Günter Senge

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Günter Senge (* 15. August 1927 in Herne , † 24. August 1994 in Bochum ) was a German jurist and painter who with his paintings the structural change of the Ruhr recognized as change in time.

Life

Senge spent his childhood and youth in Herne. His father, the teacher Franz Senge, came from Eichsfeld , his mother Margarete, nee. Schleinhege from the Emsland . There was a general musical mood in the family that prompted the child to draw at an early age. The middle-class Wilhelminian - style house in Herne marked the border to working-class districts with others in the street , so that Senge was confronted with the conflict-ridden conglomeration of the Ruhr area at an early age.

After attending primary school and only six years in high school, he was, like many other young people, still deployed as an air force helper towards the end of the Second World War , then drafted into the navy . In 1945 he was taken prisoner, from which he was able to escape. With this background, Senge is a representative of what Helmut Schelsky calls the “ Skeptical Generation ” - with a conservative attitude. This attitude did not make the rest of his life easy. In 1946 he made up his Abitur in Leer and, despite his initial inclination towards philology , decided to study law in Würzburg because of the external post-war conditions . After completing his studies, he went on to study in Switzerland and England . Over the next eight years he completed his legal clerkship, the second state examination in law , an attempt as a lawyer in Münster and finally, in 1959, his doctorate. Despite the early workload, Senge did not give up painting and went through further training at the Werkkunstschule in Düsseldorf in the early 1960s. From 1963 he exhibited his pictures publicly.

His further career as an administrative lawyer led Senge to Düsseldorf, Bochum and finally as city director to Monheim, where he and his family moved in the early 1970s. There he was initially involved in preventing the city from being incorporated into Düsseldorf. Senge left the service in 1977 due to illness and returned to Bochum in 1979, where he was able to devote himself entirely to his art. “This was the beginning of the most productive time of his painting for Senge. … When Günter Senge died in 1994, the transformation of the Ruhr area from coal mining to post-industrial urban landscape was practically complete. ”Despite the workload and severe family blows, he found consolation and confirmation in his painting. By Richard Gessner he settled in the technique of Eitemperamalerei introduce in Bochum, he later attended lectures by Max Imdahl and constantly kept in touch for the Association of Düsseldorf artist , at the Great Winter Exhibition NRW Senge 1963-1977 regularly took part. For a few years he was also its deputy chairman. He painted two large group pictures of the association's board.

One of the two group pictures: Günter Senge, Hommage à Fantin Latour, 1979 board member of the Association of Düsseldorf Artists ,
Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf, oil on canvas, 101 × 140 cm

with the artists: Upper row from left: Georg Grulich (painter), Trude Esser (sculptor), Erwin Eichbaum (painter), Günter Senge (painter) - lower row: Clemens Pasch (sculptor), Hagen Hilderhof (sculptor), Kurt Sandweg (Sculptor), Günther Cremers (painter), Bert Gerresheim (sculptor)

plant

As a landscape painter, Günter Senge, in addition to his work as an administrative lawyer, painted a series of over 200 pictures of the Ruhr area urban landscape for over thirty years . Like a chronicler, he reproduces typical living situations between Duisburg and Dortmund in the past Ruhr area with the houses, workshops and streets . The starting point is the mixed situation and the changes in the Ruhr area, insofar as they threaten people in their homes. She has repeated Senge through slight interventions when he z. B. arbitrarily positioned traffic signs, trying to protect.

How Senge met the local color of the old Ruhr district is normative for his realism. The color tones used for this are based on a limited number of subdued colors such as the caput mortuum , the umber , the Vandyck brown , the Parisian blue and the like. He used them almost exclusively and richly modulated them by adding shades of gray , so that Kuno Gonschior could refer meaningfully to "... the colors!" (verbal communication). The sooty gray of the broken colors more or less covers all pictures.

Senge's view of the world of the Revier changed from the early window pictures of the 1960s with her view from the security of the living space to the outside of the industrial world to the view from the outside of the residential buildings, which seemed deserted. Living has become a question of existence: despite the empty space in Senge's pictures, he is concerned with people.

