only interrupted by the outbreak of World War I , which he took part in as a soldier in France , Russia and as an Italian interpreter for the Alpine Corps . One of his studios is still used as such today, on Offenbacher Strasse in Berlin-Friedenau .

Services

To Schmidt-Kestner's complete works to realize needs to be mentioned that there are 80 percent of the design of architectural sculptures existed. He received many orders from government departments, industry and private individuals. In the town hall of Berlin-Charlottenburg a larger than life was Hermes statue erected of him in the city park of Berlin-Schoeneberg a popular duck fountain in Berlin-Tempelhof , a fox group in Berlin-Steglitz the Paulsen -Denkmal, on the square in Hanover of Mercury - Fountain. One of his great areas of work was the design of portrait heads . His portraits always show an unpathetic and natural gesture. In the period from 1912 to 1921 there were also many portraits of children. During these years his five children were born.

In 1926/1927 Schmidt-Kestner was appointed lecturer and head of the sculpture class at the art and trade school in Königsberg (Prussia) . Teaching gave him great pleasure. A well-known work from his time in Königsberg that is still preserved in today's Kaliningrad are the Playing Greyhounds on the main path of the zoo, of which Schmidt-Kestner was honorary deputy director for several years. During this time, the artist created hundreds of graphic sheets, drawings and etchings that reflect his art of observing animal life. Above the (art) portal of the main train station in Königsberg there were five reliefs depicting journeys by water, land and air, arrival and departure; His Justitia bust stood on a four-meter-high clinker column in the courtyard of the court. The reliefs were carved by Schmidt-Kestner and his student Wilhelm Ernst Ehrich. Ehrich emigrated to America in 1929, where he continued this tradition of public art as director of the Federal Art Project in Buffalo, New York, and as resident sculptor and professor at Rochester University. Like Schmidt-Kestner, Ehrich's works also contained animals and reliefs for a zoo in Buffalo. However, some of the sculptor's works in Königsberg around 1933 are often kept secret. The work on the exhibition catalogs of the Königsberger Kunstverein , edited and edited by Rudolf Meyer-Bremen in 1993, can be found in the catalog of the Kunstverein's 62nd art exhibition in the Kunsthalle am Wrangelturm in the year 1933 a plaster bust of the Führer for 1,500 Reichsmarks and a portrait of Colonel Abbe , also made of plaster. The Adolf Hitler bust also mentions the large artist lexicon founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker in 1936. It is possible that Schmidt-Kestner's latter engagement is the reason why he can no longer be found in any artists' lexicon after the war.

In 1935 Schmidt-Kestner left East Prussia and accepted a teaching position as a professor at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Kassel , of which he later became director. In Kassel he was also the head of the “care center for the design of war memorials”.

In the Second World War , many of Schmidt-Kestner's works fell victim to the bombs. The folder with the photos of the building sculptures was also lost in the turmoil of time. Only a few smaller sculptures, some reliefs, the mother group in Bad Hersfeld and the sculpture of a miner in Volpriehausen have survived . But according to contemporary reports e.g. B. also the playing greyhounds in what is now Kaliningrad , Russia , which were exhibited in the garden of a Soviet general after the war and are now in the city's art gallery. In 1994, a lost Schmidt-Kestner relief is said to have been renewed by Ernst Lübbert and is located in Neubrandenburg in the ramparts on Grosse Wollweberstrasse.

The artist constantly endeavored to give his work as closed a form as possible. By his own admission, he didn't like working life-size, but rather larger-than-life or scaled down. He was in ongoing collaboration with the Selb porcelain company and the Ilmenau porcelain factory Metzler & Ortloff , but works based on Schmidt-Kestner's clay models were also produced at the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin . For his metal work he used the foundry Hermann Noack from Berlin, the material for his stone work came from the Miltenberg quarry .

Schmidt-Kestner died on October 24, 1941 in Nordhausen, northern Thuringia, at the age of 64. On May 19, 1942, the Kasseler Kunstverein arranged a commemorative exhibition in the State Gallery, about which the Kasseler Neuesten Nachrichten of May 19, 1942 wrote:

“The extent of the memorial exhibition gives a surprising picture of Schmidt-Kestner's work, which in purely material terms spans the range from the realistic portrait of animal sculpture to the large symbolic composition and the mirror of his artistic activity in graphic works. The classical measure, which has always been the model for the artist, is revealed most clearly in youthful figures of noble posture (Paris) or the equestrian figures, who enter into a beautiful unity with the horse, filled with currents of power between humans and animals. A special skill of the artist adds up in these equestrian paintings: the perfectly shaped and character-appropriate representation of the animals. Since this empathy with the nature of animals was combined with a high level of craftsmanship, in these horses, playing dogs, deer and lions we have animal sculptures of outstanding veracity and harmonious form. "

In 1984 the East Prussia Cultural Center in the Teutonic Order Castle in Ellingen dedicated an exhibition to Schmidt-Kestner together with Edmund May and Franz Andreas Theyne. One of his students was the Hannoversch Mündener potter and sculptor Heinz Detlef Wüpper .

