Friedrich Julius Scherff

Friedrich Julius Scherff

Friedrich "Fritz" Julius Scherff (born August 10, 1920 in Elberfeld , † October 27, 2012 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German painter and representative of abstract expressionism and Informel in Germany.

biography

family

Friedrich Julius Scherff was the eldest son of the locksmith Friedrich Wilhelm Scherff (1887–1971) and Amalie Scherff, nee. Mayborn (1891-1971). He had a brother and grew up in Ronsdorf . In 1947 he married the divorced Mina Karoline Renker (née Best, 1919–2003) in Frankfurt am Main , who had two sons as a first honor. There were two children from the marriage.

Live and act

Farmhouse in France (1943)

The Dragon

Photography (1966)

M106 No. 5 (1981)

After graduating from school in Ronsdorf in 1934, Scherff did an apprenticeship in repro photography , which he finished in 1938. During his apprenticeship he completed evening studies in drawing, painting and photography at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Wuppertal - Barmen with the painters Ernst Oberhoff and Otto Schulze and with Edmund Krause ( graphic artist ), Erich Cleff ( sculptor ), Ernst Liebel and Otto Dabringhaus ( both chemographers ). After completing his apprenticeship, Scherff received a state scholarship in 1938 to study at the arts and crafts school as a master class student with Theodor Paul Etbauer. During this time he drew and watercolored and visited museums and exhibitions in Cologne and Berlin, where he was particularly impressed by the works of Stefan Lochner , Matthias Grünewald , Rembrandt van Rijn , Wilhelm Leibl , Hans Thoma and Albin Egger-Lienz .

With the beginning of the Second World War , Scherff served as a soldier in Poland, Nordhausen , Reims and Croatia and was interned by the British in Klagenfurt in 1945 . He took part in a playgroup here as a singer and painter and wrote diary notes and poems in which he took up the moods of the mountains. After being released from captivity in 1946, Scherff returned to Wuppertal. First he drew the ruins of his hometown and tried to build up a living as a freelance painter.

After founding the Frankfurter Kunstgemeinde in 1948, he got to know some of the founding members who organized private exhibitions with his pictures and also bought pictures. Scherff belonged to Johannes Rath's painting group and through this came into contact with the Frankfurt Heussenstamm Foundation. In 1948 he joined the Professional Association of Visual Artists Frankfurt am Main, of which he remained a member until 1979. In 1949 Scherff took part in the exhibition painting and architecture in the Städel and in exhibitions in Wuppertal and the surrounding area. Since the success did not materialize, Scherff initially gave up his activity as a freelance painter. In 1950 he took a job as a car washer in the tram depot of Stadtwerke Frankfurt and was promoted there several times. From 1962 he worked as a graphic designer for the Frankfurter Verkehrsverbund and worked as such until his retirement.

Scherff's first studio (1951–1953) was a small attic room on Eckenheimer Landstrasse . In 1958 he moved into a studio in the rear building at Fleischergasse 7 in Frankfurt-Bockenheim , where exhibitions were also held from the 1970s. In 1958 there was an exhibition at the Wittenborn Gallery in New York . In this year he also met the painter and director of the Frankfurt gallery at the cathedral, Eberhard Steneberg (1914–1996), who exhibited Scherff's pictures. With the artist colleagues of the Domgalerie, group exhibitions followed in Frankfurt, Gießen , Hamburg and Copenhagen .

Between 1965 and 1969 Scherff made artistically formative journeys to Franconia and Alsace as well as to Tuscany , Rome and the Netherlands . In 1969 his works were shown in solo exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Strasbourg and the Galerie International in Winter Park (Florida) . On the occasion of his 50th birthday, a comprehensive retrospective of his previous work took place in the Saalbau Haus Eckenheim in Frankfurt a. M. instead. On this occasion, the first illustrated book, We owe people to people, was published .

