Fritz Hafner
Fritz Hafner (born December 10, 1877 in Vienna , Austria ; † November 21, 1964 in Juist , East Frisia ) was an Austro-German painter and art teacher .
Life
Even as a schoolboy, Hafner developed a great weakness for all manifestations of nature and tried to capture the impressions he perceived of the landscape and the flora, especially wild flowers, in the picture with a brush and paint. Since he reached his amateur limits, he made the decision to learn to paint well. At the age of 19 he applied for a place at the Art Academy in Stuttgart , where he studied for eight years with Carlos Grethe , Jakob Grünenwald , Robert von Haug and Ludwig Herterich and with Wilhelm Steinhausen in Frankfurt am Main . Because of his good performance, he received a scholarship for a studio and accommodation as well as a six-month study visit to Italy.
At the time, the art academy taught techniques with the aim of empowering budding artists to paint pictures for exhibitions. However, Hafner did not comply with this circumstance and the academic art business. It took him years to break away from it. He made do with a return to the origins of his early passion. While his colleagues turned mainly to modern styles at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Hafner sought and found his artistic satisfaction and fulfillment in a natural representation of flowers and landscapes. His love for Far Eastern painting helped to strengthen him in it. His early work finds expression in it.
In 1907 he moved from Stuttgart to Thuringia to work as an art and natural history teacher for the Free School Community of Wickersdorf , his first job. Together with the reform pedagogue and headmaster Martin Luserke (1880–1968) and other teacher colleagues such as Rudolf Aeschlimann and Paul Reiner , he moved to the North Sea island of Juist in 1925 to establish the school by the sea , a high school with a reform pedagogy and boarding school. Sixteen students from FSG Wickersdorf followed them to the new school, including the later sociologist Herbert von Borch . As before in Wickersdorf, he worked in the Loog on Juist as an art and natural history teacher, but was also a member of the board of trustees of the Schule am Meer foundation . So far familiar with the hilly landscape of Württemberg , Thuringia, Italy and its flora , the long, narrow sandbank in the Wadden Sea with its barren flora began to interest him more and more and finally to fascinate him. He painted a lot there and thus found the finely nuanced watercolor .
When the school had to close in 1934 for economic and political reasons, Hafner was the only one of the former teaching staff who remained in the Loog on Juist. With his wife Christel and his three children, after the loss of his income, he was forced to show pictures from his work at well-known exhibitions in large cities in Germany in order to sell them if possible. This proved to be a difficult struggle to carry with him, as he was actually painting for himself and not with commercial interest. He could therefore hardly part with any of his works.
In 1934/35, Hafner put together a small local history museum for the island of Juist, which he offered to the community, with exhibits from the natural history teaching material collection of the Schule am Meer , which he helped to build. The latter agreed to the idea and gave him the management of this museum, which he ran from 1934 to 1953 and which he expanded with his own paintings. He dedicated an identification book to his love for the diverse species of mussels and snails, in which he described them in detail.
Some of his 1000 pictures (watercolors, drawings, oil paintings and sketches) are privately owned, but the vast majority of them are in the Juist Coastal Museum , which emerged from the former local history museum. Fritz Hafner was buried next to his wife in the cemetery in Hage , East Frisia.
Works (excerpt)
- Forest near Wickersdorf (Thuringia) , youtube.com, 3:20 min. , Originally from the private collection of Gustav Wyneken (1875–1964)
- Emmy Coerper: Yearbook, with 12 hand-colored drawings by Fritz Hafner, private print. Darmstadt 1937.
- Art print portfolio with 6 watercolor prints, 35 × 45 cm, Trobitsch. Frankfurt / Oder 1937.
- Beach flora - watercolor studies, 4 color prints. In: Illustrierte Zeitung, Leipzig June 2, 1938.
- North Sea mussels - types and shapes, with 75 illustrations (pen drawings), Florian Kupferberg. Berlin 1939.
- Hans Kolde : Fritz Hafner, 40 years of artistic creation on Juist. In: Ostfriesland. Calendar for everyone. 68, 1985, p. 96, I-VIII (with 24 illustrations, including a self-portrait).
Honor
In 1947 he was awarded the East Frisian Landscape Indigenous School for his life's work .
Web link
Individual evidence
- ^ Thieme-Becker artist lexicon, EA Seemann. Leipzig, 1907–1950
- ↑ History on the North Sea island of Juist - personalities: Fritz Hafner ( Memento of the original from August 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , at: juist.de, accessed on April 7, 2016
- ↑ 1934 - Fritz Hafner, Heimatmuseum Juist , on: juist.de, accessed on April 7, 2016
- ^ Fritz Hafner , on: ostfriesenelandschaft.de, accessed on April 6, 2016
- ↑ History on the North Sea island of Juist - personalities: Fritz Hafner ( Memento of the original from August 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , at: juist.de, accessed on April 7, 2016
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hafner, Fritz |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Austrian-German painter and art teacher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 10, 1877 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Vienna , Austria |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 21, 1964 |
| Place of death | Juist , East Frisia |