Ernst Schunke

Ernst Schunke: The Black Color in Schleiz (1918)

Tomb of Volker Schunke (1898 - 1917), the son of Ernst Schunke, in the Schleiz mountain cemetery

Ernst Schunke (born September 28, 1862 in Wersdorf ; † October 12, 1936 in Murnau ) was a German artist and drawing teacher who discovered Otto Dix's talent while working in Gera (1902–1907) and who decisively promoted him in his youth .

Life

Schunke spent his childhood and youth in the Grand Duchy of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach . He received his training as a teacher in Weimar and his first job as an elementary teacher in Mellingen . In 1902 he switched to the Russian school service. Here he first worked at the community school in the Gera suburb of Debschwitz . As a teaching practice, he held two lessons on the subjects of “The young man from Nain” and “The Saale and its region”.

In 1903 he moved from Debschwitz to the Lower House Citizens School. The new school principal Theodor Böttcher, who was also appointed to this school a year later, enabled him to specialize as a drawing teacher. At first he also had to teach religion, natural history and German. Of his own accord he who has never taken an art teacher testing, in Weimar in the studio of Professor Rasch and in the years 1905 and 1906 in the summer courses at the Munich art school of William of Debschitz - in addition to the Weimar School of de Henry van Velde the most modern in what was then Germany - further training. For this purpose he was given a generous leave of absence from the Untermhausen school service. He designed the drawing lessons in the modern sense according to the ideas of the Munich artist Hermann Obrist (1863–1927), one of the most influential contemporary theorists of Art Nouveau. Unacademic training in drawing from nature was more important to him than teaching art theories. He also introduced plastic modeling into the classroom.

On March 30, 1907, he moved back to Gera, where he primarily taught artistic subjects at the Enzian School. In 1908 he moved with his family to Schleiz , where he was appointed to the traditional princely high school Rutheneum . There he gave lessons in drawing, music and mathematics. Schunke worked as a teacher in Schleiz until his retirement in 1928. In 1912 he wrote down prominent places in Schleiz with a pen, which resulted in a postcard collection that was sold for decades. In 1935 he moved to his daughter Elisabeth in Murnau, where he died on October 12, 1936.

family

Schunke's marriage resulted in two children, the daughter Elisabeth and the son Volker, who was born on September 5, 1898 in Mellingen. As a young high school graduate, Volker Schunke was drafted shortly before the end of the First World War (1917). Before he reached the Western Front, he was fatally struck by a stray shrapnel on top of a telegraph pole on December 1, 1917 , while he was an enslaved and corporal of Telephone Battalion I, 28 near Banteux . On December 3, 1917, he was buried in Selvigny. In 1918 the body was transferred to Schleiz and buried there on May 30, 1918. With an almost life-size bronze sculpture that can still be found on the northern wall of the cemetery, his parents memorialized him in the Schleiz Bergfriedhof. Probably based on a design by his father, the bronze depicts a naked, seated youth, with the book and sword slipped from his hands. In addition the inscription: “Years a young man, a child at heart, he died a man.” Ernst Schunke is said to have been hit so hard by the death of his son that he fell into deep grief and bitterness and within a very short time aged by years.

The daughter Elisabeth, who inherited her father's talent, completed her art studies in the 1920s at the State Academy for Applied Arts in Dresden .

meaning

Ernst Schunke was the first to discover and promote Otto Dix's extraordinary talent . In 1903 he met his talented pupil, who was then 12 years old, and helped him decisively over the next three years. He opened “his eyes to the essence of the native landscape” and awakened “the sense of a pictorial condensation of what was seen”.

On Sunday forays through the immediate vicinity of Gera, Schunke taught his pupil how to look, understand and draw his homeland. Relentlessly, he urged him to draw: “Better to draw than paint! Everything has to be drawn much more precisely! ”He noted in a delicate but energetic handwriting on early drawings. Otto Dix wrote in 1966, looking back on Ernst Schunke: "I have always been able to paint without role models, but of course I owe a lot to my old teacher Schunke, who led me to creative freedom."

Schunke obtained for the young artist in an audience with Heinrich XXVII. Reuss j. L. , the then ruling prince in Gera, received a scholarship for the arts and crafts school in Dresden. However, the prince made the scholarship a condition that Dix should learn a trade beforehand. Thereupon Otto Dix completed an apprenticeship as a decorative painter with Carl Senff in Gera from 1906 to 1910. Only then did his actual painting career begin. In 1931 Otto Dix met his now 69-year-old teacher again and drew a striking portrait in black chalk that was long thought lost, but possibly still exists and is privately owned in southern Germany.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Theo Piegler: "Better to draw than paint!" In: District Office of the Saale-Orla district (ed.): Heimatjahrbuch . District Office of the Saale-Orla District, Schleiz 2001, p. 150-153 .
2. ↑ Ulrike Rüdiger (Ed.): Otto Dix . Art collection Gera, Gera 1996, ISBN 3-910051-14-6 , p. 21 .