Gerhard Fietz
Gerhard Fietz (born July 25, 1910 in Breslau ; † March 4, 1997 in Göddingen ), was a German painter, professor and representative of non-representational painting . He is considered an important painter in Germany in the second half of the 20th century.
As a co-founder of the artist group ZEN 49 , he competed against traditional representational art and, together with painters such as Willi Baumeister , Fritz Winter and Rupprecht Geiger, developed a painting that concentrated on testing artistic means. Fietz exhibited at numerous national and international exhibitions, including the 1955 exhibition in the Cercle Volnay in Paris.
Life
Gerhard Fietz was born on July 25, 1910 in Breslau. After graduating from high school in 1930 Fietz began his studies at the State Academy for Arts and Crafts in Breslau, where he studied with Alexander Kanoldt and Oskar Schlemmer , among others . In 1932 he moved to the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf. In 1937 Fietz became Kanoldt's master student at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. Soon after completing his training and painting stays in the Giant Mountains, on the Baltic Sea and in Schlederloh, Gerhard Fietz was drafted into the war. The 31-year-old fought as a machine gunner from 1941 in the so-called central section of Russia near Orel and Minsk. Fietz remained a private because he refused to become an officer. A battalion doctor helped him to train as a paramedic. His war injury forced him to stay in the hospital in Stolp (Slupsk, Poland) for several months, after which Fietz moved to Schlederloh (Icking).
After stays in Stuttgart and Buch with Illertissen, Gerhard Fietz accepted a position as a guest lecturer in Hamburg in 1953 and 1956 and was appointed professor at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin in 1957; his students there included u. a. the painters and graphic artists Ernst Marow and Karl-Heinz Herrfurth . Between 1965 and 1974, he and his students went on an annual study trip to the Dutch island of Terschelling. After long stays on the island of Cres, Croatia, Gerhard Fietz moved to Göddingen near Bleckede in 1979, where he died on March 4, 1997. His estate was looked after by his wife Anne Fietz (* October 20, 1938, † September 23, 2014).
The Gerhard Fietz House
The Gerhard-Fietz-Haus is located near the Elbe in the small town of Göddingen, one of 14 districts of the city of Bleckede . In 1979 it was converted from a disused potato barn into a spacious residential and studio building. In 1999 the Friends of Gerhard Fietz e. V. and is now showing exhibitions by well-known artists in the extended annex, who were connected to Gerhard Fietz, among others.
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Russia
During the war in Russia, Gerhard Fietz had to deal with the everyday life of war and occupation as well as the otherness of the country and its people. Unusually wide, unspoilt and unsophisticated, he experienced the Russian landscape. He observed and drew and photographed villages, the hut-like buildings and everything that went with them: simple tools, wells, fences, paths. He found the encounter with the Russian people fascinating. With the consent of the models, he drew pictorial portraits of old men and women with their faces marked by life, or young girls, Madonna types with irregular, large, calm features. Drawing became Gerhard Fietz's strategy for survival, he experienced the war, the Russian population, the country subjectively differently than the primitive clichés of war propaganda wanted to lead one to believe. He suffered from the calamities that the war, including himself, brought upon Russia. When he was wounded in the arm, neck and wrist on July 23, 1943, the war was over for him. His paralyzed left hand and trembling right hand were made functional again in the Stolp reserve hospital and through later training. His battalion was wiped out.
"I cannot cope with my judgment about Russia; the longer I am here, the quicker judgments falter. I doubt a lot of things that I had thought too quickly. Russia vacillates in extremes, has so much to love and so much, That is to be rejected. Much in old Europe seems wrong and decadent and unhealthy the longer I recognize the naturalness of Russia. Again and again I feel the whole power and beauty of the Russian behind the other neglect, caused by paralyzing poverty. " (G. Fietz, war diary).
ZEN 49
After 1945, Fietz soon gave up processing the experiences of war on a visual level. He also decided to part with his pre-war work. While looking for a new way of expressing himself, he found a visual language in abstraction that enabled the post-war situation to be clarified and at the same time offered a “new alphabet of understanding” (G. Fietz). The interest shifted from the representation of nature to the testing of artistic means, the functions of color, line, shape in space, possibilities of their relationships and effects on one another. Theoretical studies on the basic elements of painting accompanied the experiments. From then on he consistently avoided titles and numbered his works consecutively.
