Fritz Mackensen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fritz Mackensen as director of the Weimar School of Art
Standing from left: Otto Modersohn, Fritz Mackensen, Heinrich Vogeler; sitting: Fritz Overbeck, Hermann Allmers , Carl Vinnen 1895

Fritz Mackensen (born April 8, 1866 in Greene ; † May 12, 1953 in Bremen ) was a German painter, co-founder of the Worpswede artists' colony and director of the Nordic Art Academy , today's Bremen University of the Arts .

Life

Fritz Mackensen was like his brother, the architect Wilhelm Mackensen , a son of the master baker Ludwig Mackensen and his wife Luise. The optician and inventor Otto Mackensen was his half-brother. His uncle was the civil engineer Ernst Mackensen . He attended the Herzogliche Gymnasium Holzminden , where Carl Büttger was his drawing teacher, and from 1884 studied together with Otto Modersohn and Fritz Overbeck at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and in 1888/89 with Friedrich August von Kaulbach and Wilhelm von Diez at the Munich Art Academy .

As early as 1884, at the invitation of the merchant's daughter Mimi Stolte, Mackensen discovered the Moordorf Worpswede with its landscape and the rural population for his work and spent the summer months there. At the mission festival this summer in the neighboring village of Schlußdorf , Mackensen found the motif for his monumental painting (almost 3 × 5 m) outdoor worship service (on display in the Landesmuseum Hannover ), which shows Schlußdorfer absorbed in prayer, with their simple houses in the background. In 1889 he was followed by Modersohn and Hans at the end , in 1893/94 Overbeck and Heinrich Vogeler .

In the winter months of 1892/93 Mackensen was Christian Ludwig Bokelmann's master student in Karlsruhe and Berlin . In 1895/96 he took part in the Munich annual exhibitions of artists of all nations in the Munich Glass Palace , where the painting Outdoor Service, shown in 1895, was awarded the first class gold medal and established the reputation of the Worpswede artist colony . In 1896 he received a small gold medal at the International Art Exhibition in Berlin . In 1889 he was a co-founder of the Worpswede artists' colony. Mackensen lived permanently in Worpswede from 1895 to 1904 and taught among others Paula Modersohn-Becker , Georg Harms-Rüstringen , Ottilie Reylaender and Clara Westhoff .

In 1908 he took over a professorship at the Weimar Academy of Art , whose director he became in 1910. Marianne Brandt , who later became a product designer at the Bauhaus, was one of his students . But not Otto Pankok , who applied for a place at Mackensen, to whom another student was preferred and who later moved to the Dötlingen artists' colony around 1913 on this grounds . In 1918 Mackensen returned to Worpswede, to the Worpswede artists' colony.

He became a member of the Stahlhelm , for which he was also active as a journalist, as well as in the ethnically -minded, anti-Semitic Kampfbund for German culture .

From 1933 to 1935 he was entrusted with the establishment and management of the Nordic Art Academy in Bremen. In 1937 he joined the NSDAP . Mackensen was a respected artist during the Nazi era and was represented in 1937 at the first Great German Art Exhibition in the Munich House of German Art with the painting Service in the Moor . In 1941 he received the Goethe Medal for Art and Science . In 1942, at the age of 76, he was major in the Propaganda Substitute Department in occupied northern France, where he painted sea and beach pictures. In the final phase of the Second World War , in August 1944 Adolf Hitler added him to the list of the most important painters who had been gifted by God , which saved him from being deployed again on the home front .

Starting with the plein air painting of landscapes and depictions of rural life (including outdoor worship , 1886–95), Mackensen turned to idealizing painting in the tradition of the 19th century at the turn of the century. He wrote, among other things, Worpswede and its first painters (1940).

Fritz Mackensen was a board member of the German Association of Artists .

Honors

Works (selection)

Painting:

Bronze plastic:

literature

  • Hans Wohltmann: Mackensen, Fritz. In: Otto Heinrich May (Ed.): Niedersächsische Lebensbilder , Vol. V, 1962, p. 208.
  • Fritz Mackensen: Gerd Klindworth, Beta's son . Otto Meissner Verlag, Bleckede Castle ad Elbe 1947
  • Ulrike Hamm: Studies on the Worpswede artists' colony 1889–1908 with special consideration of Fritz Mackensen . Dissertation, Munich 1978
  • Antje Noeres:  Mackensen, Fritz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 15, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-428-00196-6 , p. 621 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Ulrike Hamm, Bernd Küster: Fritz Mackensen, 1866–1953 . Worpsweder Verlag 1990
  • Kai Artinger: Fritz Mackensen and genre painting as an authentic “race representation” / Fritz Mackensen and the art politics and propaganda of the National Socialists . In: Strohmeyer / Artinger / Krogmann: Landscape, Light and Low German Myth. The Worpswede art and the National Socialism . VDG, Weimar 2000, ISBN 3-89739-126-0 , pages 130-168

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Helmut Knocke : Mackensen, Wilhelm. In: Dirk Böttcher , Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein, Hugo Thielen : Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2002, ISBN 3-87706-706-9 , p. 242; on-line:
  2. ↑ a b cf. “Station: {3} Fritz Mackensen« Divine service in the open »” (illustration of a study by Mackensen on the monumental painting with audio commentary), on: Audioguide: Museum tour of the Museum at the Modersohn House Worpswede. In: museum.de. Retrieved August 18, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b c d Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , pp. 383-384.
  4. ↑ kuenstlerbund.de: Ordinary members of the German Association of Artists since it was founded in 1903 / Mackensen, Fritz ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed November 8, 2015)
personal data
SURNAME Mackensen, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH April 8, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Greene
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 1953
Place of death Bremen