Georg Tappert

Georg Tappert (born October 20, 1880 in Berlin , † November 16, 1957 in Berlin) was a German expressionist painter .

With his pictures of chansonettes, nude dancers, exotic artistes, demimonde ladies and street whores, Tappert was one of the first German artists to discover the metropolitan world of entertainment as a subject. Tappert, who for the first time brought together the avant-garde of the capital and the artists of the Dresdner Brücke and the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM) in the “ New Secession ” in Berlin before the First World War , was one of the most important artists of German Expressionism . He also gained an excellent reputation as a professor at the Pedagogical Art College in Berlin.

Life

Tappert grew up as the son of a tailor in " Friedrichstrasse 10", the entertainment mile of Berlin at the time. So he came into contact with fashion and the demi-world there since childhood. After an apprenticeship as a tailor and as a journeyman he studied with the help of patrons from 1900 to 1903 at the Grand Ducal Baden Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe a. a. with Ludwig Schmid-Reutte and Carl Langhein . In 1904/05, at the request of his patrons, he was assistant to Paul Schultze-Naumburg at his life reform art school in Burg Saaleck .

In 1905 Tappert returned to Berlin as a freelance artist and had his first solo exhibition there at the renowned address of Paul Cassirer . From 1906 to the end of 1909 Tappert lived in Worpswede ( Worpswede artists' colony ) and ran a private art school there, the most famous student of which was the artist Wilhelm Morgner, who was still a patron of Tappert . During this time Tappert had u. a. Contact with Heinrich Vogeler , whom he valued personally but not artistically, and with Paula Modersohn-Becker , who influenced him artistically and probably introduced him to newer French art. In Worpswede, Tappert began to develop his personal style in numerous flower still lifes, some landscapes and first figure pictures and portraits.

Students at the school for gymnastics Doris Reichmann and Georg Tappert on Sylt around 1935

Back in Berlin in 1910, his works were rejected by the jury of the “ Berlin Secession ”. On the back of the notification he sketched with Moriz Melzer and Heinrich Richter-Berlin the founding of the “ New Secession ”, which began in May with the exhibition of those who were judged from the Berlin Secession and which put together another six exhibitions until it was dissolved in 1914. From the beginning, the artists of the Dresden artist group Die Brücke were members of the New Secession. Max Pechstein was its first chairman until the bridge left in 1912, Georg Tappert the second chairman and main organizer. At the end of 1911 Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky were won as members. The third exhibition of the “New Secession” then showed these two main groups of German Expressionism together for the first time.

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During this time up to the First World War, Tappert created large expressionist works, pictures of women, depictions of dancers and portraits as well as the large series of nudes based on his preferred model Betty. In addition to painting, he devoted himself intensively to graphic techniques in wood and linocut, in lithography and etching. Since 1913 various avant-garde magazines, u. a. The action , regularly published graphic contributions by him. In 1912 Tappert was represented with four large paintings at the International Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne and exhibited at the second exhibition of the Blauer Reiter in Munich. In 1911, Tappert founded the Berlin jury-free exhibitions together with Käthe Kollwitz and others. From 1912 he taught for the first time in government services, in 1913 he became a teacher at the Royal Art School Berlin and at the private Berlin-Wilmersdorfer Art School.

During the First World War, Tappert served in the Fliegerstaffel in Berlin from 1916 and was able to continue working artistically. During these years, Tappert particularly received stylistic elements from Cubism , Futurism and Orphism .

In 1918 he was one of the founders of the November Group and the Labor Council for Art, and in 1919 he resumed teaching at the State Art School Berlin-Schöneberg and at the Reimann School (until 1924). In the same year he married his former student Kathleen Bagot (1890-1925). In 1921 he received the professorship. After Kathleen's death in 1925, he married his student Elisabeth Foerstemann (1901–1929) a year later.

In his work of the twenties and thirties, the artist devoted himself primarily to the women of the Berlin demi-world milieu of cafés, variety shows, night bars and circuses. A large series of nudes and large portraits was created in a very varied, expressive-realistic style. Neither the cool tendencies of the New Objectivity nor the caustic socio-critical verism of this time were his thing. Psychologically sensitive, relentless, but humanly observing, he delivered his own panorama of the supposedly insignificant city dwellers of this time. During this time, printmaking lost its importance to him, while drawing gained great importance. The estate contained around 4,500 sheets in all techniques from the smallest pencil sketch to large-format watercolor and pastel .

In 1933 this image of man fell under the verdict of " degeneracy " by the National Socialists. Tappert was dismissed from his teaching post as early as February 1933, reinstated for a limited period six months later at the request of colleagues and students, and finally dismissed in 1937 and banned from painting and exhibiting. After retiring to landscape painting in 1934 , he finally gave up artistic work around 1944. Around 100 works have been lost or lost due to the ostracism and war damage.