From 1972 to 1989 Scherff was a member of the working group for fine arts at the Evangelical Academy in Arnoldshain im Taunus . In 1976, together with the object artist Herbert Hildmann, the painter and graphic artist Wolfgang Müller and his wife Petra Müller, a carpet weaver, he founded the KSI group, an acronym for art, style, individuality . Until 1983, the group had several exhibitions, including in the town hall of Bad Homburg , in the Staatstheater Darmstadt , in Thun (Switzerland), in the BFG high-rise in Frankfurt, in Kronberg im Taunus and in collaboration with the Wilhelm Hack Museum in the Bürgermeister-Ludwig- Reichert-Haus Ludwigshafen .

In 1983 Scherff retired as a employed graphic artist and from then on worked as a freelance painter.

On the occasion of his 65th birthday, his second illustrated book was published in 1986. In 1990 the second artist book Das Lied von Hildebrand und Hadubrand (Hildebrandslied) was created in collaboration with Wol Müller, Alpha Presse, Frankfurt am Main. In 2011 the third illustrated book was published on the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2010.

Works by the artist are now in public and private collections.

plant

During his time as a soldier in World War II, landscapes were created in Champagne that were characterized by a new color perception, the relationship between brown ocher and light ocher green. Later he followed the advice of Johannes Rath to work from the unconscious with the painterly means of surface and color and to dissolve old styles that were shaped by the art studies. Up until now he had drawn a figure, a portrait or a landscape directly translated from nature, but now he has led lines freely into the space. In landscape paintings, a way of depicting movement, a cloud on the horizon became an opposing tension, and a ridge of a hill became a triangle. Objective references dissolved more and more. Composition fields remained: the triangle, the arch that is stretched to the opposite arch, an upward movement that falls off again, forms a circle, etc. The picture surface became the space in which something happened: A conflict between light and dark, line and surface, contrasting colors. Scherff later also dissolved the geometric (triangular, trapezoidal and circular) surfaces into painterly structures that resulted from the brushwork. As a result of the brushwork, small shapes, lines and figural movements appeared in the colored areas. Conscious play with chance made the unknown z. B. masks and figures visible.

The visit to the first Documenta in Kassel in 1955 and the pictures by international artists exhibited there made a great impression on Scherff. In Frankfurt, Klaus Frank (1906–1997) showed in his room gallery Frank u. a. the works of the artist group Quadriga . Scherff felt a connection with their so-called informal, tachistic or - as the artists themselves called them - "new expressionist" painting. In October of the same year, Scherff's first exhibition by the Frankfurter Kunstgemeinde eV took place in the foyer of the Frankfurter Volksbildungsheim.

From an artistic point of view, the years 1960 to 1964 were characterized by a constant search for new forms of expression. At first Scherff still worked with the brush, be it in oil or in ink. The compositions of his paintings and drawings have recurring structures: sometimes delicate, sometimes powerful dynamics, polar elements such as movement and calm, cold and warm colors, light and dark surfaces as well as basic geometric shapes, sometimes with thick and sometimes delicate brushstrokes. Turning or dabbing the brush often resulted in line elements that appear like figures. Later, instead of using a brush, he drew one or more colors over the surface (canvas, cardboard or paper) with a Japanese spatula and experimented with impasto paint.

In 1964 he developed a new, very complex painting technique on film material - his photography. He blackened photo-technical film in the size DIN A4 by incident light and developed it. Then he fixed the blackness. The completely black area has now been cleared up again with the help of caustic chemicals. Through this process of etching off the surface, shapes were created, into which he drew with a brush or spatula with liquid ink. As the ink stuck in certain places like a pigment, a surface was created that looked like a dust surface and was broken up into vortex movements by the water. When everything was dry, the picture was copied onto photo paper.

