Erwin Vollmer

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Erwin Vollmer self-portrait 1923

Erwin Vollmer (born October 19, 1884 in Berlin ; † June 27, 1973 in Rehlingen near Lüneburg ) was a German painter and sculptor .

Life

Vollmer comes from a north German family of artists. His grandfather was the Hamburg landscape and marine painter Adolph Friedrich Vollmer (1806–1875). His father Johannes Vollmer (1845–1920) was an architect of the German Protestant church building and taught at the Technical University of Charlottenburg . His older brother was the art historian Hans Vollmer , for many years the editor and editor of the standard artist encyclopedias “ Thieme-Becker ” and “ Vollmer ”.

Vollmer received his first artistic lessons at the University of Fine Arts in Charlottenburg from the Berlin landscape painter Paul Process . From 1904 to 1908 he studied at the art school in Weimar with Ludwig von Hofmann , Theodor Hagen , Sascha Schneider and Hans Olde . There he met Willy Preetorius , Otto Illies , Rudolf Siegmund and Ivo Hauptmann, among others . He remained lifelong friends with Preetorius and Illies. As an art student in 1906, Erwin Vollmer had the opportunity to take part in the third exhibition of the German Association of Artists in Weimar with the oil painting May Evening . After his training he was accepted as a full member of the DKB; his name can be found in the membership directory from 1936 until the artists' union was forced to dissolve.

Vollmer found a landscape similar to his essence in the barren Lüneburg Heath . Around 1908 he settled in the village of Rehlingen - at that time still surrounded by extensive heathland - and lived there in this seclusion all his life. Study trips took him to Finland, in 1935 to Rega in Pomerania , and repeatedly to Otto Illies in the Harz Mountains and to Willy Preetorius in Kreuth am Tegernsee .

Vollmer had two daughters from his first marriage to Erna Sparkuhl (1889–1930) and from his second marriage to Erna Christine Kresina (1907–1996) a daughter and a son. After his death, Erna Christine married the German-American historian Fritz T. Epstein , whom she had met as a young student in Hamburg and with whom she had remained in contact - with an interruption due to the war.

Drafted into the military in 1914, Vollmer was dismissed because of impaired eyesight. This increasingly deteriorated with age. Despite severe disabilities, especially in the last 10 to 15 years, Vollmer painted until his death.

plant

Vollmer's themes mainly include the landscape, especially the lonely heath in late autumn and winter, and people in this landscape at work. One of the themes that occupied him time and again was the human figure as the embodiment of emotional feeling: there is nothing personal about them. In the representation of figurative groups, L. von Hoffmann's influence of his Art Nouveau compositions of rhythmically moving figures in an ideal landscape can be felt up into the 1930s [and even later]. Examples are the pictures Women Making Music (1918) and Deluge from 1944.

As a sculptor, Vollmer is self-taught. The small sculptures - nudes and animals - are made of terracotta and bronze .

After pointillist and impressionist attempts, inspired by Hans Olde (e.g. Belvederer Allee Weimar 1907), Vollmer found his own expressionist mode of expression in the 1920s, which always starts from color. The colors as well as the basic mood are predominantly gloomy: dark green, blue and brown predominate. The late work is characterized by increasing simplification of form and greater intensity of color. Hanna Fueß (1941) saw an essential affinity between humans and this landscape: “The cloud-shrouded sky weighs heavily on the barren brown heather and its people are an inseparable unit.” From the images, as if created from an “elementary primal force”, there is a “primitive Strength that lacks any sentimentality ”. The basic mood of the pictures with religious themes - Old Testament and mythological motifs that are repeatedly taken up - is dark and heavy: "People mostly do not appear as actors, but rather as objects of divine will, severity and inexorability shape the pictures."

According to Otto Fischer (1955), a basic religious mood is not limited to these pictures, which are directly determined by the subject matter: A “dreamlike premonition of the infinite” pervades and unites Vollmer's entire figural and landscape work. The sky, the earth, trees and animals (very rarely also people) are as "works of the Creator" witnesses of the "divine order of nature". Man, however, is portrayed as lost between this world and the hereafter. His most important religious works include the Descent from the Cross (altarpiece in the parish hall of St. Gertrud in Lübeck) and a triptych in the former Kreissparkasse in Amelinghausen.