On the one hand, the images can be viewed as a documentation of the buildings, primarily the residential buildings. “He wanted to capture and preserve the historically grown individuality of the region against the background of progressive structural change.” On the other hand, they are Senge's subjective judgment with a view to the historical constraints that humans are exposed to, and testify to the love for this threatened world.

interpretation

“I did not run to raise social protest. … Utrillo painted Paris all his life. My love belongs to the area. ”Senge would have had reason enough to denounce the social consequences of the collapse of the colliery and the structural changes in the Ruhr area, as is still happening decades later. Senge's attitude is different. Senge's painting is based on the New Objectivity , on painters like Werner Heldt , Gustav Wunderwald , Wilhelm Schmurr , but also on the photographs of Albert Renger-Patzsch .

Despite all the dismay at the inexorable structural change, Senge accepts the unchangeable in silence. The resulting silence becomes a structural feature of his pictures. The question of the fairness of this process will have preoccupied the lawyer Senge, at least unconsciously. Understandably, however, it remains unanswered in the transcendent sense of the veil of ignorance .

During the creation of the image, Senge was concerned with the general, that is, erasing the anecdotal until, according to the title of the monograph by Wieland Schmied, in which he had underlined certain passages, the impression of the magical, the unstable balance of reality and unreality ceased. In this way, the pictures became authentic testimonies to personal self-reflection and documents of the social conditions that form the Movens for social memory. With their ambivalences, they are free from false comfort.

There are no future expectations that promise salvation for Senge's conservative skepticism. The finiteness experienced and suffered are reflected in the constantly newly composed, subdued colors of the pictures. They demonstrate the powerless mental tension in relation to the objective, fateful repetition compulsions of life. You are dominated by a sadness, but have nothing to do with sadness. The magical-poetic style of the depiction allows the critical observer to gain a reflected distance from the social process. The tense silence of the pictures signals something mysterious that the viewer wants to think. It is the gray veil that is visibly invisible like a veil of oblivion over the urban landscape and saves it from being completely forgotten.

By painting the pictures, Senge has unconsciously come close to the truth of human relationships in the world beyond himself and the religious part of his worldview. The apparently realistic painter becomes an advocate for the ephemeral. A related worldview can be found in Konrad Knebel . "In his pictures he repeatedly deals with the city theme as a symbol of being and human perishing."

This enables a gain in knowledge, which can be liberating in spite of all the distress, since with a view to the finiteness of life it shows this as general truth in the basic color of the pictures. “The painter should not only paint what he sees in front of him, but also what he sees in himself. But if he does not see anything in himself, he also refrains from painting what he sees in front of him. ”“ It was always about depicting the essential, the background, that which is overlooked by most people, and that, believe I realized in my pictures. ”Senge's Ruhr area pictures are painted history.

Works (selection)

Many of the pictures are privately owned. Publicly owned pictures are in the art museum Bochum , in the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf, in the Federal Council in Berlin, in the Stadtwerke Düsseldorf and in the Emschertal Museum in Herne.

  • Window picture house with jug

  • Winter day in Constantin

  • Workshop

  • The Haldenwald

Exhibitions (selection)

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

  • 1963–77 Winter Exhibition NRW, Düsseldorf
  • 1967–84 Museum Bochum, Bochumer Künstlerbund
  • 1967 Westphalian Art Association, Münster
  • 1975 Kunsthalle Darmstadt
  • 1978–94 Large art exhibition, Düsseldorf
  • 1983 Oviedo, Spain - Bochumer Künstlerbund and Moscow, house of the Soviet artist association, together with the association Düsseldorfer Künstler v. 1844
  • 1985 Emschertal Museum, Herne
  • 1989 Large art exhibition, Munich
  • 1997 Emschertal Museum, Herne, review of 5 Herne artists.

