Franz Reckert
Gustav Franz Reckert (born May 27, 1914 in Kassel ; † January 13, 2004 in Hamburg ) was a German painter , graphic artist and sculptor who lived in Hamburg and on Sylt.
Life
Franz Reckert was born as the second of three sons of the employee of the Henschel-Lokomotiv-Werke , Andreas and his wife Elisabeth in Kassel. His artistic talent became apparent at an early age and his parents set up a room in their apartment for him during school where he could paint and draw. After finishing school he completed an apprenticeship as a lithographer and graphic artist and attended the state arts and crafts school in Kassel.
In 1935 Reckert went to Hamburg to accompany the Swedish animal filmmaker Bengt Berg's research trip as a photographer, which the political situation prevented. Instead, he went on a bike tour through Sweden to evade the National Socialists, but returned to Germany because of the threat of reprisals against the family. From 1937 to 1938 he completed the required military service.
Then Reckert set up a studio apartment on Graumannsweg in Hamburg, worked as a commercial artist and painted on the side. He went to Munich to see the Nazi exhibition “ Degenerate Art ” and was so impressed that he wanted to devote himself more to painting. In the same year Franz Reckert received a scholarship to study at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin with Professors Fritz Burmann , Peter Fischer and Kurt Wehlte . He learned there a. a. the painting students Manfred Kandt (husband of Susanne Kandt-Horn ) and Bernard Schultze know, and life-long friendships developed.
In 1940 Reckert was called up for military service. An injury in the third year of the war enabled him to continue his studies at the university in Berlin. Recovered to some extent, he had to go back to military service. As a graphic artist and aspiring painter, he was employed as a cartographer, where he met the later cartographer Gerhard Falk (Falk plans). The friendship lasted beyond the war. In the nights of bombing in Hamburg in 1943, Reckert's studio apartment and a large part of his early artistic work were also destroyed. Shortly before the end of the war, Reckert was taken prisoner by the Soviets while fleeing and was deported to Tbilisi for forced labor , where he narrowly escaped death from typhus .
After his release and return to Germany in 1946, Franz Reckert initially set up a studio in Römhild in Thuringia and made exhibitions in Berlin, Erfurt and Eisenach. In April 1948 he received first prize in the 3rd Hildburghausen art exhibition for his painting Waiting Women . In 1949 he took part in the exhibition for the Goethe year in the Weimar Castle Museum, whereupon he was awarded the title “particularly valuable artist”. In 1950 he left the GDR for political and personal reasons .
Reckert came back to Hamburg. Initially homeless, his painter colleague and friend Eduard Bargheer gave him his apartment and studio in Hamburg-Blankenese while he himself was on Ischia in Italy. Franz Reckert then found an apartment and studio in Hansastraße and became a member of the Hamburg Professional Association of Visual Artists, in whose annual exhibitions he took part.
From 1952 Reckert undertook extensive study trips to Spain, Ticino and Austria. Further exhibitions followed a. a. in Chicago, Locarno and Ibiza. From 1964 he regularly took part in the great art exhibition in the Haus der Kunst in Munich and became a member of the New Munich Artists' Cooperative.
In 1953 Franz Reckert co-founded the legendary Witthüs on the island of Sylt. The Witthüs soon developed into a meeting place for free spirits, artists and anthroposophists. There were u. a. also Rudi Dutschke , Joseph Beuys , Claus Peymann and Helmut Griem . Reckert, who set up a studio in Witthüs, was primarily interested in the artistic exploration of the landscape of the northern coasts, inspired by the beauty of the surrounding nature.
In 1992 he received the Arnold Fiedler Prize for his life's work.
plant
His painterly work is characterized by the representational to reduced black and white compositions to complete abstraction. In his later work he worked partly - in a playful way - representationally, but in parallel also abstractly and in all the techniques that he had developed in the course of his life - from prints to oil paintings , watercolor , gouache and his ink tempera Pictures.
The early images of man and landscapes, some of which were created during Reckert's time as a soldier, are of a melancholy and reserved color, predominantly in broken gray-green-brown tones. Most of his early work, however, was lost during the war. It was not until Franz Reckert's study trips to southern Europe in the years after 1952, especially to Spain and Ticino, that the war experiences slowly fade into the background and revive his color palette. He now paints bright, light landscapes, southern women, Ticino architecture. Oriental cities, palazzos, lush gardens or gnarled olive trees are now also among his motifs.
The island of Sylt inspires him to create a multitude of pictures with landscape views. In this landscape, shaped by the elementary forces of wind and tides, the action of the forces of nature, understood as a dialogue between heaven and earth, is henceforth one of his favorite artistic themes. But also the traces of human existence in nature, made visible e.g. B. buoys, groyne remnants, shipwrecks or fragments of floating debris become objects of color in the flat expanse of the landscape. In this context, the diversity of vegetative and geological forms represents another large topic in Reckert's work.
The gouaches, watercolors and mixed techniques with landscape attributes, such as leaves, shells or snail architecture, are examples of the endeavor to demonstrate an artistic and symbolic exchange process with certain recurring natural forms. With the exemplary use of vegetative forms as an artistic actor, Franz Reckert spans the arc between realistic representation on the one hand and the alienation of the surreal landscape on the other. Reckert's surrealist inclinations lead to a style in which the motifs become independent, detached from their assigned meaning, become an independent cipher in their abstraction, whereby the landscape character is retained - or dissolve their representational meaning and give the viewer a very unique, reveal new objectivity.
