Ernst Müller-Blensdorf

Ernst Müller-Blensdorf (born in Schleswig in 1896 ; died in Bruton , Somerset in 1976 ) was a German-English sculptor .

Life

Ernst Müller was a son of the doctor Ernst Gustav Müller and his wife Johanna Hedwig, geb. Worry who was a concert pianist. After his parents divorced in 1901, Ernst Müller lived with his mother and two siblings in Wernigerode , where he attended a private school. From 1905 he attended elementary school in Halberstadt . He left this without a degree to work as a seaman. But he became infected with typhus and then moved in 1912 to his father, who was practicing in Elberfeld . There, Ernst Müller later passed a school leaving examination, but then withdrew from his father's efforts to prepare him for a scientific career and went back to sea. When the First World War broke out , he was arrested in Cape Town . He spent the war time interned in Pretoria , where he worked with African wooden sculptures and decided to become a sculptor.

Following the war, he completed an apprenticeship as a wood sculptor with M. Bernuth and Paul Krause in Elberfeld , which he finished in 1922. Then he worked for two years in a furniture factory in Munich ; During this time he learned to work with stone.

Telecommunications office at Briller Strasse 39, Elberfeld. The structure was erected in the late 1920s.

From 1924, after his marriage to Ilse Blensdorf, a daughter of the rhythmist Otto Blensdorf , he had the surname Müller-Blensdorf. The marriage resulted in two daughters and a son. From 1926 Müller-Blensdorf received numerous public contracts. He created memorials for the likes of Neviges and Wuppertal - Nachbarebreck , designed the entrance door of the elementary school in Bochum , a figure for the tax office in Hagen , a young Stilling bust that was set up in the Elberfeld City Library, and stone cast work on the subject of communication for the Elberfeld telecommunications office in Briller Strasse. From 1930 Müller-Blensdorf taught at the applied arts school in Wuppertal.

During this time he also began to work on an international memorial for Fridtjof Nansen , who had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 and died in 1930. After the seizure of power of the National Socialists public procurement him were withdrawn. Müller-Blensdorf moved to Norway in 1933 . The children of the Müller-Blensdorf couple were placed in a boarding school in Paris run by their aunt Charlotte and her husband Donald MacJanett. Ilse Müller-Blensdorf moved to Norway with her husband.

The Nansen memorial was to be carved into a 200 meter high granite block in the port entrance of Bergen . Ernst Müller-Blensdorf reckoned that 40 to 50 sculptors would be employed for twelve years and the work would cost four to five million Norwegian crowns. He sought international donors.

In the meantime, monuments that he had created in Germany were destroyed because they did not correspond to the new zeitgeist. His studio in Bonn also fell victim to the National Socialists. The stone cast heads on the facade of the post office in Briller Strasse, however, have been preserved. The war memorial in next Breck was not destroyed either.

The Müller-Blensdorf couple earned their living in Norway selling small ceramic sculptures and taking rhythm lessons. Ernst Müller-Blensdorf did not succeed in establishing a granite school there. The hope of being able to work for Gutzon Borglum in America, which was awakened by Müller-Blensdorf's brother-in-law, was not fulfilled either. When the MacJanett couple left Europe in 1939, the Müller-Blensdorf couple's children came to Oslo .

This town was attacked on April 8th and 9th, 1940 and subsequently evacuated. On June 8th of the same year Ernst Müller-Blensdorf got on the last ship that could leave Norway, the icebreaker Fridtjof Nansen , without his wife, but with the children . The painter Kurt Schwitters and his son and daughter-in-law and the Norwegian Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht , who was one of the sponsors of the planned monument, were also on board . It was thanks to Koht that Müller-Blensdorf was allowed to transfer from a small fishing boat to the icebreaker on which he could travel from Norway to England.

Ernst Müller-Blensdorf was interned in the Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man until 1941 . In 1942 he divorced his first wife and married the teacher Rosemary Jane Lawson, with whom he had three more children. He lived on a farm in Bruton and worked as an art teacher at primary schools in Somerset . In 1947 he was accepted into the Royal Academy.

