Erich Wegner

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Erich Wegner (* July 12, 1899 in Gnoien ; † December 11, 1980 in Hanover ) was a 20th century painter and is one of the outstanding representatives of the New Objectivity in Hanover.

life and work

childhood and education

Erich Wegner was born the son of a postman in Gnoien and grew up in Rostock . The city shaped him from an early age, as a child he hung around the harbor with an adventurous spirit and his original wish was to become a sailor. Even then he was so often out and about with his sketchpad that his actual calling as a painter was not out of question. The motifs of the port, however, sailors and shipyard workers and again and again ships, stayed with him and ran through his varied life's work. His father would have preferred to secure him in a civil servant or salaried career, but Erich Wegner found a more convenient start to his professional life from 1917 to 1918 as a trainee in the painting workshop of the Rostock City Theater. However, the path was interrupted immediately because he was drafted as a soldier in the last year of the First World War . 1919 he applied to several art schools in northern Germany and was delighted with the warm welcome that he attended the School of Applied Arts Hannover at Fritz Burger-Mühlfeld found. During the four semesters that he studied there, he got to know Ernst Thoms , Grethe Jürgens , Gerta Overbeck , Friedrich Busack and Hans Mertens . The friendships with these classmates shaped his life and his artistic career. They are later seen - with a few other artists - as the Neue Sachlichkeit Hannover group .

Tramp with the sketchpad

From 1921 to 1925 Erich Wegner, at times together with Ernst Thoms, went on a wandering , typing, as it was called at the time, because the two penniless men could not afford study trips in the traditional sense. She financed her longer stays in Frankfurt am Main , Dresden , Hamburg and Cologne with odd jobs as a theater painter, commercial artist and also as a house painter. But of course the creative focus was on capturing the cityscapes, the scenes and milieus on the drawing pad. Wegner also wandered for some time with a circus, with the illusion of free life and a subsequent disillusionment. He later said that the driest and most humorless people he met were the clowns. But the circus arenas and the clown pictures have remained motifs that are often repeated in his work. In 1923 he set up a studio in the same house as Thoms, on Calenbergstrasse in Hanover, in which he also lived for a time. Wherever he was, but especially in Hanover, Wegner took up the social and societal situation of the 1920s in his pictures, street scenes and dreariness, cabaret, bar scenes and taverns, artist festivals and unemployment, workers, street girls, misery provide the models for intense and Capturing reality without illusions in his work. At the same time, this reality was also Wegner's own situation, the constant worry of earning enough money to live on.

Murder images

An extensive series of so-called murder pictures in watercolor, black chalk, tempera, ink and some oil paintings comes from the early period of his work (1920–1923) . The drastic depiction of the murder, especially of women, connects him with other artists of the immediate post-war period of the First World War such as Oskar Kokoschka and Alfred Kubin in Vienna or George Grosz in Berlin, Otto Dix in Dresden. "The depiction of the murder of women is one of the few new contributions in Austrian and German painting shortly before and after the end of the First World War to the expiring genre of the event picture. Wegner's murder pictures are one of them. In accordance with the new artistic endeavors after the First World War, Wegner chose no longer subjects that corresponded to the academic canon of the good, the true and the beautiful. Instead, he dealt (...) with the realistic representation of social conflicts. "

In 1924 Wegner received an order from the Hannoversche Zeitung to draw the notorious mass murderer Haarmann , who had been discovered at the time. "He didn't do it squeamishly and reached on. He showed the law enforcement officers in their lack of imagination, you saw two policemen strolling unsuspectingly past a window, behind whose curtain the murderer was chopping up the corpse. It was a hard grip, and this obscene view and representation was too much even for the editors; the collaboration was over. "

New Objectivity

In 1925 Erich Wegner married the librarian Katharina Engel. Their son Klaus was born in 1926. It seems as if Wegner's confrontations with everyday life as well as with the theories of art have become more serious and settled. He continues to do more badly than well with commercial work. His main clients were the Red Aid and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), of which he was temporarily a member.

From 1926 he exhibited together with Busack, Jürgens, Overbeck, Thoms, Mertens, Karl Rüter and August Heitmüller regularly at the Kunstverein Hannover . They are seen as a group of painters of the New Objectivity in Hanover, but they often pointed out that they were more of a loose association than a group. "Not a stringent, even collectively agreed work program, but similar aesthetic convictions - which at the same time must have been discussed very controversially - constituted a certain consistency in the creative will. This occasionally led to clear references, such as those documented by mutual portraits, or to the processing of the same Motives. " But it was precisely this atmosphere of friendship and debate that led the artists into a very creative and productive period.

Wegner receives first recognitions and successes. In 1928 the Hanoverian magistrate bought his oil paintings "Winterlandschaft" (today Sprengel Museum ) and "Straße mit Leuchtturm". In the same year he won first prize with a poster for the "Zinnoberfest". In 1929 he took part in the exhibition "Neue Sachlichkeit" at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

In the time of National Socialism

In 1933, after the National Socialists took office , Wegner escaped arrest and internment as well as being banned from painting , but house searches and arrests, interrogations and harassment led to uncertainty and fear. Wegner destroyed many of his works that could have burdened him. The family moved several times in the hopes of avoiding the Gestapo . In 1937 two of his works, including "Street with Lighthouse", were confiscated as part of the " Degenerate Art " campaign. Although he was found "unworthy of defense" in 1935, he was drafted into military service in 1939. At the end of the Second World War he was taken prisoner by the Soviets. His pictures, or rather landscape paintings, from these years are often strangely emptied, one suspects the people and life, but does not see them.

