Factory City (Werefkin)

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Factory town (Marianne von Werefkin)
Factory town
Marianne von Werefkin , 1912
Tempera painting on cardboard
69.5 × 83 cm
Fondazione Marianne Werefkin , Ascona
(inventory number 0-0-29)

Factory City is the title of a painting that the Russian artist Marianne von Werefkin painted in 1912. The work belongs to the holdings of the Fondazione Marianne Werefkin in Ascona .

iconography

Shown is a section of a factory town specifically chosen by the artist . It lies in the right dark foreground of the picture. The tightly packed houses are as if seen from a bird's eye view, some have red-lit windows. But mostly only their roofs can be seen. To the left a wide landscape opens up in the morning light. High mountains form the background.

In a wide arc, the district touches a river, over which several bridges lead. A high factory chimney with a mighty cloud of smoke protrudes from the maze of buildings like a landmark . Most of these houses have chimneys from which smoke also gushes. A simple, slender church tower with a pointed helmet is located in the municipality. It belongs to the neo-Gothic parish church of St. Johannes Baptist in Oberstdorf . In Werefkin's time, the "Flecken" was considered a " climatic health resort in a beautiful and well-visited Alpine region, in the headwaters of the Iller ."

In addition to flourishing tourism, Meyers Konversations-Lexikon of 1908 mentions a "mechanical cotton weaving mill" as a source of income for the population , followed by "Cattle breeding of the Algäu breed , important cheese making and butter making."

From 1888 Oberstdorf could be reached with a "standard gauge local railway" via Sonthofen . “As early as 1909, there were passing cars from Munich.” It can be assumed that Werefkin took advantage of this convenience when she drove to the summer resort with Jawlensky , her cook Helene and their son Andreas in 1912 .

Jawlensky and Werefkin had frequent visits to their vacation home in Oberstdorf. Jawlensky tells us that "the painter Kardowsky came there with his family". In his memoirs, Jawlensky mentions almost casually: "In Oberstdorf I painted various mountain landscapes." They differ very much from Werefkin's pictures. While Jawlensky depicted mountains for their own sake, lending them something essential and mystical and dispensing with depictions of people, the latter play an important role in Werefkin's pictures. Because she “turned valleys, heights, forests and meadows into effective accessories for the socially critical elements in the foreground of her depictions. [...] She expressed her aversion to inhuman working conditions. In Oberstdorf she painted the large cotton mill on the outskirts. In the early morning light, men are slowly walking to twelve-hour factory monotony. No second, no second from their environment in the Neue Künstlervereinigung München dealt artistically more clearly and consistently with the main problem of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the social question ”.

literature

  • Clemens Weiler : Marianne von Werefkin. In exh. Cat .: Marianne Werefkin 1860–1938. Municipal Museum Wiesbaden 1958
  • Bernd Fäthke : Marianne Werefkin. Munich 2001. ISBN 3-7774-9040-7
  • Brigitte Roßbeck: Marianne von Werefkin, The Russian from the circle of the Blue Rider. Munich 2010.
  • Bernd Fäthke: Marianne Werefkin: Clemens Weiler's Legacy. In: Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in her Circle. (Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche eds.), Leiden / Boston 2016 (English), pp. 8–19, ISBN 978-9-0043-2897-6

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Meyers: Large conversation lexicon. A reference book of general knowledge. Leipzig and Vienna 1908, vol. 14, p. 874
  2. ↑ Hans Erb: 1888 - 1988, one hundred years of the Sonthofen - Oberstdorf railway line. One hundred years of Oberstdorf station. In: Our Oberstdorf. Leaves on Oberstdorfer Heimatgeschichte, issue 13 / June 1988, p. 249.
  3. ↑ a b c Alexej Jawlensky: Memoirs. In: Clemens Weiler (Ed.), Alexej Jawlensky: Heads-Face-Meditations , Hanau 1970, p. 114
  4. ↑ Brigitte Roßbeck: Marianne von Werefkin, The Russian woman from the circle of the Blue Rider. Munich 2010, p. 168 f.