Gerhard Bakenhus
Gerhard Bakenhus (born December 14, 1860 in Großenmeer , † December 12, 1939 in Kreyenbrück ) was a German painter .
education
Gerhard Emil Bakenhus was born on December 14, 1860 in Großenmeer / Wesermarsch district as the son of the weaver and peddler Johann Harm Bakenhus in Großenmeer near Oldenburg. The parental farm with the little shop threw little off. Gerhard Bakenhus, who found school easy and who began to experiment with colors at an early age, was sent to a painter in Rastede after attending the village school to do an unproductive and unpleasant apprenticeship for him. He continued his hard training in a ship operation in Elsfleth, but then took Reissaus in the direction of Münster, where he was suspected of being a social worker and imprisoned because of his red shirt . In 1879 he finished his apprenticeship as a painter and glazier. Then he came to Oldenburg on the usual journeyman's journey. His interest in the grand ducal gallery meant that he received lessons from its curator Sophus Diedrichs (1817-1893). With him he met the young painter Richard tom Dieck (1862–1943), who was just going to Berlin with an art grant from the Grand Duke and with whom he became a lifelong friend. Gerhard Bakenhus followed him to the capital in 1880 and kept afloat with occasional earnings, including as a quick painter in variety shows, as a decorative painter, house painter and photographer. In the evening he attended the arts and crafts school. In 1888, with a grand ducal scholarship, he was able to study for two semesters in Karlsruhe with Professor Gustav Schönleber (1851–1917), who was then highly regarded as a landscape painter .
Life and work
After his friend left Berlin, Gerhard Bakenhus returned to the Oldenburger Land, worked as a house painter, and from 1884 on again did studies in the Augusteum. In 1886 he went to Hamburg and worked in a lithographic institute. Gerhard Bakenhus then worked for six years as a theater painter, lithographer and photographer in Hamburg, Berlin and again in Hamburg. Technically perfect, with clear artistic ideas and always inclined to theorize about art, Bakenhus finally returned to Oldenburg in 1895, where in 10 years he succeeded in gaining a foothold as a freelance landscape and still life painter. In 1905 he built a house in front of the town in the remote Kreyenbrück in what was then Schaftriftsweg, today's Klingenbergstrasse, and married Anne Wilhelmine Ferdinande Emma Kersebaum (1876–1964), who was the director of a plastering shop and who was also successful in the arts and crafts. The marriage had two children.
Landscape painters were much less in demand at that time than portraitists and life painters like Professor Bernhard Winter , and the idiosyncratic and probably a bit too direct Bakenhus offended people and potential buyers of his pictures. “It's a thick head,” said Professor Winter about him, but this reflected recognition of Gerhard Bakenhus' straight course.
The north-west German marshland, heather and moorland were at the center of his painterly work. His paintings are basically of a lyrical nature and depict holistically recorded phenomena and moods of nature. The composition of the image is firm, its tones are graduated and fine, even with large areas of paint. His style, which he had found in 1905, made him a respectable representative of north-west German open-air painting and as such, with a slight delay, an essential representative of Oldenburg painting.
Exhibitions
Although Gerhard Bakenhus had a hard time asserting himself as a painter of the gloomy color stimuli of his native landscape, had a rough nature, was clumsy in economic matters and always had to live in modest circumstances, he still found recognition. In 1904 he was a co-founder of the Oldenburger Künstlerbund and, as secretary, was also a member of its board. In 1905 he received the silver and in 1916 the golden Oldenburg State Medal. From February to March 1909 he exhibited his work in the Kunsthalle Bremen as part of the third exhibition of the Association of Northwest German Artists with Ludwig Dettmann , Paul Müller-Kaempff , Heinrich Vogeler and others. In 1913 it was exhibited together with Max Liebermann and the Worpswedern in the Augusteum. In 1935 the city of Oldenburg recognized it with an entry in their Golden Book. In 1920 and 1936 Gerhard Bakenhus was honored with anniversary exhibitions. In 1912/13 he went on a boat trip to North Africa, on which he painted small seascapes. In 1925/26 he went on an art trip to Berlin. After his second anniversary exhibition, he fell ill with cancer, which led to death after a third operation.
Painting teacher Gerhard Bakenhus
Since Bakenhus never really wanted to make a profit with his painting, the family budget was seldom right. In a letter to tom Dieck in 1922 he confessed: “I also always lack the money to buy paints, books and the like.” So the idea of giving painting lessons was very obvious. His painting lessons, which he gave, therefore had a very special meaning for Oldenburg. Even before the First World War , students gathered around the moor painter. For some well-heeled people, it was part of the bourgeois tone to get a taste of the bohemian world and be instructed in the secrets of art. Kreyenbrück became a real artist colony and Gerhard Bakenhus their foster father. His pupils were Hugo Duphorn (1876–1909), Wilhelm Kempin (1885–1951), Heinz Witte-Lenoir (1880–1961), Johannes von Wicht (1888–1970), Hermann Böcker (1890–1978), Margarethe Francksen- Kruckenberg (1890–1975), Marie Meyer-Glaeseker (1901–1983), Willi Meyer (1890–1958), Ludwig Fischbeck (1866–1954), Emy Rogge (1866–1959) and even Theodor Tantzen , the last Prime Minister of Oldenburg.
See also
literature
- Gerhard Wietek : 200 years of painting in the Oldenburger Land. ISBN 3-9801191-0-6 .
- Jürgen Derschewsky: Biographies of Oldenburg artists
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bakenhus, Gerhard |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 14, 1860 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Great Sea |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 12, 1939 |
| Place of death | Kreyenbrück |