Colorful years

After 1945 Erich Wegner got financial "ground under his feet". He became a lecturer in art courses at the Volkshochschule Hannover. He loved this activity and carried it out with great enthusiasm for many years - until 1971. And it gave him space for his artistic development. His pictures became lighter and more colorful, although he kept referring to old pictorial ideas thematically, but he was more interested in free composition. In the 60s and 70s he created an astonishing bundle of abstract watercolors, which colorfully convey the artist's pleasure to the viewer, and which are very different from his abstract works from the 1920s, with the strict geometrical shapes that were partly influenced by constructivism . The Wilhelm Busch Museum , Hanover organized a retrospective exhibition in 1951. However, it was not until 1961 that Wegner exhibited his works regularly again, often in the Kunstverein in Hanover, but there are also well-known museums and galleries in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Bristol, St. Etienne and Parma.

In 1972 Erich Wegner was awarded the Hanover city badge and in 1979 he was awarded the Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Lower Saxony Order of Merit as the second official honor . Wegner died on December 11, 1980 at the age of 81 in Hanover.

After his death

Street sign with legend on Erich-Wegner-Weg, laid out in 1990 in the southern part of Hanover

It was only after his death that the work of Erich Wegner found actual appreciation and it was only after his 100th birthday that he received public attention.

In 1990, the city of Hanover honored the painter by the naming of the same year in the district of South City landscaped Erich Wegener way .

The exhibition "The strongest expression of our days" at the Sprengel Museum Hanover in 2001, and the ensuing establishment, focused primarily on his work and his participation in the New Objectivity. But Wegner's work is so much richer. In 2006, the Kunstmuseum Celle carried out an extensive elaboration of the artist's wide-ranging early work with the exhibition "Between Gosse and Geometry - Erich Wegner: Drawings of the Twenties": "Wegner's graphic work of the twenties reveals a pronounced joy in experimentation. Hanover is of the twenties a big city in a spirit of optimism, characterized by a lively pluralism of styles: the fading expressionism with its ecstatic pictorial creations exists alongside verism and the new objectivity as two new directions of realistic painting. In addition, constructivist art in its various forms is pushing itself into the foreground, and the Abstracts gain influence in Hanover. The dispute about finding terms for new art movements reflects the ambivalent mood between clinging to the old and moving on to the new in the post-war phase. (...) With all these different art movements Wegner parted ways. They are his field of experimentation in developing his own handwriting. "

The actual processing of his extensive work is still pending.

Honor grave

The honorary grave of Erich Wegner found on the city cemetery Engesohde in Hannover, Department 17 , grave number 1016 .

Exhibitions

  • 1927 Hanover Art Association
  • 1929 Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, "New Objectivity"
  • 1951 Hanover Wilhelm Busch Museum
  • 1961 Berlin, house on the Waldsee
  • 1962 Hanover, Art Association "The Twenties in Hanover"
  • 1962 Bristol, City Art Gallery "Contemporary Art from Lower Saxony"
  • 1966 Cologne, Galerie Zwirner "New Objectivity 1920 - 1933"
  • 1967 Wuppertal, Art and Museum Association "Magical Realism in Germany"
  • 1968 Hamburg, Galerie Brockstedt and Kunstverein
  • 1969 Milan, Galleria del Levante
  • 1973 Parma, Galleria della Rochetta
  • 1974 St. Etienne, Musée d'Art et d'Industrie
  • 1975 Hamburg, Galerie Krokodil "From Art Brut to New Objectivity"
  • 1976 Hanover, Galerie Kühl
  • 1977 London, Piccadilly Gallery "German Realists 1918 - 1933"
  • 1978 Vienna, Museum of the 20th Century "New Objectivity and Realism"
  • 1983 Munich, Abercron Gallery
  • 1986 Munich, Galerie Hasenclever
  • 1996 Celle, Art Foundation "Erich Wegner - Abstract Works from the Twenties"
  • 2001 Hanover, Sprengel Museum "The strongest expression of our days"
  • 2005 Rostock, Kunsthalle "Erich Wegner - Drawings of the Twenties"
  • 2006 Celle, Art Museum "Erich Wegner - Drawings of the Twenties"

Literature (selection)

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Hugo Thielen : Wegner, Erich , in: Stadtlexikon Hannover , p. 660
  2. ↑ Sprengel Museum: The strongest expression of our days. Neue Sachlichkeit in Hannover , Hildesheim 2001, p. 259
  3. ^ Rudolf Lange: The painter Erich Wegner ; in: Kunstmuseum Celle: Erich Wegner. Drawings from the 1920s , Celle 2006, p. 15 ff.
  4. ↑ Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtis: Wegner's Murder Pictures; in: The strongest expression of our day. New Objectivity in Hanover , Hildesheim 2001
  5. ^ AF Teschemacher: Erich Wegner . Westermann Verlag GmbH, Braunschweig 1983
  6. ^ Daphne Mattner: The woman from the milieu - a look at Erich Wegner's artistic diversity ; in: Kunstmuseum Celle: Erich Wegner - drawings of the 20s. Celle, 2006
  7. ↑ Karin van Schwartzenberg (responsible): Graves of honor and graves of important personalities at the Engesohde town cemetery , A3 leaflet with overview sketch, ed. from the City of Hanover, The Lord Mayor, Department of Environment and Urban Greenery, Department of Urban Cemeteries, Department of Administration and Customer Service, Hanover, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Wegner, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Gnoien
DATE OF DEATH December 11, 1980
Place of death Hanover