The rock and mountain landscapes, which Reckert always fascinated, also belong in this world of shapes. Starting from what he experienced and seen, he sought the poetic substance in reality in order to transform it artistically and to design it again and again with ingenuity. This is where the sculptor in Franz Reckert stands out particularly clearly: be it by merging micro-organic structures and objects into an ensemble and thereby creating a new form, or by building up the natural smallness of some objects into monumental sculptures.
Although Franz Reckert mostly started out from the object, from visible experience in his painting, he was always concerned with abstracting from what was seen to the point of complete liberation from the representational. The confrontation with the rapidly developing technification of our age inspired Reckert to paint the active line, which suggests movement and speed, in which shattering manifests itself as a dynamic state of vibration. The progressive liberation from the world of the object was for him a journey to the sources of fantasy and the depths of psychic existence.
His pictures on the subject of sport, which represent a closed series, are quite different. The symbolic condensation of fighting as an expression of the people of our time is the focus of Franz Reckert's interest. In his pictures, Reckert allows the exciting climaxes of sporting combat action and the resulting tension, which is shown in the concentrated discharge of emotion in the actors and audience, to merge into a single moment of action full of movement. He mainly chooses sports such as soccer, ice hockey, rugby, wrestling and boxing. The almost realistic-looking, very striking works, initially in black and white, later in color using a technique he developed himself, are often referred to as "original graphics". However, if you take a close look at her career, the pictures are painted.
In addition, there is his sculptural work in the form of art in public spaces and in buildings from 1965 onwards, as well as a large number of sculptures, freely conceived designs and models. A large number of Franz Reckert's works can be found in private and public collections around the world, for example in the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the contemporary art collection of the Federal Republic of Germany .
Plastic works in public space and in buildings (selection)
- Ceramic mosaic in the stairwell of the office building Besenbinderhof 52 in Hamburg, 1959
- Fairy tale relief made of artificial stone over three floors in the stairwell of the Brothers Grimm School in Lübeck-Moisling, 1969
- Artificial stone relief in the hall of the Großlohering daycare center in Hamburg, 1971
- Relief wall on Unterbacher Breidenplatz in Düsseldorf, 1971
- Large fountain at AK Altona in Hamburg-Othmarschen, 1972
- Relief , outer facade of the Burkhard High School in Lübeck, 1973
- Freestanding staggered relief wall made of artificial stone in front of the AK Wandsbek in Hamburg, 1976
- White Rose Memorial , open-air sculpture made of shell limestone in Hamburg-Volksdorf, 1977
- Aluminum relief in the Glinde post office near Hamburg, 1982
- Free-standing sculpture of basalt stone, Karstadt administration building in Essen, 1983
- Artificial stone relief , exterior facade of the Ahrensburg school near Hamburg, 1984
- Signal , free plastic made of stainless steel, automotive workshop of the OPD Hamburg, 1985
- Open sculpture made of shell limestone in the schoolyard of the Brothers Grimm School in Lübeck-Moisling, 1986
- Brick relief in the cash desk of the Sparkasse Husum, 1987
- Fountain sculpture made of stainless steel, Itzehoe pedestrian zone, 1989
- Fountain sculpture made of artificial stone, Catholic monastery, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1998
Literature (selection)
- Reckert, Franz . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 4 : Q-U . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1958, p. 30-31 .
- Abendpost : the newspaper for politics, culture and economy for Central Germany. Weimar, December 9, 1948
- Catalogs of the Great Art Exhibition in Munich, 1964 to 1985
- Olympic flame : Journal of the Olympic Society, Frankfurt am Main 1972
- Arts and Crafts : Monthly magazine for applied and decorative arts, Hamburg 1973
- Olympic Youth , Issue 11, "Sports fighting drawn, painted", 1973
- Volker Detlef Heydorn : Painter in Hamburg , Vol. 1–4, Hamburg 1974
- Ahrensburger Zeitung , "Rocks, Shells and Leaves", March 27, 1975
- Sylter Rundschau , "Exhibition in the Westerländer Sparkasse by Franz Reckert", from May 24, 1978
- Fountain and water games , Julius Hoffmann Verlag, Stuttgart 1980
- Sylter Rundschau , "In the rhythm of nature", July 5, 1988
- Sylter Nachrichten , "The White House: Memory of Franz Reckert", from March 14, 2005
- Der Neue Rump: Lexicon of Hamburg's visual artists , Wachholtz Verlag, Hamburg 2013
- Sylter Rundschau , "Sights worth seeing on Sylt: The locked gate and the story behind it", from January 10, 2020
Web links
- http://www.kunst-luebeck.de/kuenstlerdetails/reckert-franz.html
- http://www.hamburger-wochenblatt.de/harvestehude/kultur/franz-reckert-hamburger-maler-und-bildhauer-d8308.html
- Franz Reckert - Abstract works in the Kunsthaus an der Alster Hamburg
Individual evidence
- ↑ Biography and sculpture White Rose Memorial in Hamburg-Volksdorf at the Volksdorf meeting point
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Reckert, Franz |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German painter, graphic artist and sculptor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 27, 1914 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | kassel |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 13, 2004 |
| Place of death | Hamburg |