Gelsenkirchen Baroque
Gelsenkirchen Baroque is an ironic term for mainly bulky - mostly bulged and high-gloss precious wood veneer - ornamental cabinets and chests of drawers , as they were first produced in Germany in the 1930s and again around 1950 and were popular.
Gelsenkirchen is representative of the working class milieu of the German coal and steel industry in the Ruhr area , where this furniture was initially mainly to be found. The term baroque alludes to the lively opulence and variety of shapes and decorations.
origin
The model for what is called Gelsenkirchen Baroque was initially furniture in the old German style, which was still manufactured in Germany between around 1850 and 1910 as one-off handcrafted items. From the 1930s onwards, historical copies or free variations of these were produced industrially in series. These objects were probably also created as a nostalgic reaction to the increasing spread of today's so-called classic-modern furniture (e.g. light cantilever chairs made of tubular steel), as it is among others. a. brought about the Bauhaus and the Werkbund .
In the era of the German economic miracle after the Second World War, such furniture was again produced in large numbers and successfully sold, with modern production techniques adding to the already extensive repertoire of forms. The furniture was considered a prestige object . Their great popularity may have been due, among other things, to the fact that they were able to convey the illusion of craftsmanship, which was perhaps more of a petty bourgeois longing for tradition, security and German cosiness . At the same time, the unmistakable exhibits of supposedly bourgeois living culture expressed pride in overcoming war-related privations in everyday life, especially since other more or less valuable possessions are often found in the showcase-like cabinet parts - e.g. B. trinkets or good china - could exhibit.
The Municipal Museum Gelsenkirchen organized in 1991 an exhibition on the Gelsenkirchen Baroque. With a self-deprecating and cultural-scientific approach, as well as with the great success of the exhibition, the city succeeded in “making peace” with the disrespectful attribution, possibly also in emancipating itself from it.
meaning
The word creation Gelsenkirchener Barock probably found its way into everyday German in the early 1950s and is still in use today. It is not an academic concept of style , but rather its parody . It is actually not used in art history or furniture style studies. As consistently anonymous mass-produced goods, the formal elements of which could be assembled from set pieces as desired, the so-called furniture is not known to any outstanding designers or protagonists . If you wanted to understand Gelsenkirchen Baroque in terms of style, you could describe it as a retro or neo style without great aesthetic or financial value, especially since it is essentially just an industrial re-edition of an equally eclectic historicism , which in turn only imitated, without being particularly independent and to be innovative.
This explains the predominantly negative connotation of the term. A certain intellectual disdain for a phenomenon of everyday culture is expressed in the mocking, ironic connection of the mining and steelworkers' milieu of Gelsenkirchen and the surrounding area, which are regarded as proletarian, with an important European style epoch .
The expression Gelsenkirchen Baroque is a vernacular , lovingly ironic to critically disrespectful comment on a design and furnishing culture that one would like to characterize as old-fashioned, stuffy , tasteless and overloaded. During the period in which the term was coined, the objects in question stood in stark contrast to the contemporary, modern and avant-garde furniture. It must therefore also be understood as a subjective, tasteful value judgment on a worldview that is perceived as conservative and backward-looking.
In the meantime, however, its use is no longer limited to the historical furniture described above, but is used more generally, e.g. B. to mark furnishings that have become unpopular as out of date and out of fashion or kitschy . And even one car, the Ford P2 , was derogatory to the Gelsenkirchen Baroque in the late 1950s.
literature
- City of Gelsenkirchen, Municipal Museum (Hrsg.): Gelsenkirchener Barock . Ed. Braus, Heidelberg 1991, ISBN 3-89466-005-8 .
- City of Gelsenkirchen, City Museum (Hrsg.): Gelsenkirchen Baroque as a contrast to Werkbund, Bauhaus, Ulm School of Design . Heidelberg 1991.
- Barbara Mundt, Babette Warncke: Form without ornament? Applied art of the 20th century between functional form and object . Nicolai, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-87584-875-6 .
- Hartmut Häußermann, Walter Siebel: Sociology of Living: An Introduction to Change and Differentiation of Living . Juventa, Weinheim 2000, ISBN 3-7799-0395-4 .
- Elisabeth Pfeil, G. Ipsen, H. Popitz: The housing wishes of the miners. Sociological survey, interpretation and criticism of the living ideas of a job . Mohr, Tübingen 1954.
- Oak, mouth-bitten: Oak, mouth-bitten . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1991, pp. 192-194 ( Online - Aug. 5, 1991 ).
- Jörg Niendorf: Gelsenkirchener taste aberration In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 23, 2010 [1]
Web links
- Arte TV broadcast on October 19, 2008 [2]
- Baroque term long worked up in: WAZ 23 September 2006 [3]
- Gelsenkirchen Baroque home decor of the 50s and 60s [4]
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.beyars.com/kunstlexikon/lexikon_332.html
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from April 5, 2009 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.
- ^ Jörg Niendorf: Gelsenkirchener taste aberration. In: FAZ.net . June 23, 2010, accessed October 13, 2018 .
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from February 24, 2014 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.
- ↑ Oak, mouth-bitten: Oak, mouth-bitten . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1991, pp. 192-194 ( Online - Aug. 5, 1991 ).
- ↑ Gelsenkirchen Baroque? Yeah sure! - 25 years ago, a cultural festival stirred up prejudices, City of Gelsenkirchen, March 17, 2016
- ↑ http://www.kunstwissen.de/fach/f-kuns/design/nachkr0.htm