In October 1949 Fietz and other non-objective artists from southwest Germany founded the ZEN 49 association : Willi Baumeister , Fritz Winter , Rupprecht Geiger , Rolf Cavael , Willi Hempel and the sculptor Brigitte Meier-Denninghoff . As art historical advisors, Dr. Franz Roh , Dr. Ludwig Grote and the later art critic John Anthony Twaites aside. ZEN 49 competed against traditional representational art, rejecting it as reactionary. The name had been agreed because the East Asian cultural area of Buddhism offered a spiritual basis that met the ideas of the members. The group existed for almost five years, and other, now well-known artists from France joined them: Pierre Soulages , Hans Hartung , Gérard Schneider . Gerhard Fietz took part in all ZEN 49 exhibitions.
Abstract
Always new approaches, reflections, experiments with the pictorial vocabulary determine the artistic path of the painter. Shapes appear organoidally or geometrically sharply delimited, figurations are abstract and concrete, structures are relief-like or tachistic. The closed form dissolves, the image space becomes color space. Soon the color takes over the functions of form and line, only to emerge in the end in a structured manner and with a new relief-like expression. The painter now used certain tools for structuring, he sometimes uses tools such as a spatula.
Image of man, Icarus
From 1959 onwards there was a new approach to nature, triggered by work stays on the island of Terschelling and conversations with his students. The tensions of the present - the Vietnam War, the building of the Wall, the conflict in 1968 - let old images rise again, of war, destruction, injuries, experiences with death. Gerhard Fietz brooded over an appropriate image form for the human face. Until the 1980s he dealt with series of heads, with the design of those dream faces that haunted him. There were images of high intensity and extraordinary divergence. In 1965/66, Gerhard Fietz painted five monumental pictures that fit together thematically. The pictures show scenes with groups of figures that put the subject of war on a generally human level. The interior picture (1965/4) evokes associations with open air raid shelters with horror scenarios of the dead, which show signs of madness and long perseverance. "The Companions of Icarus" (1966/1) are a parody of human hubris. Icarus is not an isolated case: anyone who frivolously misuses his power and skills will fall fatally. The third large picture (1966/25) transfers the human tragedy to the animal world and nature. A wounded horse rears up and turns in panic to flee, pursued by a flogging person. With the pathos gesture of the upraised head, it awakens memories of Picasso's Guernica picture. It embodies the suffering of the creature in war, which, however, succeeds in breaking out into freedom.
Geometric
At the beginning of the 1970s, Gerhard Fietz and his colleague friend Helmut Thoma were on the Croatian island of Crés. The experience of Mediterranean light ushered in a new phase of painting, the step towards self-sufficient color, which becomes the subject and content of the painting process on its own. He examined the proportionality of color and of geometric shapes, as well as the possibilities of color within geometric boundaries. In doing so, he increased the coloring, following the laws of contrast effects, increasingly to unbroken, pure tones. Mathematically exact lines, surfaces, triangles, circles, puristic forms determine the work of this time.
Late work
Gerhard Fietz's late work was created after the end of his obligation as a university professor and his move to Göddingen in 1979. In Göddingen, far from the hustle and bustle of the big city, they found design, here he put his philosophical view of life and his reflections in new forms of expression, freer and more colorful Painting around. Modified, large-format compositions were created from motifs and images from the 1940s and 1950s. Some evoke ideas of eruptions or explosions of concentrated energy. The warlike image of 1953 "There are opponents and conflict", 1953/108, changed in the late work of "New Storm", 1990/27. The images of war, the questions about human beings lead to a sphere of the cosmos in old age, are reduced to a physical system of forces. Physics resolves moral and ethical questions about guilt, religion, power and war in an extra-human, supernatural sphere.
