Fritz Ketz

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Fritz Ketz, photo around 1950
Signature of Fritz Ketz

Fritz Ketz (actually: Friedrich Adolf Ketz ; born June 12, 1903 in Hamborn ; † July 15, 1983 in Pfullingen ) was a German painter and graphic artist of expressive realism . He was an important exponent of watercolor painting in German art of the 20th century.

Life

Fritz Ketz was born on June 12, 1903 in Hamborn as the son of the later mine clerk Hermann Ketz, who moved from West Prussia , and Martha Ketz from Herford in Westphalia . As the youngest of seven children, he moved with his parents to Karrasch (now in Polish Karaś) near Deutsch-Eylau in East Prussia in 1918 . Due to the economic circumstances of the parents, it was not possible to study art. So Ketz went through the military, where after twelve years of commitment, transitional aid was paid that made training possible.

education

In 1920, at the age of 17, he left the family and joined the Reichswehr in order to get closer to his actual goal of becoming an artist as a military draftsman after completing the 2-year basic training in Marienburg in West Prussia. After several stops in East and West Prussia , primarily in Königsberg , and then in Berlin , he was stationed in Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart in 1929 . In the last three years up to his discharge from military service, he also took lessons from painters in the Stuttgart area and sat in on the Stuttgart School of Applied Arts . He also took private lessons with Wilhelm Blutbacher in life drawing and Bruno von Sanden in head drawing. After leaving the Reichswehr in 1932, he began to study art at the Württemberg Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart - Hans Spiegel was the director at the time - and first settled in Neckarweihingen near Ludwigsburg, and later in Stuttgart. His teachers at the art academy included Hans Spiegel, Alexander Eckener and Anton Kolig . In 1933 Ketz married Elisabeth Freiberger, the marriage was divorced again in 1941.

Pre-war and wartime

Mother with fallen son ("Pieta") 1941

In 1934/35 he received his first solo exhibitions in Stuttgart. A picture submitted for the first Great German Art Exhibition in 1937 in Munich's Haus der Kunst was rejected. In 1938, however, Ketz also took part in collective exhibitions of the Württemberg Art Association and the Stuttgart Artists' Union and was able to move into a free studio with Professor Hans Spiegel .

From "Gestalten und Bilder" Partisan Boy 1942

In the spring of 1938, Ketz went on a trip to Italy with his painter colleague Gustav Illenberger, including Venice , where a large number of watercolors, drawings and some oil paintings were created.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, as a freelance artist, Ketz increasingly came into conflict with National Socialism . Time-critical works were created, including ink watercolors and drawings that he had to keep hidden at all times. In 1943 Ketz traveled to his mother in Karrasch for the last time - sometimes at risk of death due to the partisan war that was waged there . His mother died on the run in 1945. After competing artists reported his critical work and statements to the Gestapo in 1944 , he himself destroyed most of the work that was endangering him; he only carried a small remainder in his suitcase for fear of house searches. They survived the Third Reich and were published after 1945 with an introduction by Jakob Witsch in his Reutlingen bookstore. In an air raid on Stuttgart in 1944, almost all of his early work went up in flames, and Ketz himself only survived by chance. Ketz had to hide. With the help of some friends from Stuttgart and the Swiss architect Attilio Calegari , he was able to go into hiding and was illegally housed by friends from Pfullingen, the Scholkmann family, in their holiday home on the Traifelberg near Lichtenstein Castle in the Swabian Alb, where he also experienced the end of the war. He was taken care of in secret by farmers and residents of the area.

After 1945

After the war, Ketz initially received rooms from patrons on an estate near Pfullingen. In 1953 he built himself a studio house based on Calegari's plans, which he expanded in 1972 and in which he lived and worked until his death in 1983. He turned down appointments to professorships at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe , Dresden University of Fine Arts or Toronto (Canada) in the early 1950s.

