Günter Ranft

Günter Ranft (born July 15, 1901 in Eisenberg , † March 23, 1945 in Bladiau / East Prussia ) was a German set designer , church painter, head of a painter's work group for the renovation of churches and employee of the art service of the Protestant church . When presenting the works of “ Degenerate Art ”, he was able to move numerous paintings and graphics aside and save them from destruction by the Nazi state .

Live and act

Ranft was the son of the evangelical pastor Adolf Ranft and his wife Margarete geb. Oettel. After obtaining his university entrance qualification , he studied with Horst Schultze at the Leipzig Academy , with Kandinski and Klee at the Weimar Bauhaus, and with Karl Hofer and as a master student with the stage designer César Klein at the Berlin Academy of Arts . At this time he was already working as a set designer at the Reussian Theater in Gera .

He then specialized in church painting and, since the late 1920s, had maintained the Günter Ranft studio at Riemeisterstraße 162 in Berlin-Zehlendorf , which also became the seat of the painter's work association (MAG) he founded and led . In addition to the painter colleagues Schuh and Tack, Dorothy Dadd , the English student of the painter Paul Klee, who Ranft married in 1931, also joined the community .

The churches that were restored and painted by MAG included Sankt Silvestri in Wernigerode , the new deaconess church in Dresden-Nord and the institutional church of the Bethesda deaconess institution in Radebeul . Some other works by Ranft can be seen in the village churches of Berlin-Lichterfelde and Kaltensundheim in the Rhön.

When MAG got involved in the design of the underground station and the new church on Onkel-Tom-Strasse in Berlin-Zehlendorf, the Protestant Art Service and other church art politicians and theologians became aware of him. Between 1938 and 1943 he worked as a clerk in the exploitation of works of art of the action degenerate art operates; he succeeded in hiding numerous works of art that the Nazi authorities had planned for destruction or in secret routes to get them out of the country - which is likely to be his greatest lifetime achievement.

On the other hand, the posthumous exhibition of the artist, who died as a Wehrmacht soldier in East Prussia in 1945 and which his family had organized in the Marburg University Museum in 1955, hardly received any public recognition.

Her marriage to Dorothy Dadd had four children. When the mother and the children were bombed out in Berlin - husband Günter had been a soldier since 1943 - they first moved to Dresden . There, too, they lost their apartment again due to the bombing war , and so they initially fled to Eisenberg, but returned to Berlin after the war. In 1947 Dorothy moved to her native England, where she worked as a drawing teacher and later as an art historian - honored by the Queen Mother . As early as 1947 she had taken some of Günter's hidden works of art back to her old new home. Further transports with saved pictures followed later.

Publications

• Advice on church painting , in: "Die Dorfkirche", 1932, p. 76f.
• The landmark , in: "Die neue Saat", 5, 1938, pp. 151–153.
• Light and color in the renewed church space , in: “Art and Church” 4, 1938.

literature

• Hans Prolingheuer: Hitler's pious iconoclast. Church & art under the swastika , Dittrich Verlag Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-920862-33-3
• Michael Albrecht Ranft: New genealogical-historical news on the history of the Ranft family from Burgstädt i.Sa. , 1962

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hans Prolingheuer: Hitler's pious iconoclasts. Church & art under the swastika, Dittrich Verlag Cologne 2001, p. 305, ISBN 3-920862-33-3
2. ↑ See also Andreas Hüneke : Confiscated works of art in Ernst Barlach's studio. Böhmer as a dealer in the »Degenerate Art« campaign and the relocation of the remaining stocks to Güstrow. in: Meike Hoffmann (ed.): A dealer of "degenerate" art. Bernhard A. Böhmer and his estate. (= Writings of the Research Center Degenerate Art Volume III), Berlin 2010, pp. 73–88