Solo exhibitions (selection)
| 1940 | Günther Francke Gallery, Munich |
| 1947 | Gallery Dr. Petzet, Icking |
| 1948 | Modern gallery Otto Stangl, Munich |
| 1950 | Galerie der Spiegel, Cologne | Gallery Springer, Berlin |
| 1954 | Galerie Schüler , Berlin. |
| 1957 | Stedelijk Museum , Amsterdam |
| 1958 | Ulm Museum |
| 1963 | Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven | Art Museum Mülheim an der Ruhr | Kunstamt Charlottenburg, Berlin |
| 1964 | Academy of Arts , Berlin |
| 1979 | Museum for the Principality of Lüneburg |
| 1981 | Kurhaus Hitzacker |
| 1988 | Harthan Gallery, Stuttgart | Art Association Springhornhof, Neuenkirchen | Walther Gallery, Düsseldorf | House of Culture, Mali Losinj, Yugoslavia |
| 1989 | Gallery Dittmar, Hamburg |
| 1990 | Galerie Walther, ART COLOGNE art fair , Cologne |
| 1991 | House on Lützowplatz, Berlin | East German Gallery , Regensburg |
| 1992 | Gallery at Rotkreuzplatz, Munich |
| 1994 | Walther Gallery, Düsseldorf |
| 1995 | Karl & Faber, Munich |
| 1996 | Art Association Schweinfurt |
| 1997 | Fritz Winter Atelier, Dießen |
| 1998 | Fritz Winter House, Ahlen |
| 1999 | Gerhard Fietz House, Bleckede / Göddingen | Gallery Dittmar, Berlin |
| 2000 | Gallery Association Leonberg | Upper Hessian Museum , Giessen |
| 2002 | City Collections Schweinfurt |
| 2003 | Franz Heat House, Munster |
| 2004 | Villa Wessel , Iserlohn |
| 2005 | Munich Swiss Life |
| 2010 | Art Association Schweinfurt |
| 2013 | Neuhardenberg Castle , Brandenburg | Leba City Library, Poland |
| 2014 | Buchheim Museum , Bernried am Starnberger See | Fietz House Göddingen, Bleckede / Göddingen |
Awards
| 1949 | Blevin Davis Prize, Munich |
| 1950 | 1st Ströher Prize, Darmstadt |
| 1951 | 4th Domnick Prize, Stuttgart |
| 1988 | Culture award of the district of Lüneburg |
| 1991 | Lovis Corinth Prize |
literature
- Werner Haftmann: Painting in the 20th Century. Munich 1962.
- Gerhard Fietz. Published by the Museum Association for the Principality of Lüneburg. With a text by Herbert Kessler. Lueneburg 1980.
- Gerhard Fietz - works 1957–1967. Angelika Harthan Gallery. With a text by Brigitte Lohkamp. Stuttgart 1989.
- Gerhard Fietz - retrospective. Published by Galerie Angelika Harthan Stuttgart, Städtische Galerie Leinfelden-Echterdingen, Kulturverein Zehntscheuer Rottenburg, Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen . With a text by Brigitte Lohkamp, texts and autobiographical notes by the artist. 1991.
- Gerhard Fietz on his 85th birthday. Works 1947–1995. Karl & Faber Munich 1995.
- Bruhns, Maike: Pictures of Russia - Artists draw in World War II. With texts by Gerhard Fietz, Theo Wilhelm and Heinrich Christian Meier. Altonaer Museum in Hamburg 1995.
- Gerhard Fietz - The search for the image form of the human face in the mirror of life experiences. With a text by Eckhard Michael. Kunstverein Lüneburg 1999.
- Erich Schneider, Joachim Haas: On the way to the absolute picture. Schweinfurt Museum Writings 68/1996.
- Gerhard Fietz - Approach and Work. Edited by Anne Fietz. With a catalog raisonné. Goddingen 2000.
- Gerhard Fietz - works on paper. Images and texts. In: Schweinfurter Museumsschriften, Vol. 104/2002. Writings of the Friends of Gerhard Fietz, Volume 2002/2003.
- Gerhard Fietz Russia drawings, catalog raisonné II. Gerhard Fietz Circle of Friends, writings of the Gerhard Fietz Circle of Friends, Göddingen 2005.
- Gerhard Fietz Russia drawings, catalog raisonné III. Freundeskreis Gerhard Fietz, publications of the Freundeskreis Gerhard Fietz, Göddingen 2013.
Web links
- Literature by and about Gerhard Fietz in the catalog of the German National Library
- Website of the Gerhard Fietz House
- Participation in exhibitions
- Exhibition Gerhard Fietz in the Wessel-Verein Iserlohn 2004/2005
- Gerhard Fietz: Russia photos, drawings and pictures / Exhibition in the Gerhard Fietz House 2014
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.landkreis-lueneburg.de/Home-Landkreis-Lueneburg/Tourismus-und-Ehrenamt/Auszüge-und-Ehrenamtliche/Ehrenbuch/Ehrenbuch-1/anne-fietz.aspx/myfilter-f/ ( page not more available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Fietz, Gerhard |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 25, 1910 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Wroclaw |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 4, 1997 |
| Place of death | Bleckede |