Fritz Jenzer

Fritz Jenzer (born August 17, 1907 in Thunstetten ; † March 21, 1985 in Bern ) was a Swiss painter and graphic artist .

Life

Fritz Jenzer was born in 1907 as the son of a pastor couple in Thunstetten in the canton of Bern . After finishing school he did a four-year apprenticeship as a draftsman- lithographer at the Polygraphische Anstalt in Laupen . In 1928/29 he attended the Royal School of Applied Arts in Munich . This is followed by a year of art residency in Paris. Back in Switzerland, Jenzer settles in Spiez and works as a freelance graphic designer. In 1932 Fritz Jenzer was treated for the first time in a psychiatric clinic for a nervous problem. As a result of this suffering, Fritz Jenzer will spend a large part of his life in the Bernese psychiatric clinic in Waldau , where he also died in 1985. During his stays in the clinic, Jenzer works as a "court graphic artist" in clinic painting and creates a large number of his own pictures and drawings.

plant

Fritz Jenzer has created an extensive work. Around 800 pictures have been cataloged to date. Jenzer's specialty was watercolor painting. But there are also many oil paintings, pencil, blush, charcoal and ink works as well as colored pencil drawings and spray technique pictures. Jenzer usually found the motifs for his pictures in the immediate vicinity of where he lived and stayed. Many of his works show subjects from the Waldau clinic area - surroundings, buildings, departments, patients - which has earned him the name "Waldau painter". During his vacation absences, Jenzer preferred to paint landscapes from the Bernese Oberland . In 1948 Jenzer painted two wall paintings in the Ringgenberg restaurant in Bern. One of them was painted over some time ago. In the 1930s, Jenzer's pictures still show the influence of the Impressionists . He later turned to naturalistic realism. His pictures are impressively precise.

Jenzer mostly sold his pictures to the clinic staff, from whom they were in great demand. As a result, however, he could not acquire a greater degree of popularity. Fritz Jenzer was unable to see the first exhibition of his works in Bern in July 1985. This took place in the “Emmentaler Leinenstube” gallery and was a great success.

literature

• Otto Frick: Fritz Jenzer, the Waldau painter: His life as a person and an artist. Fritz-Jenzer-Verein, Bern 1986, 32 pp.
• Michel Beretti, Armin Heusser (Ed.): The Last Continent: Report on a journey between art and madness. Limmat-Verlag, Zurich 1997, ISBN 3-85791-281-2 (separate chapter on the life and work of Fritz Jenzer).