Müller-Blensdorf was determined not to return to Germany. He applied for English citizenship; he died in 1976 in his adopted home Bruton.

Awards

In 1968 Ernst Müller-Blensdorf received a gold medal for his work at the Charleroi art exhibition .

Works by Müller-Blensdorf in public space

War Memorial Next Brack

Müller-Blensdorf's facade decoration at the telecommunications office in Briller Strasse 39 in Wuppertal-Elberfeld has been preserved. The expressionist building with the L-shaped floor plan has four floors; the two wings have 17 and 24 window axes, respectively.

The figure on the corner of the tax office at Mollstrasse 6 in Hagen has also been preserved.

The war memorial in the Junkersbeck in Nachbarebreck was erected on a piece of land in the Hardtwäldchen and inaugurated on May 31, 1931. An earlier attempt to erect a memorial to the fallen of World War I had failed due to inflation, which had devalued the money already collected for this purpose. The memorial consists of a quarry stone pillar, on the sides of which the names of the 123 fallen can be read. A soldier in uniform made of porphyry blocks stands guard at the front .

In contrast to this memorial, the war memorial in Neviges, which was six months older and showed a similar warrior figure, was dismantled by the NSDAP district leader in 1937. The monument, the soldier figure of which was unclothed in contrast to the one in Next Breck, was classified as a remarkable work of art, but did not appear heroic and Aryan enough to the local ruler and, in his opinion, showed a stupid and womanish expression.

The three ages

At the Oberhausen train station there is a cast-iron relief by Müller-Blensdorf, which was once called The Three Ages of Life , but is now called The Family . The one tonne, 1.51 by 2.98 meter large relief shows three groups of people of different ages. Müller-Blensdorf created this relief the year before he emigrated. In 1934 it was still housed in the third class waiting room at Oberhausen train station. It was lost in later years of the Third Reich . After it surfaced again, it was first placed on the corner of Concordiastraße / Am Förderturm. After the station was redesigned, the artwork was returned there.

swell

The life dates and all information about his career and his works come from the dissertation “The Sculptor Ernst Müller-Blensdorf - An Emigrant Destiny” by Anke Carstens-Richter, which she presented in 1993 to the Faculty of History at the Ruhr University Bochum. After the dissertation was published, the author organized a traveling exhibition with the sculptor's works, which began in Schleswig, the artist's birthplace, in 1996 and ended in Wuppertal in 1997 after stops in Flensburg, Husum and Bad Schwartau. The sculptor was trained there and received his first public commissions. Carstens-Richter also designed the catalog for this traveling exhibition (No. 32 of the catalogs of the museums in Schleswig-Holstein) and wrote the foreword.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Carstens-Richter, Anke: The sculptor Ernst Müller-Blensdorf - the fate of an emigrant . Dissertation printing Darmstadt, Bochum 1993, p. 365 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Bergische Kunstgenossenschaft eV (Ed.): 1905. 2005. Hundred years of Bergische Kunstgenossenschaft e. V. , Wuppertal 2005, ISBN 3-00-016342-5 , p. 74 f. Digitized
3. ↑ Notwithstanding, the DNB names 1979 as the year of death.
4. ↑ The plural form can be found in the biography of Müller-Blensdorf in the catalog for the centenary of the Bergische Kunstgenossenschaft. Which monuments other than the one in Neviges are said to have been destroyed is not specified there.
5. ↑ Description of the telecommunications office on architektur.bda-wuppertal.de ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 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. 
6. ↑ War memorial next Breck on www.denkmal-wuppertal.de
7. ↑ Blickfänger , July 17th, 2010 at www.derwesten.de
8. ↑ Carstens-Richter, Anke (Red.): 1896-1976 The sculptor Ernst Müller-Blensdorf. The fate of an emigrant . In: Catalogs of the museums in Schleswig-Holstein . tape 32 . Druckhaus Severin, Flensburg 1996, p. 56 .