Günter Bruno Fuchs 1955

During the post-war period in particular and well into the 1950s, Ketz was largely dependent on donations from friends, including the art historian Rainer Hartmann and his family, or from the farmers who lived in the vicinity of the studio. He usually received paints and large quantities of drawing paper as a gift from a paper manufacturer. He often received in kind for the provision of drawings or pictures. Today there are still pictures by Ketz as examples of this direct “patronage” on farms around Pfullingen or in inns. The “Schwanen” in Metzingen has a “Ketzstube” with several watercolors. The painter's house only had a well and until the 1970s no public electricity or water connection. Ketz generated electricity with a generator. He also set up an observatory, and astronomy became his special passion. In 1950 and 1952 he traveled to the Ruhr area ; There he created numerous drawings and watercolors from working life in the ports and collieries (including in Duisburg and Dortmund ). The contacts made there also included the one to the important Protestant theologian, social pedagogue and social ethicist Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze .

Around 1953, Ketz joined the Telegram group in Reutlingen , which was founded in 1952 by the writers Günter Bruno Fuchs ("GBF"), Richard Salis and the painter Winand Victor to publish literary and artistic leaflets, the "telegrams". The magazine, a synthesis of literature and fine arts, published "encrypted messages" against violence and war until 1958 , to which Ketz also contributed illustrations (including telegrams 5, 9 and 10). Other members included the authors Dietrich Kirsch, Werner Dohm, Willy Leygraf, Kurt Leonhard , Rudolf Paul, the musician and composer Walther Hecklinger. Martin Gregor-Dellin was also associated with the group . Many young authors such as Peter Härtling , Helmut Heißenbüttel , Heinz Piontek , Johannes Poethen and Oliver Storz had their say in the 15 issues of the "telegram".

Martin Buber (Jerusalem) and Hermann Hesse (Montagnola) were among the sponsors of the “telegramme” . Buber wrote to the editors: "You can now and always be assured of my attentive viewing and reading ..."

And Hesse: "One of the dangers that have to be combated is the fear of war [...] To counter this fear [...] everywhere [...] is one of the duties of those who are of good will."

Günter Neske Verlag was founded in Pfullingen in 1951 ( taken over by Klett-Cotta since 1993 ), which became an important forum for literature, art and philosophy in the young Federal Republic, and to which Fritz Ketz was also in contact.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Ketz traveled to Hamburg , Switzerland (where several exhibitions were held in Zurich and Bern ) and Holland , to the Lüneburg Heath in 1960 , to Denmark in 1972 and to Sweden in 1975 . Extensive series of landscape and industrial images and drawings were created.

Work (selection)

Even 1-11-45
Autumn trees 29-10-62
Fritz Ketz: Forest, watercolor October 6, 1970
Denmark Limfjord 18-8-72
Girls 29-3-61
Woman in Blue 1-5-71

The first publication of Ketz's works after the war was the publication of the portfolio “Gestalten und Bilder” in 1947 by the publishing house Jakob Witsch, Reutlingen, with eight reproductions of rescued ink watercolors from the war. In them he had given expression to the despair and misery of many lost people: deported Jews, soldiers going into the field, the mothers of fallen sons or even a partisan boy. The art historian and critic Otto Gillen wrote an essay on these pictures. One of these works is now in the possession of the German Historical Museum in Berlin.

Early on, Ketz dealt intensively with watercolors, the technique that, along with drawing, most suited his impetuous pictorial temperament. Her whole passion has always been directed towards capturing the moment that can be experienced or suffered, regardless of the respective motif. As a rule, his pictures do not have a title, but only the date, usually accurate to the day, in addition to the signature. After the war, his preferred subjects were the work of Swabian farmers in the medium of ink drawings , as well as the landscape of the Alb, its seasons and, above all, the flowers of the landscape garden near his studio in watercolor in increasingly strong colors. In addition, he also created pictures of industrial workers in the Ruhr area and religious works, including a large passion cycle in ink watercolors in 1946/47, a gloomy lament , "scurrying like a ghost" , as Werner Steinberg had characterized similar black and white works by Ketz in 1945.