In the years 1965 to 1969 Scherff undertook several formative journeys, such as to Baroque works of art in Franconia and to the Gothic in Alsace , where Grünewald's altarpiece in Colmar deeply impressed him and inspired him to paint in transparent glazes. Old manuscripts and translations by Ovid in Sélestat inspired him to write the book "Lyrik-Fotografik" (1966), in which he graphically designed poems by Hans Benjamin (actually Hans Albert Groddeck) and confronted them with his own photographs. Further trips to Tuscany , Rome and the Netherlands followed. For him, Italian marble slabs had structures similar to the movements of clouds. In the structures of the color spaces in marble, he discovered images that corresponded to the result of his own painting process: the path into the unknown. The enormous differentiation of the colors in the paintings of the Renaissance painters, who painted many glazes on top of each other so that the underlying colors shone through, stimulated him to achieve similar color tones in his own pictures - but based on the colourfulness of typical German landscapes.

In the period around 1970, stimulated by monochrome painting, Scherff temporarily experimented with geometric forms and spatiality as well as with the condensation of color surfaces. From earlier painterly experiences, however, there were always graphic elements that are embedded in the picture and - as a real concern - came to the fore again in later pictures. In the geometric pictures, too, Scherff was concerned with the experience of space. He braced colored spatial fields into one another, laid several colored areas next to one another and combined them with strictly laid out graphic elements.

Triptych (1974)

Exhibitions

In Friedrich Julius Scherff's studio house, in the rear building at Fleischergasse No. 7 in Frankfurt-Bockenheim, there was the peephole , the painter's permanent exhibition room. On the initiative of Mina Scherff, the first exhibition with pictures by Friedrich Julius Scherff was opened there on February 25, 1966. Since then, the exhibition space has been a meeting place for art lovers far beyond Frankfurt am Main. The exhibitions provided regular information on the artist's latest work and aroused great interest. After his death in October 2012, the studio house was given up.

In 2013, a memorial exhibition with pictures by the artist from 1960 to 2010 took place in the gallery of his son, Heinrich Renker, on the Hoherodskopf in Schotten - Breungeshain . In October 2015, another posthumous exhibition - Friedrich Julius Scherff, 1920–2012: The silent painter with a big statement - was opened in the KunstSalon Aschaffenburg .

Since his first solo exhibition in 1947 in the Leithäuser Gallery in Wuppertal , Scherff's works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad, for example in (alphabetically) Aschaffenburg (1991–1992), Bad Homburg vor der Höhe (1971, 1979), Bad Nauheim (1972–1980), Darmstadt (1981), Düsseldorf (1969, 1978), Frankfurt am Main (1948–2015), Fulda (1993), Geneva / Switzerland (1971, 1972, 2011), Gießen (1958), Heidelberg (1993), Hamburg (1959), Hofheim am Taunus (1976, 1987), Hückeswagen (1950–1951), Königstein im Taunus (1974), Copenhagen / Denmark (1959), Kronberg im Taunus (1983), Limburgerhof (2004 ), Ludwigshafen am Rhein (1983), Lyon / France (1963), Neu-Isenburg (1965), New York City / New York (1958), Oberursel - Stierstadt (1974–1975, 1976,), Offenbach am Main (1995 ), Pforzheim (1993), Schifferstadt (1984, 1994), Strasbourg and France (1969), Stuttgart (1959), Wiesbaden (2004), Winter Park / Florida (1969), Thun (1981), Wuppertal- Elberfeld (1947– 1950) un d Zurich (1993).