literature

  • Exhibition sheet "Günter Senge - Street portraits from the Ruhr area", Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf 1983.
  • Sabina Becker: New Objectivity. Volume 1: The Aesthetics of New Objective Literature (1920–1933). Volume 2: Sources and Documents. Bühlau Verlag, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2000.
  • Olge Dommer: A rich field for interesting discoveries. Günter Senge: Urban landscape of the Ruhr area. 2003. p. 12 ff.
  • Michael Dückershoff Bochum, artist portrait: Günter Senge. In: industrie-culture magazine for monument preservation, landscape, social, environmental and technological history, Klartext Verlag, issue 2. 2003, p. 32.
  • Westfälischer Heimatbund (Hrsg.): Heimatpflege in Westfalen. 16th year. Münster 2/2003, p. 16.
  • Dieter Henrich: Experiment about art and life. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 2001.
  • Rolf Kania: Where white was just a dream. In: Günter Senge, Stadtlandschaft Ruhrgebiet. Painting and drawing. Emschertal Museum Herne March 14th – June 1st, 2003; Rheinisches Industriemuseum Oberhausen 15.3. – 18.5.2003; Westfälisches Industriemuseum Dortmund 16.3. – 24.4.2003 (book, 2003). P. 9 f. ISBN 978-3-922987-75-8 , p. 15 ff.
  • Günter Karhof: Günter Senge - places of remembrance. The "old locksmith's shop in Duisburg". An introduction to Senge's world of images. In: Günter Senge, Stadtlandschaft Ruhrgebiet. Painting and drawing. Emschertal Museum Herne March 14th – June 1st, 2003; Rheinisches Industriemuseum Oberhausen 15.3. – 18.5.2003; Westfälisches Industriemuseum Dortmund 16.3. – 24.4.2003 (book, 2003). ISBN 978-3-922987-75-8 , p. 19 f.
  • Günter Karhof: A painter and his territory. Memories on a dark background. Günter Senge (1927–1994) and the magic of the places shown. In: locations. Yearbook Ruhr area 2003/2004. Klartext Verlag, Essen 2004, pp. 72–77.
  • Alexander von Knorre: Search for the Ruhr area. In: Günter Senge, Stadtlandschaft Ruhrgebiet. Painting and drawing. Emschertal Museum Herne March 14th – June 1st, 2003; Rheinisches Industriemuseum Oberhausen 15.3. – 18.5.2003; Westfälisches Industriemuseum Dortmund 16.3. – 24.4.2003 (book, 2003). ISBN 978-3-922987-75-8 , p. 9 f.
  • Horst Lang: ... when the pot was still boiling. Photographs from the Ruhr area. With a text by Andreas Rossmann. Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 2000.
  • Thomas Parent, Thomas Stachelhaus: Urban landscape Ruhr area. Klartext, Essen 1991.
  • Renger-Patzsch: Ruhr Area - Landscapes 1927–1935. Cologne 1982.
  • Andreas Rossmann: The smoke no longer connects the cities. Cologne 2012.
  • Günter SENGE. Pictures from the area. Exhibition catalog. - Schwerte: Catholic Academy 1978. 22 p., Fig.
  • Günter Senge - Urban Landscape Ruhr Area. Exhibitions in Herne, Dortmund and Oberhausen [1] (PDF).
  • Peter Wittenberg, Alexander von Knorre, City of Herne: Review. Five artists from Herne: Wilhelm Imhof, Heinrich Wurm, Edmund Schuitz, Robert Imhof and Günter Senge. Emschertal Museum, Volume 52, 1997.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Schelsky, Helmut, The Skeptical Generation. A sociology of the German youth. Düsseldorf Diederichs Verlag 1957. Summarized by Odo Marquard in a conversation - SWR2 contemporaries odo marquard -: “... he (Schelsky) described the skeptical generation as a generation that was suspicious and at the same time gripping in form, so Adorno did that later Called concretism . ”Concerning concretism in philosophical terms connected with the risk of loss of intellectual, i.e. H. theoretical dimension: Theodor W. Adorno in ZEIT Online: Marginalia on theory and practice August 15, 1969.
  2. ^ Bärbel Senge, The painter Günter Senge, Stadtlandschaft Ruhrgebiet. Painting and drawings, Herne 2003. p. 29. So also Andreas Rossmann in: Horst Lang:… when the pot was still boiling. Photographs from the Ruhr area. With a text by Andreas Rossmann. Schirmer / Mosel Munich 2000. p. 11 “In the Ruhr area, the sixties are not so much a time of new beginnings, of youth and student rebellion, as a phase of formative structural change that marks the beginning of the end of the coal and steel industry and is only in the in the nineties. "
  3. ^ Bärbel Senge, The painter Günter Senge, Stadtlandschaft Ruhrgebiet. Painting and drawings, Herne 2003. p. 29.
  4. ↑ “It was not the centers of the cities with their public buildings, but the adjacent areas and the suburbs that fascinated him with the mixture of houses, streets, bridges, conveyor towers and church towers, heaps and advertising walls. He was interested in these typical, often barely noticed, Wilhelminian-style settlement houses with their surroundings, the backyards, the drinking halls and corner bars, the industrial architecture directly connected to them, the pipelines, rail lines, the isolated trees, street lamps, crossings, street signs, barriers, advertising pillars and other details strong. "Alexander von Knorre, Günter Senge: Stadtlandschaft Ruhrgebiet, p. 10.