Major works

• Statue striding girl (1904, 1905 gold medal of the international art exhibition in Munich )
• Statue of Hermes in the Berlin-Charlottenburg town hall
• Duck fountain in the city ​​park Berlin-Schöneberg
• Paulsen monument in Berlin-Steglitz
• Fox group in Berlin-Tempelhof
• Archer (1915, bought by the Berlin Senate )
• Paris (1919, bronze, 68 × 22 cm, bought by the Berlin Senate)
• Merkur fountain in front of the southern porch of the town hall in Lützowstrasse in Hanover
• Five reliefs above the portal of the Königsberg main station (travel)
• Youth act in front of the anatomy in Koenigsberg (Pr.)
• Richard Wagner's relief in the Königsberg theater
• Portrait heads: Ernst Wiechert , Edmund May (1929, bronze, 48 × 20 cm), Hermann von Helmholtz , Hans Lohmeyer , etcher Anton Scheuritzel , Hermann Göring, Colonel Abbes (Königsberg), Adolf Hitler
• Playing greyhounds on the main path of the zoo in Königsberg (Pr.)
• Small sculptures: rider, runner at the finish, relay run by two women , first runner at the finish , riding amazon with spear , amazon with horse , the kiss goodbye , favorite horse , seated girl , bathers , marble, height 62 cm, boy leads horse to watering , bronze and Further

• Hundreds of sheets with scenes from animal life (sketches and etchings)
• Justitia - bust in the courtyard of the courthouse of Königsberg (Pr.)
• Hermann Sudermann Monument in Heydekrug
• Sculpture of a miner in Volpriehausen
• Mother Group , a life-size travertine sculpture of a seated mother with three children. Bad Hersfeld from 1938 (district hospital, since 1961 district office). Here the iconography of the Madonna is mixed up with the usual depiction of maternal sacrifice. The sculpture used to be in the foyer of the district hospital. Two sculptures were drawn in the construction plans of the district hospital, one of which is probably the mother group.
• Portrait of his daughter Adelgunde Fock

gallery

• 

  Ernst Lübbert Monument Neubrandenburg, 1934 (relief renewed)

• 

  Lübbert Monument Stavenhagen (reconstruction 1989)

• 

  Cenotaph for the fallen soldiers of the Hersfeld district in the First World War, erected in 1936. The design of the bronze sculpture, a warrior standing in watchful position "with a detached rifle, comes from the sculptor Erich Schmidt-Kestner

• 

  Mother group in Bad Hersfeld from 1938.

• 

  Sculpture of a miner in Volpriehausen from 1945, installed in 1974

literature

• Rüdiger RE Fock: The Kestner. A German-French-Swiss family makes history (s). Schnell Buch und Druck, Warendorf 2009, ISBN 978-3-87716-706-9 .
• Schmidt-Kestner, Erich . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 30 : Scheffel – Siemerding . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1936, p. 169 .
• Irmgard Buchholz, Eva Köhler: Erich Schmidt-Kestner. In: Deutschordensschloss Ellingen - Cultural Center East Prussia (ed.), Prof. Edmund May - Erich Schmidt-Kestner - Franz Andreas Threyne . Exhibition catalog August 4 - September 30, 1984, EOS print: St. Ottilien 1984.
• Siegfried Rösch: The Buff family. Insight into more than four hundred years of family history. Publishing house Degener & Co .: Neustadt an der Aisch 1953.
• Johannes ES Schmidt, Rüdiger RE Fock (ed.): The French Cathedral School and the French Gymnasium in Berlin. Publishing house Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8300-3478-0 .
• Art. 17 (= art for everyone. 23), 1908, p. 78.
• Yearbook of the German Werkbund. Verlag E. Diederichs, Jena 1912, p. 78, p. 230.
• Dec. Art. 28, 1913, p. 230 f.
• Architecture and sculpture. Romanticism and the present in East Prussia, art exhibition of the Kunstverein Königsberg / Pr., 1933, p. 46, p. 50, Königsberger Hartungsche Zeitung, No. 566, evening paper.
• Farewell to Professor Schmidt-Kestner. Kassel Post, October 25, 1941.
• The sculptor Erich Schmidt-Kestner. Kassel Latest News May 19, 1942.
• HM Mühlpfordt: Königsberg sculptures and their masters 1255–1945. Würzburg, pp. 159-161.
• HM Mühlpfordt: Supplementum to Königsberg sculptures and their masters 1255–1945 , Würzburg, pp. 159–161.
• Friends of the arts and crafts school Königsberg / Pr. (Ed.): Düsseldorf 1981, pp. 12-13.
• Rudolf Meyer-Bremen (Ed.) Exhibition catalogs of the Königsberger Kunstverein. Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 1993, ISBN 3-412-10691-7 .
• Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein: Hanover Chronicle. From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 1991, ISBN 3-87706-319-5 .
• From nature's book. Issues 1–4, Ferdinand-Hirt-Verlag 1926–1931 ( familie-leilich.de PDF).
• Paul Pfisterer: Signature Lexicon. de Gruyter, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-11-014937-0 , p. 352 ( books.google.com Schmidt-Kestner's signature).

Web links

Commons : Erich Schmidt-Kestner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

1. ↑ Monument topography of the Federal Republic of Germany. Cultural monuments in Hessen. District of Hersfeld-Rotenburg III. P. 96.
2. ↑ Monuments in Kaliningrad
3. ^ Foundry Hermann Noack ( Memento from July 16, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
4. ^ East Prussia Cultural Center: Events for the years 1982–2014.
5. ↑ invaluable.com
6. ↑ Sculpture: The greyhounds are still playing ostpreussen-info.de.
7. ↑ Sculpture: Riding Amazon with a spear
8. ↑ Sculpture: Amazon with horse - archive link ( Memento of the original from November 1st, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
9. ^ Sculpture: The kiss goodbye
10. ↑  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
11. ↑ Sculpture: Sitting Girl ( Memento from July 31, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
12. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original dated November 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
13. ↑ antik-moderne.de
14. ↑ invaluable.com - hydroponicsonline.com
15. ↑ Monument topography of the Federal Republic of Germany. Cultural monuments in Hessen. District of Hersfeld-Rotenburg III. P. 225.
16. ↑ The stone miner. Heimatverein Volpriehausen eV, accessed on July 29, 2016 .