literature

• Frankfurter Kunstgemeinde eV (Ed.): Communication. Born 10/2, October 1957. Frankfurt am Main, October 1957.
• Saalbau GmbH, Frankfurt am Main (ed.): The meeting point 7th year No. 10, p. 4 and 6 Frankfurt am Main October 1965.
• The program magazine of the state capital for art, local affairs and business-Düsseldorf (Ed.): Düsseldorfer Wochenspiegel No. 18/69, 16. – 30. September 1969, p. 21.
• Stadtwerke, Frankfurt am Main (ed.): Stadtwerker. September 1973, p. 13. Frankfurt am Main September 1973.
• City of Frankfurt am Main, Department of Culture and Leisure, Office for Science and Art (Ed.): The visual artists in Frankfurt am Main. An artist lexicon for Frankfurt. Frankfurt am Main 1982.
• Iris Bradenahl: Impressions on the work of FJ Scherff. In: Friedrich Julius Scherff: Pictures from 1971–1985. Second illustrated book, Frankfurt am Main 1986.
• Dieter Gembicki: Some reflections on the recent work of FJ Scherff. In: Friedrich Julius Scherff: Pictures from 1971–1985. Second illustrated book, Frankfurt am Main 1986.
• Heussenstamm Foundation, Frankfurt am Main (Ed.): Fifty Years of Treu um Treu , p. 115. Frankfurt am Main 1983.
• Evangelical Lutheran Epiphany Congregation, Frankfurt am Main (ed.): Epiphany letter 35th year No. 2, pp. 2 and 3. Frankfurt am Main, February 1988.
• Eike Pies (Ed.): No limits, group rbk - Art & Artists 1946–1996. Publishing house E. & U. Brockhaus, Solingen 1997, ISBN 3-930132-06-0 , p. 44.
• Udo Garweg: Wuppertal artist directory. From the Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, Wuppertal 2000, ISBN 3-89202-042-6 , p. 341.
• Dieter Gembicki: On Friedrich Julius Scherff's work. Thoughts while looking at the third catalog book. In: Friedrich Julius Scherff: Pictures from 1986–2010. Third illustrated book, pp. 47–48. Published by Heinrich Renker. Renker, Grebenau 2011, ISBN 978-3-00-034604-0 .
• Heinrich Renker: In gratitude for a life's work. In: Friedrich Julius Scherff: Pictures from 1986–2010. Third illustrated book, p. 49. Renker, Grebenau 2011, ISBN 978-3-00-034604-0 .

Artist books and illustrated books

• Poetry photography. Poetry: Hans Benjamin. Photography, design, execution: Fritz Scherff. Frankfurt am Main, 1966.
• Figure. Graphic yearbook. Gallery Patio, Neu-Isenburg. Vol. 2 1965/1966 (1966). Inside: picture no. 16, Friedrich Julius Scherff. ZDB ID 1168900-6
• The song of Hildebrand and Hadubrand. In a design as an artist's book. With 6 single and multi-colored original lithographs by Friedrich Julius Scherff and 4 photographs by Erich Würz-Huss. Translation into New High German and commentary by Knut Forssmann. Alpha Presse, Frankfurt am Main 1990. (Hildebrandslied). ISBN 978-3-924510-19-0 .
• Friedrich Julius Scherff. We owe people to people! First illustrated book. Frankfurt am Main 1970, ISBN 978-3-00-034602-6 .
• Friedrich Julius Scherff. Pictures from 1971–1985. Second illustrated book. Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 978-3-00-034603-3 .
• Friedrich Julius Scherff. Pictures from 1986-2010. Third illustrated book. Published by Heinrich Renker. Renker, Grebenau 2011, ISBN 978-3-00-034604-0 .

Web links

Commons : Friedrich Julius Scherff  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Friedrich Julius Scherff in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Literature by and about Friedrich Julius Scherff in the catalog of the German National Library
• Website Friedrich Julius Scherff

Individual evidence

1. ^ Frankfurter Neue Presse, Frankfurt am Main (ed.): Frankfurter Neue Presse . August 10, 2010, p. 17. Frankfurt am Main, August 10, 2010.
2. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau, Frankfurt am Main (ed.). Frankfurter Rundschau . August 11, 2010, F. 18. Frankfurt am Main August 11, 2010.
3. ^ Homepage of the artist , accessed on July 6, 2015.
4. ↑ Exhibition directory on the artist's homepage , accessed on June 30, 2019.