In 1945 he rebuilt the Berlin University of Art Education on behalf of the occupying powers, which he soon merged under one roof with the University of the Arts under the leadership of Karl Hofer. In 1953 he received the Cross of Merit (Steckkreuz) of the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of his educational work , while his own artistic work, which he had hidden in the cellar and in the attic of his house and never brought out, was forgotten. In the same year he finally married his niece Annalize Friedrich (1908–2002), whom he had taken in as a young music student in 1932.

He was a member of the German Association of Artists .

Georg Tappert died in Berlin in 1957 at the age of 77. His grave is in the Dahlem forest cemetery .

The artistic estate

Only after his death did the gradual rediscovery of his work begin, in which Gerhard Wietek , art historian and former director of the Schleswig-Holstein State Museum at Gottorf Castle , played a decisive role. He supported Annalize Tappert in the administration of the estate, published the first comprehensive monograph with the catalog raisonné of the paintings in 1980 and organized and supported numerous exhibitions. In 1996 his catalog raisonné of prints followed.

The artistic estate is in the Georg Tappert Foundation in the Foundation Schleswig-Holstein regional museums at Gottorf Castle preserved in Schleswig. The written estate is kept in the German Art Archive in the Germanic National Museum. The Bayreuth Art Museum houses a Georg Tappert collection with works that were created during study visits to Upper Franconia between 1926 and 1933 .

Exhibitions

• Georg Tappert - German expressionist. (Schleswig, Gottorf Castle and Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum , 2005); big retrospective.
• Georg Tappert - Women 1910 - 1933 ( August-Macke-Haus , Bonn, May 30 - September 14, 2008 and Bayreuth Art Museum, October 25, 2008 - February 1, 2009)
• Expression and lust for colors - Georg Tappert and his student Ernst Straßner . Cismar Monastery , March 29, 2015 - November 1, 2015

literature

• Gerhard Wietek : Georg Tappert (1880–1957) - a pioneer of modernity. Thiemig, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-521-04118-2 .
• Gerhard Wietek: Georg Tappert - catalog raisonné of prints. Wienand, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-87909-499-3 .
• Gerhard Wietek: The Worpsweder photographs of the painter Georg Tappert from 1906 to 1909 . Worpsweder Verlag, Lilienthal 1980, ISBN 3-922516-22-X .
• Georg Tappert (1880–1957) works from Franconia. City of Bayreuth (ed.), 1995, OCLC 181669617 .
• Gesa Bartholomeyczik: Photographic moments of a painter after 1900 - Georg Tappert. ed. v. Herwig Guratzsch, exhibition catalog, Schleswig-Holstein State Museums Foundation, Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig / Heidelberg 2001, ISBN 3-926318-36-8 .
• Gesa Bartholomeyczik (arrangement): Georg Tappert - German expressionist. Publishing house of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg 2005, ISBN 3-936688-07-9 .
• Wolfgang Maier-Preusker : Book and portfolio works with graphics of German Expressionism. Catalog accompanying the exhibition in the Hanseatic city of Wismar. Maier-Preusker, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-900208-37-9 .
• Gesa Bartholomeyczik: Georg Tappert: Women 1910–1933 . Edited by the August Macke House Association, Bonn 2008, ISBN 978-3-929607-55-0 .
• Gesa Bartholomeyczik: from focus to focus - Georg Tappert, drawings 1904–1940. Exhibition catalog, Foundation Schleswig-Holstein State Museums Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig 2010, ISBN 978-3-529-02770-3 .
• Gesa Bartholomeyczik, Gädeke, Thomas, Baumann Kirsten (Ed.): Expression and lust for colors - Georg Tappert and his student Ernst Straßner. Exhibition catalog, Schleswig-Holstein State Museums Foundation, Gottorf Castle, Schleswig 2015.
• Tappert, Georg in: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. Fourth volume (Q – U) , EA Seemann, Leipzig 1999 (study edition). ISBN 3-363-00730-2 (p. 418)
• Margret Schütte:  Tappert, Georg. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 25, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-428-11206-7 , p. 786 f. ( Digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Swantje Kuhfuss-Wickenheiser: The Reimann School in Berlin and London 1902–1943. A Jewish company for international art and design training up to its destruction by the Hitler regime. Aachen 2009, ISBN 978-3-86858-475-2 , pp. 288-290.
2. ↑ kuenstlerbund.de: Ordinary members of the German Association of Artists since it was founded in 1903 / Tappert, Georg ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on April 17, 2016)  
3. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 589.

Web links

• Literature by and about Georg Tappert in the catalog of the German National Library
• Exhibition in August Macke Haus 2008. Accessible via the footer, menu item Archive.