From the delicate, rather small-format watercolors of the 1940s, Ketz literally freed himself in this medium in the 1950s through ever larger formats and a density of color, with which he brought the expressive possibilities and power of the watercolor closer to that of oil painting . Around 1960, Ketz found a format of 70 × 80 cm in watercolor that was appropriate to his dynamic painting style, in which most of the watercolors and oil paintings were then created. He almost always did watercolors wet on dry, mostly using drawing paper that he had roughened with a wire brush and sandpaper in large sweeps so that the paint could hold and absorb the moisture. There was no longer a preliminary drawing. Ketz always painted the motifs on site, that is, apart from the portraits, almost all of the pictures and drawings were created outdoors , regardless of the weather. There are pictures on which raindrops or sand from dunes left their traces, or also frost traces in the form of ice flowers in the winter watercolors, which Ketz had to let freeze out for days in the open so that the frozen color would not run again in the studio. Not only colors, but also structures of very different, both artificial and natural origins, overlapped in the painting process.

The plein air painting forced him to paint at a high pace. In quick succession, whole series of watercolors were created in front of the same motif. Ketz then took these with him to his studio, often looked at them critically for days, and then burned a large number until only the most successful in his opinion remained.

The line that appears in the drawing can be found in a similar form from the wider watercolor brush or the thin brush handle in the large-format watercolors. In them, Ketz combined all conceivable values ​​of the techniques of drawing, oil painting and watercolor to color and shape ciphers of landscape, flower, man or animal, forest or winter. Around 1960 he began to develop a more writing style in the watercolors. Both the motifs and the background of the picture were designed with powerful, broad lines, which often placed the colors next to each other or layered them on top of each other. By using very dry paint next to or on flowing, water-rich areas, he set typically graphic ciphers. The representation of the motifs remained fixed to the intuition, but turned them into color and shape symbols on a highly abstract color background.

Iris 8-6-71
Poppy 8-6-71

This ground becomes independent in the edge and corner parts of the pictures and develops its own picture and force fields. The grounds of the picture are tachistic tableaus, similar to Art brut or Action Painting , in which Ketz revealed his contemporaneity to the Informel of the 1960s.

Fall 2-11-81

Around 1970 the concrete motifs became more and more part of their ground, outgrowth or enter into it, or they set a difficult counterpoint . Contrary to the first often striking appearance of the superficial motifs, the pictures tell myths of color and shape. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's sentence also applies to them : “It is therefore not correct to judge my pictures with the standard of true-to-life correctness, because they are not images of certain things or beings, but independent organisms made up of lines, surfaces and colors, the natural forms included only insofar as they are necessary as a key to understanding. My pictures are similes, not illustrations. Shapes and colors are not beautiful in themselves, but those which are produced by the will of the soul. There is something secret that lies behind people and things and behind the colors and frames, and that connects everything again with life and the obvious appearance, that is the beauty that I am looking for ... ” - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ketz was hardly interested in formal aspects of color or shape construction, even if he had studied them very carefully: the pictures of his teachers at the Stuttgart Academy are strongly influenced by them, partly also his own early pictures, as far as this from the few surviving examples can be seen. But the pictures, especially the drawings and watercolors, from his mature period since the late 1940s, instead focused on an aspect of exclusivity of the painter's direct concern through the confrontation with the subject. This may also be one of the reasons why, unlike in the drawings, people almost never appear in the watercolors of landscapes or flowers. Ketz banished them from these fertility ciphers with the same romantic radicalism and consistency as Caspar David Friedrich had determined them 150 years earlier to be back figures and viewers of his eternity panoramas.