Vollmer's works are represented in the following museums: Albert König Museum Unterlüß, Museum for the Principality of Lüneburg , Bomann Museum Celle, Gleimhaus Halberstadt, Altona Museum Hamburg, and in the Pommersches Landesmuseum in Greifswald. After his successful solo exhibitions in the 1950s, further official purchases were made by the Lüneburg Employment Office and the Federal President's Office in Bonn.

  • gallery

  • Young mother 1930

  • Couple (dance) 1962

  • Winter night 1955

  • Heath 1968

  • Winterbach 1948

  • Creation Day 1946

literature

  • Vollmer, Erwin . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 34 : Urliens – Vzal . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1940, p. 527-528 .
  • Words of friendship for a collective exhibition of the work of Erwin Vollmer in the Museum for the Principality of Lüneburg. Museum Association for the Principality of Lüneburg, Lüneburg 1955.
  • Erwin Vollmer 75 years. Adolph Friedrich Vollmer 1806–1875. Johannes Vollmer 1845–1920. Exhibition catalog. Bomann Museum, Celle 1959.
  • Klaus Homann: Erwin Vollmer. In: Klaus Homann: Painters see the Lüneburg Heath. (= Published by the Albert-König-Museum. No. 39). 2nd, expanded edition. Unterlüß 2008, ISBN 978-3-927399-39-6 , pp. 175-181.
  • From Barlach to Frido Witte - Great German Art Exhibition in 1927 and its reconstruction eighty years later. Verlag Atelier im Bauernhaus, Fischerhude 2007, ISBN 978-3-88132-038-2 .

Web links

Commons : Erwin Vollmer  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ a b c Vollmer, Erwin . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 34 : Urliens – Vzal . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1940, p. 527-528 .
  2. ↑ s. List of participants in the catalog of the 3rd German Association of Artists Exhibition , Weimar 1906, p. 21: Vollmer, Erwin, Weimar. Catalog number 224 - May evening. online (accessed May 31, 2016)
  3. ↑ s. Membership directory 1936, in: 1936 banned images. Exhibition catalog for the 34th annual exhibition of the DKB in Bonn. Deutscher Künstlerbund, Berlin 1986, p. 99: Erwin Vollmer
  4. ^ A b c Wilhelm Kayser: Erwin Vollmer. In: Erika. Sunday paper of the Lüneburg advertisements. No. 16, April 14, 1935, pp. 138-141.
  5. ↑ Since the heath is a cultural landscape , it was largely pushed back to the nature reserves with the change in management since the late 19th century; there it is preserved by traditional grazing with heather sheep . For the origin and development of the heathland see here.
  6. ↑ a b c Klaus Homann: Erwin Vollmer. In: Klaus Homann: Painters see the Lüneburg Heath. (= Published by the Albert-König-Museum No. 39). 2nd, expanded edition. Unterlüß 2008, ISBN 978-3-927399-39-6 , pp. 175-181.
  7. ↑ a b Otto Fischer: The spiritual world in Erwin Vollmer's art. In: Words of friend for a collective exhibition of the work of Erwin Vollmer in the Museum for the Principality of Lüneburg April 30 to May 30, 1955. Museum Association for the Principality of Lüneburg , Lüneburg 1955.
  8. ↑ a b Exhibition in Barskamp shows works by Erwin Vollmer. In: Lüneburger Landeszeitung. 8/9 February 1997.
  9. ↑ Hanna Fueß: Erwin Vollmer exhibition in the Vaterländisches Museum . In: Cellesche Zeitung . Celle August 11, 1941.
  10. ↑ Fischer sees “die and become” as it is written in the 90th psalm as the basic theme of Vollmer's entire artistic work.
  11. ↑ Vollmer, Erwin. In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. Fifth volume: VZ / Supplements AG. EA Seemann, Leipzig 1999, ISBN 3-363-00730-2 , p. 51. (study edition)
personal data
SURNAME Vollmer, Erwin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, graphic artist and sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 27, 1973
Place of death Rehlingen near Lüneburg