Fritz Winter (painter)

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Fritz Winter on the entrance sign of the Fritz Winter House, Ahlen

Fritz Winter (born September 22, 1905 in Altenbögge (today a district of Bönen ) / Westf .; † October 1, 1976 in Herrsching am Ammersee ) was a German painter who was one of the most important abstract artists of the post-war period.

Life

youth

Born in 1905 as the first of eight children of a miner in Altenbögge near Unna, in 1919 he began an apprenticeship as an electrician at the Westphalia mine in Ahlen . In addition to his work as a miner, he attended the secondary school there . In 1924 Fritz Winter increasingly began to paint and draw. Nevertheless, he worked as a miner at night and attended the secondary school in Ahlen during the day with the aim of studying medicine. A first examination of the work of Paula Modersohn-Becker took place. In 1926 he got to know the work of Vincent van Gogh on a trip to Holland . On the advice of his drawing teacher, he applied to the State Bauhaus in Dessau in 1927 .

education

Signed by Paul Klee , he received confirmation of acceptance for the basic apprenticeship for the winter semester of 1927/28. His professors in the first year of study were among others. a. Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky . The maintenance was earned by painting tiles in a Dessau stove-setting company. In 1928 he worked in Oskar Schlemmer's stage department and in Paul Klee's painting class. Based on the testimonials from Klee and Kandinsky, he received a scholarship from the city of Dessau. In 1929 he took part with 12 pictures in the exhibition "Young Bauhaus Painters", which was shown in Halle ad Saale, Braunschweig, Erfurt and Krefeld. In the same year he visited Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Davos for the first time during the autumn holidays , with whom he became a close friend. It was also Kirchner who arranged an exhibition for him in a Davos bookshop in 1929. In the same year, Winter met the constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo during a lecture at the Bauhaus . In 1930 he was on leave from studying at the Bauhaus and worked for three months in Gabo's studio in Berlin. First solo exhibition at the Buchholz gallery in Berlin. The museums in Halle, Hamburg, Mannheim, Breslau and Wuppertal acquired works from him. In the summer of 1930 he visited EL Kirchner for the second time in Switzerland. On September 10, he finished his studies at the Bauhaus and received a diploma with a positive assessment from Paul Klee, who, in retrospect, made the largest contribution to his training. In 1931 Fritz Winter tried to set up his own studio, the "Studio Z", together with artist colleague friends. At the suggestion of his friend Hans-Friedrich Geist , a former Bauhaus fellow student, he came to Halle ad Saale in April to take on a teaching position at the Pedagogical Academy. Fritz Winter met the composer Christian Hellmuth Wolff through Geist . This introduced him to his later partner Margarete Schreiber-Rüffer. Another visit to EL Kirchner in the summer.

National Socialism, Military Service and Captivity

After the seizure of power by the Nazis moved Fritz Winter 1933 to Munich, Paul Klee visited in Bern and Else Lasker-Schüler in Zurich. He also took part in the exhibition “Contemporary German Art from Swiss Private Ownership” at the Kunsthaus Zürich. In 1935 Winter moved with his partner Margarete Schreiber-Rüffer and their son first to Allach near Munich, then to Dießen am Ammersee. In 1937 works by Fritz Winter from public collections were confiscated as part of the National Socialist campaign against so-called “ degenerate art ”, removed from museums and expropriated without compensation. Fritz Winter was banned from painting and exhibiting . In 1938 he took part in the exhibition of contemporary painters in the New Burlington Gallery in London, which was directed against the traveling exhibition "Degenerate Art" in Germany. In 1939 Fritz Winter was called up for military service and participated as a soldier in the campaign against Poland. In 1941 he took part in the war against the Soviet Union . During this time, the so-called "field sketches" were created in small sketchbooks. In 1944 he was seriously wounded. During the convalescence leave, the small-format series of images "Driving forces of the earth" was created. From 1945 to 1949 Fritz Winter was a Soviet prisoner of war in Siberia and on the Volga. Thanks to the initiative of Margarete Schreiber-Rüffer and his friends and collectors Will Grohmann and Ottomar Domnick, it was nevertheless possible to show works by Fritz Winter in international exhibitions. In 1949 he was released from captivity and returned to Dießen. In order not to jeopardize his release, he destroyed several hundred drawings, fearing that they could incriminate him as 'espionage material'.