Estate and Estate Administration

Fritz Ketz's estate is now administered by his son Jörn-Uwe Droemann. Large parts of the several thousand watercolors, oil paintings, drawings and graphics were cataloged and inventoried by the Schlichtenmaier Gallery, Stuttgart and Dätzingen .

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1934/35 First solo exhibitions in Stuttgart
  • 1938
    • January exhibition of the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart
    • Spring exhibition of the Künstlerbund Stuttgart
  • 1939
    • Württemberg Art Association
    • Exhibition of the Württembergischer Künstlerbund in the Kunstverein Stuttgart
  • 1942 Kunsthaus Schaller, Stuttgart
  • 1982
    • Municipal gallery, Bad Oeynhausen
    • Gallery in the Kolpinghaus, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt
  • 1983 for his 80th birthday
    • Rathaus Reutlingen, (last exhibition opened by the artist himself)
    • Gallery of the city of Pfullingen 'Im Kloster' (last exhibition designed by Fritz Ketz himself, but which will be opened posthumously)
  • 1984 and 2002 Gustav-Lübcke-Museum , Hamm i. Westphalia
  • 1985
  • 1989 and 1993 Gallery Schlichtenmaier, Dätzingen Castle, Grafenau
  • 2007 Municipal Museum Ludwigsburg , Fritz Ketz (1903-1983). A painter between times
  • 2011 Lüdinghausen Castle , Fritz Ketz Cactus Culture Forum , Anarchy of the Beautiful, Beauty of Anarchy
  • 2012 Museum Nysa (Neisse in Poland), Piękno anarchii - grafika, rysunek i malarstwo Fritza Ketza
  • 2014 Fundacja Borussia ( Borussia Foundation), Dom Mendelssohna, Olsztyn ( Allenstein ), Fritz Ketz Rysunek Malarstwo
  • 2015 Klosterkirche Pfullingen "Picture cycle on the Passion of Jesus 1946-1948 and selected works from the years 1942-1949"
  • 2016 Galerie Eiting Pfullingen "Fritz Ketz - Ernst Eiting, color dialogues - two painters, two positions"
  • 2017 Pfullingen monastery church "Art exhibition with Fritz Ketz, Ernst Eiting, Maks Dannecker , Jochen Warth, Ena Lindenbauer and Manfred Bodenhöfer"
  • 2018 Ev. Stadtkirche Schorndorf "Passion exhibition with woodcuts by Fritz Ketz"

