Günter Scherbarth

Günter Scherbarth (* 1930 in Berlin ; † 2000 in Berlin) was a German graphic artist, painter and university professor whose special interest was in writing and nudes. He created outside the avant-garde and the art trade of his time. With his wife, the children's book painter Eva Scherbarth , he had two sons, one of whom had a fatal accident at a young age. Scherbarth carried a different burden as a result of a kidney disease, which he very likely contracted at the end of the war as a forced member of the National Socialist Volkssturm .

Günter Scherbarth: Study on the Ring , 1991

Life

Scherbarth completed his studies at the Berlin University of Fine Arts in 1952 as a master student of Ernst Bohm (applied graphics). Until 1957 he worked as a freelance graphic artist. He then taught at the Berlin Master School of Arts and Crafts (later Werkkunstschule), and from 1971 at the newly founded Hochschule der Künste, which gave him a professorship for graphics and writing in the field of visual communication . He took his teaching activities very seriously, although he always knew how to spice it up with jokes and antics. For example, if Wilhelm Busch's pupils showed themselves to be naked, Scherbarth played them scenes from Max & Moritz . Shortly after his retirement in 1992, Scherbarth underwent a kidney transplant. Although it gave him a certain freedom of movement, it also hit him with some debilitating side effects. Scherbarth died shortly before the completion of an etching cycle based on Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen, based on around 200 sheets, in his long-term apartment in Berlin-Spandau.

plant

In 1977 Scherbarth had a solo exhibition with drawings and paintings in the Spandau Citadel, then again in 1996, where he presented the first 117 sheets of the Ring cycle. Scherbarth had worked on the zinc or copper plates using a number of techniques such as drypoint, line etching, and aquatint, which he knew how to combine with great skill. He got the prints from the plates himself with the help of an ancient etching press. The black and white sheets portray the struggle of heroes and fiends for power, wealth and love with far more comedy than librettist and composer Richard Wagner, who always used his all-in-one rhymes with conviction. Scherbarth achieves this comical effect not least through his idea of ​​mainly working with files, that is, he shows all the boastful hens, villains and Valkyries naked. According to Henner Reitmeier, who was one of Scherbarth's master models, his HdK colleague FW Bernstein was impressed by the approach and staying power of this etching cycle. Only for the inferno of Wagner's Götterdämmerung , Scherbarth's virtues were no longer sufficient. His estate is administered by his wife.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Portrait Scherbarth, Günter in: Der Große Stockraus. Ein Relaxikon , Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-926880-20-8