Gottfried Andreas Herrmann

Gottfried Andreas Herrmann (* July 23, 1907 in Erlangen ; † December 27, 2002 in Schwangau ) was a German painter whose work can be attributed to "critical realism".

Life

His artistic ambitions were already evident in the humanistic high school “Fridericianum” in Erlangen, where he passed his Abitur in 1926. During this time he was already represented at exhibitions of the Erlanger Kunstverein.

From 1926 to 1928 Herrmann studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Munich, then until 1931 at the Technical University and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. There he passed both the artistic and the pedagogical state examination. During his studies he first came into contact with the art of classical modernism, with drawings by Paul Klee, Picasso and Kandinsky. Soon afterwards, Gottfried Herrmann began to question the traditional way of painting and to deal with the modern. On May 15, 1934, Gottfried Herrmann began his school service at the municipal upper secondary school in Füssen and remained there as an art teacher and high school professor until February 8, 1971.

Artistic work

The human figure forms the main motif in Herrmann's artistic work. In his late work he places people in the reality of a civilization that deforms them. He often portrays people as bandaged, constricted, deformed, broken. Accessories such as sunglasses, targets, tubes, corsets dominate the human figure. The face becomes a mask, a grimace, the world an inferno. The human being is presented as perpetrator and victim.

Gottfried Andreas Herrmann himself assigned his work to " Magical Realism ". For him, it was not about depicting external appearances, but about exposing inner traits, "the representation of sensations between the lines", as he himself put it.

The art educator

Gottfried Herrmann consistently and persistently pursued his very own, individual teaching style. Its main goal was to educate you in an authentic and absolutely sincere representation. The goal was not some form of skill with which one would be able to shine, but the unsophisticated expression of one's own - albeit naive, inexperienced - way of seeing. All other aspects of visual education were subjected to this goal. The teaching of different techniques was undertaken very carefully, so that the individual, authentic of the respective student would not be suppressed in any way. Any form of copying, be it the copying of a realistically reproduced object or a certain artistic style, was strictly prohibited and viewed as a form of fraud. This mainly affected fashionable appearances and comics (which were seen as corruptions of the objects depicted). Sincerity and authenticity were not only the goals of the painter Gottfried Herrmann, but also the goals of the art educator Herrmann. In art history lessons, emphasis was placed on understanding the formal achievements of a picture or sculpture, i.e. H. on the graphic arrangement, the painterly composition, the quality of the colors and color harmonies. This was demonstrated in works from ancient Egypt, Greece, the European Middle Ages and early modern times and above all in the history of painting from the plein-air movement to abstract art. Herrmann showed the transitions from Impressionism (Cézanne, Monet, Renoir to van Gogh and Gauguin) to Cubism and Expressionism and finally to abstraction (in Picasso, Klee, Kandinsky and others) in a vivid and memorable way. Herrmann assumed that for many painters of the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, the object - required by the patron or the church - (e.g. a Christian motif) was secondary, indeed irrelevant. So he trained the eyes of the students, who should also be aware of the composition and color scheme in representational works.

Awards

• Art Prize of the Swabian District, 1968
• Art Prize of the City of Kempten (Allgäu) , 1977
• Federal Medal of Merit, 1978
• Citizen Award of the City of Kempten, 1979
• Culture and Art Prize of the City of Füssen, 1990

literature

• Hans H. Hiebel: Gottfried Herrmann, the painter and graphic artist . In: The new Erlangen issue 89, Dec. 1992.

Exhibition catalogs

• Gottfried Herrmann. Images - graphics. Art show in the Paula-Becker-Modersohn-Haus. Bremen 1964.
• Gottfried Herrmann. Drawings, linocuts in the town hall in 1969.
• Gottfried Herrmann. Black on white. Ballpoint pen drawings since 1970. Kunstkabinett Memmingen 1973.
• Gottfried Herrmann. Pictures and Drawings since 1974. Standard Elektrik Lorenz AG; Stuttgart 1981.
• Gottfried Herrmann. Face and mask. Pictures and drawings. Palais Stutterheim, Erlangen 1982.
• Gottfried Herrmann. Pictures from the last ten years. Galerie Norbert Blaeser Düsseldorf 1986.
• Gottfried Herrmann. The graphic work. Galerie Norbert Blaeser Düsseldorf 1989.
• Gottfried Herrmann. Winner of Culture and Art Prize of the City of Füssen in 1990. Füssen in 1991.