  5. ↑ Heinz-Norbert Jock's apt brief description in connection with Senge's participation in the “Malkasten” exhibition in Düsseldorf in the Westdeutsche Zeitung in November 1987: “Deserted streets with traffic signs that - interrupted by smaller factory halls - the dream of a better one, associated with the advent of industry Contradicting time does not of course create a cozy atmosphere. When Günter Senge, who is currently exhibiting in the Malkasten, lets the details speak for themselves, then that is more of an exception. For him details serve at best to underpin the sadness. Avoiding any excess of precision, he marks with a brush what he perceives and expresses his feelings when looking at the big city. What matters to him is the basic melancholy mood. Gray overshadows the color. ”.
  6. ↑ Olge Dommer, "A rich field for interesting discoveries", Günter Senge: Stadtlandschaft Ruhrgebiet, p. 12.
  7. ^ Peter Wittenberg; Alexander von Knorre; City of Herne: Review. Five artists from Herne, 1997, p. 11.
  8. ↑ Bernd Langmack Photography (1990–2015), A district is destroyed. Demolition in Bruckhausen, Klartext Verlag, Essen 2015.
  9. ↑ "Nothing is as it was.", S. Museum underground ( Memento of the original from January 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in Bochum situation art. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.situation-kunst.de
  10. ↑ Günter Karhof, a painter and his territory. Memories on a dark background. Günter Senge (1927–1994) and the magic of the places shown. In: "Locations. Yearbook Ruhrgebiet 2003/2004", Klartext Verlag Essen 2004, pp. 72–77.
  11. ↑ Wieland Schmied, Neue Sachlichkeit und Magischer Realismus in Deutschland 1918–1933, Hanover 1969. At the end of the 1960s Senge read the book and marked on page 13: “To focus on the here and now, that was what it was all about View out of the window and onto everyday life and the asphalt in front of the house, the view onto the alley ... gutter, factory hall, shipyard, operating theater, brothel. . Even if it sometimes just fell into an allotment garden or on a stationer's house or luck in a corner or got stuck on the clothesline perspective of the backyard environment. ”Also page 14:“… just as the realists of the twenties relied on the early Renaissance Old German painting and the classicists, to David, Ingres, but also to German Romanticism, to Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. ”.
  12. ↑ “Because an essential meaning of this work lies not in the documentation, but in the interpretation of the urban landscape of the Ruhr area, which touched him. It is this strange silence, sadness and melancholy that radiates from his pictures. Time seems to be frozen, just like the whole situation in the picture. Mostly there are also cloudy winter views, and the defoliated trees reveal the architecture, which lies under a gray veil ... The familiar motifs from the urban landscape of the Ruhr area are part of our collective memory. In Senge's pictures they appear enigmatic, melancholy and enraptured like ciphers. ”Michael Dückershoff Bochum, artist portrait: Günter Senge, in: industrie-kultur, magazine for monument preservation, landscape, social, environmental and technological history, Klartext Verlag, issue 2 | 2003, p. 32.
  13. ↑ The motif and the symbolism of the veil, which determine the mysterious poetry of Senge's pictures, are the artistic gain of his paintings. As for Goethe, the veil would also be the “open secret” for Senge, behind whose “hints the living becomes all the more clearly visible”. (H.-K. Jung: The motif of the veil in Goethe's poetic works, TU Berlin 2004, p. 3) Senge may have experienced it as Goethe expressed it in Maximen und Reflexionen (No. 1168): " If nature begins to reveal an open secret to you, you feel an irresistible longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. ”Senge's pictures are suitable to understand them as images of the whole. His landscapes correspond to the demands that Schiller made in 1794 in his review of Matthisson's poems for the then still controversial landscape painting.
  14. ↑ Caspar David Friedrich : Statement when looking at a collection of paintings by mostly still living and recently deceased artists. Lost script from around 1830. Quoted from: Sigrid Hinz (Ed.): Caspar David Friedrich in letters and confessions. Henschel-Verlag Art and Society, Berlin 1968.
  15. ↑ "Here in the Revier" The Ruhr area painter Günter Senge. Television WDR Dortmund, March 4th 1992.
  16. ↑ a b Zukunft Herne eV, Cultural Office of the City of Herne (ed.): Herner Künstlerhandbuch '95 . Herne, 1995, p. 116
personal data
SURNAME Senge, Günter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German administrative lawyer and painter
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Herne
DATE OF DEATH August 24, 1994
Place of death Bochum