Post-war abstraction - ZEN 49

Winter became a founding member of the artist group “ ZEN 49 ” in Munich, and his house became a lively meeting place for the current art scene. In 1950 he met Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages in Paris. In 1953 he married his longtime partner Margarete Schreiber-Rüffer and received a visiting professorship at the Landeskunstschule Hamburg. In 1954 there was an intense dispute in the German Association of Artists - at this point in time Winter had already taken part in the first four annual DKB exhibitions as a full member. Ernst Wilhelm Nay , Willi Baumeister and Fritz Winter resigned due to critical comments on abstract painting by the First Chairman Karl Hofer . However, Winter resumed his membership three years later. In 1955 he received a professorship at the State University of Fine Arts in Kassel and took part in documenta 1 .

The death of his wife in 1958 was not only a heavy blow for the artist, but also the loss of his most important advisor and supporter. In 1959, Fritz Winter was ill for a long time as a result of his war injuries. Nevertheless, he took part in documenta II and married Waltraud Schreiber, Margarete's daughter from his first marriage. In 1961 his studio house was built on the property in Dießen. From then on he withdrew more and more from the family. In 1964 he took part in documenta III . On his 60th birthday in 1965 and 1966 he was honored as one of the most important post-war artists in Germany with major retrospectives in Kassel, Koblenz, Hanover, Mannheim, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart and Berlin. In 1970 he retired from the Kassel Art Academy. From then on, Winter withdrew completely to Diessen. In 1974 and 1975 he donated a large number of his pictures to the Munich Gallery Association, which later became today's Fritz Winter Foundation. In 1975 the “Fritz Winter House” was opened in Ahlen / Westphalia. Fritz Winter died on October 1, 1976 in Herrsching am Ammersee.

plant

Fritz Winter distanced himself from the ideas of the Bauhaus during his training. He represented a “L'Art-pour l'Art-attitude” and criticized the subordinate space that painting occupied at the Bauhaus. He dealt intensively with the teachings of Kandinsky and Klee, but even his early experiments show a free occupation with pictorial means, detached from the Bauhaus ideals. He also never went over to a strict formal language , rather he carried out a variety of experiments. His work should be viewed in a circular way, as he repeatedly took up old forms and added new ones, never completely detaching himself from the object like other abstract artists. After being banned from painting and exhibiting as well as being a prisoner of war for a long time, Winter created the “driving forces of the earth” on his convalescent leave in Dießen, which are still considered key works of post-war art today. Here, Winter already dealt intensively with nature and its destructive and creative forces. He was one of the major pioneers of abstraction in Europe. He was a founding member of the artist group ZEN 49 , which understood itself in the tradition of the Blue Rider and manifested itself in a pictorial representation of a worldview that was emphasized on the spiritual .

In 1949 Fritz Winter produced his first serigraphs, making him one of the pioneers of artistic screen printing in Germany.

Awards

Exhibitions

literature

  • Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. Fifth volume (V – Z / supplements A – G) , EA Seemann, Leipzig 1999 (study edition). ISBN 3-363-00730-2 (p. 148f)

swell

  1. ↑ s. DKB: Participation in exhibitions from 1951 to 1994 / winter, Fritz in: Kunstreport 1903–1995. Overview of the German Association of Artists , Berlin / Bonn 1995. ISBN 3-929283-08-5 (p. 135)
  2. ^ Fritz-Winter-Strasse in Munich Schwabing-Freimann. Retrieved December 17, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Fritz Winter. The 1960s - Decade of Color ( February 2, 2016 memento on the Internet Archive )

Web links

Commons : Fritz Winter  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Winter, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German artist
DATE OF BIRTH September 22, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Altenbögge
DATE OF DEATH October 1, 1976
Place of death Herrsching am Ammersee