Franzjosef Klemm

Franzjosef Klemm (born March 1, 1883 in Cologne , † June 1959 in Wittlaer , today Düsseldorf ) was a German portrait painter .

Life

Franzjosef Klemm attended the arts and crafts school in Cologne from 1903 to 1904 . In 1904 he moved to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich , where he belonged to Professor Martin Feuerstein's drawing class and later to Professor Hugo von Habermann's painting class . From Habermann in particular, Klemm was able to receive important impulses for his occupation with the portrait subject. From 1909 to 1916 the artist continued his studies at the Düsseldorf Academy . He attended Eduard von Gebhardt's painting class , where he eventually became a master student. At Gebhardt, Klemm tried to learn the “old master” precision in the artistic implementation of physiognomic details. The portrait of Dr. Rheindorf was shaped entirely by the Malduktus and Gebhardt's conception of images. How quickly the artist broke away from academic rigor and found more modern design and lighting is shown by a very loosely and spontaneously painted oil study, which shows three women drawing candles at a workbench. It is obviously close to the late Impressionist manner of Max Liebermann . Klemm's virtuoso handling of the technical and his compositional skill are already clearly evident here.

Private life

Franzjosef Klemm was married and lived in Wittlaer, his adopted home. Together with Max Clarenbach, he had a representative house built near the banks of the Rhine . While Clarenbach's Art Nouveau villa, designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich , was rebuilt following inheritance disputes and fell into stranger hands, the Klemm house is still owned by the artist's family.

Work and reception

A collective exhibition held in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1915 can be described as the artist's breakthrough. In the 1920s Franzjosef Klemm became more and more a portraitist for the Düsseldorf society. An important commission and at the same time a particularly ambitious painting is the group portrait that was created on the occasion of the GeSoLei exhibition in 1926. This picture, which is based on Dutch group compositions, shows, from left to right, personalities who were responsible for the creation of the exhibition: City Planning Director Meyer, Mayor Reuter, Alderman Thelemann, industrialist Ernst Poensgen , Lord Mayor Robert Lehr , the Social hygienist Arthur Schloßmann , the banker Robert Bürgers , the lawyer Ernst Wilms-Posen and finally the architect in charge of the building complex with the planetarium , which appears in the background as "picture in picture" , Wilhelm Kreis .

In 1940 portraits and studies by Klemm were on view in a second large collective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf , where this group portrait was also represented. The exhibits in this exhibition make it clear that Klemm had already established himself as a portraitist of large-scale Rhenish-Westphalian industry: Fritz Henkel , Emil Kirdorf , Peter Klöckner , Hugo Stinnes , August Thyssen and Fritz Thyssen are captured in impressive portraits. The works are in museums or private collections. Perhaps the most spontaneous and “intimate” of the portraits shown in this exhibition is the portrait of court photographer Adolf Julius Söhn . The series of self-portraits that run through Klemm's work is also impressive. Particularly noteworthy is the self-portrait with a high hat in the possession of the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, with its broad, impasto painting style and its chiaroscuro, which was trained by Rembrandt van Rijn . The self-portraits and self-portrait studies in particular were used by Klemm to deal with history, to compete with the greats of the past. Even after the Second World War, Klemm was able to maintain his position as the preferred portrait painter. He captured personalities of the post-war period such as Konrad Adenauer and Josef Cardinal Frings in lively portraits.

Exhibitions (selection)

Klemm took part in the collective exhibitions in 1915 and 1940 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy , and in 1926 at the GeSoLei .

literature

• Dirk Kocks: portraitist of the Düsseldorf Society. The portrait painter Franzjosef Klemm (1883–1959). In: Heimat-Jahrbuch Wittlaer 1982, pp. 42–45
• Mechthild Kluitmann: A communion picture by Franzjosef Klemm. An unexpected gift from the famous portrait painter. In: Heimat-Jahrbuch Wittlaer 1998, p. 181 f.
• Bénézit, Vol. 7, Paris 1999, p. 848

Individual evidence

1. ^ Dirk Kocks: Portraitist of the Düsseldorf Society. The portrait painter Franzjosef Klemm (1883–1959) , website from October 7, 2000 in the r-abels-xxl.de portal , accessed on January 22, 2017

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