literature

  • Otto Gillen : The painter Fritz Ketz. In: The German in the East. Vol. 6, Issue 3, 1943, pp. 146-147.
  • Fritz Ketz: Design and pictures. Folder with 8 orig. Reproductions based on hand drawings. Jakob Witsch bookstore, Reutlingen 1947
  • Clemens Münster : Pictures and Worlds, New Picture Folders. In: Frankfurter Hefte, magazine for culture and politics . 2. Vol. 6, 1947, pp. 621-623.
  • Passion . Film tape strips, Westfälische Frauenhülfe, Münster undated
  • Günter Bruno Fuchs: Ketz, Victor. Reutlingen undated (1955)
  • Günter Bruno Fuchs: The boys from the Teufelsmoor. A story for boys. With 6 drawings by Fritz Ketz, Quell-Verlag, Stuttgart 1956
  • Pär Lagerkvist : Barabbas. In: The Church Messenger. 7. JG., 1956, pp. 42–44, (with illustrations of the graphics for the Passion by Fritz Ketz)
  • Manfred Eger : Young artists without snobbish gestures . In Franconian Press v. August 8, 1957
  • Otto Gillen: The painter and draftsman Fritz Ketz. In: Artis, magazine for old and new art. February 1961, pp. 19-21.
  • E. Niekisch (preface), E. Frommhold: Art in resistance, painting, graphics, sculpture 1922 to 1945. Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1968
  • Otto Gillen: The portrait: Fritz Ketz. In: Baden-Württemberg. Issue 2, 1971, p. 13.
  • City of Paderborn (ed): Fritz Ketz, watercolors and drawings. Paderborn 1980
  • Fritz Ketz: watercolors, drawings. Ed .: Galerie im Kolpinghaus, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt. Responsible: Erich Baum 1982
  • City of Reutlingen (ed.): Fritz Ketz, paintings, watercolors, drawings. Reutlingen 1983
  • Rainer Zimmermann (art historian) : The art of the lost generation. German expressive realism painting from 1925 to 1975. Econ-Verlag, Munich, 1984, ISBN 978-3-430-19961-2
  • Günther Wirth : Forbidden Art. Persecuted Artists in the German Southwest 1933-1945. Hatje-Verlag, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 978-3-7757-0243-0
  • Fritz Ketz 1903–1983, exhib.-cat. Schlichtenmaier Gallery, Dätzingen Castle, Grafenau 1989, ISBN 3-89298-037-3
  • Kunstverein Sauerland (Ed.): Expressive Realism, Artists of the Lost Generation from the Gerhard Schneider Olpe Collection 1992
  • Kunstverein Sauerland (Ed.): Expressive Realism II, graphics of expressive realism, adaptation and introduction by Gerhard Schneider Olpe 1993
  • Rainer Hartmann: Fritz Ketz, life and work. Edition Schlichtenmaier, Grafenau 1993, ISBN 978-3-89298-088-9
  • Rainer Zimmermann: Expressive Realism: Painting of the Lost Generation. Hirmer-Verlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 978-3-7774-6420-6
  • Ostracized - forgotten - rediscovered. Art of expressive representationalism from the Gerhard Schneider Collection . [on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name, Kunstverein Südsauerland Olpe (1999/2000); Museum Baden, Solingen-Gräfrath (1999–2000)] ed. by Rolf Jessewitsch and Gerhard Schneider. Wienand, Cologne 1999. ISBN 978-3-87909-665-7
  • Reutlinger Künstler-Lexikon: visual artists with reference to the city and district of Reutlingen from the Middle Ages to the present. Thomas Leon Heck, Joachim Liebchen. Reutlingen. Nous-Verlag Heck, Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3-924249-26-1
  • Catalog attack on art. Exhibition in the Lübcke Museum, Hamm 2002
  • Rolf Jessewitsch, Gerhard Schneider (Ed.) Catalog Discovered Modernism, Works from the Gerhard Schneider Collection , 2010, Kettler, ISBN 978-3-941100-16-9 . Exhibition in: Salzburg Museum 2008, Lindenau Museum Altenburg 2009, Art Museum Bayreuth 2009, City Museum Foundation - Ephraimpalais Berlin 2010, Art Museum Solingen 2010

Web links

Commons : Fritz Ketz  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fritz Ketz: Gestalten und Bilder. Folder with 8 orig. Reproductions based on hand drawings. Witsch bookstore, Reutlingen 1947
  2. ^ [City of Paderborn (ed): Fritz Ketz, watercolors and drawings. Paderborn 1980]
  3. ↑ Günter Bruno Fuchs in Reutlingen , exhibition of the Reutlingen City Library, 2008, in Heimattage , Reutlingen 2009, event review ( Memento from September 8, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  4. ^ [Quoted in: Rainer Hartmann: Fritz Ketz, Leben und Werk . Edition Schlichtenmaier, Grafenau 1993]
  5. ^ [Werner Steinberg, in communications from the Württemberg military government , November 1945]
  6. ↑ [Kuno Schlichtenmaier: Art as an expression of emotional sensation. in Fritz Ketz 1903-1983 , exhibition cat. Schlichtenmaier Gallery, Dätzingen Castle, Grafenau 1989, pp. 15–20.]
  7. ↑ Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Hieroglyph . kunstzitate.de. Retrieved March 23, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Ketz, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ketz, Friedrich Adolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH June 12, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamborn
DATE OF DEATH July 15, 1983
Place of death Pfullingen