Gottfried Heinersdorff

Gottfried Heinersdorff (born March 9, 1883 in Berlin , † October 24, 1941 in Mouleydier , France) was a German glass painting and mosaic manufacturer, art patron and art collector. He was a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund and is considered an important reformer of glass painting in Germany.

Life

Gottfried Heinersdorff was on his father's side a grandson of Julius Christlieb Heinersdorff (1805–1877). He was of Jewish descent, but had professed Christianity in the early 1830s and became a Protestant pastor in Moltheinen ( East Prussia ). His paternal grandmother, Joanna Rosalie Friedländer (1806-1889), also converted on November 11, 1826.

His father was Paul Gerhard Heinersdorff (1844–1900), who ran a court bookshop with a publisher in Berlin and had opened a glass art workshop with an art trade in 1875. By the time he died in 1900, the company had already become one of the country's leading stained glass workshops. She created glass paintings for numerous German churches, including the Protestant church in Ranzin (Risen Christ), 1881 for the Protestant church in Elgershausen near Kassel, 1882/1883 for the Protestant church in Lohre near Fritzlar and in 1893 the choir windows of the Protestant church of St. Johannis in Bevern (Holzminden district) . When his father died, Gottfried Heinersdorff took over management of the company at the age of 17.

He initially dealt with the glass painting technique of the Gothic , became a founding member of the arts and crafts reform movement Deutscher Werkbund in 1907 and had good connections to artists such as Henry van de Velde , Hans Poelzig , Lyonel Feininger , Heinrich Vogeler , Paul Scheerbart , Bruno Taut , Carl Otto Czeschka , Johan (Jan) Thorn Prikker and August Endell as well as the art patron Karl Ernst Osthaus . Also in 1907 he produced and designed by artist Max Pechstein , who at that time had a design studio for stained glass windows, mosaics and murals in Dresden, the windows of the Art Nouveau newly built town hall of Eibenstock in Saxony, the first major order Pechstein. Heinersdorff encouraged many expressionist artists by commissioning them with designs for glass art work of all kinds, including windows, mosaic floors, walls, and lights. He was paid for by the fact that the artists gave him pictures with which he then traded.

Thanks to his work, Heinersdorff quickly gained national recognition as one of the best and most innovative glass artists in Germany. From 1908 he also made glass mosaics. From 1908 - on the recommendation of Bruno Paul , the head of the educational establishment of the Royal Museum of Applied Arts in Berlin - Otto Nagel , who later became known as a painter, began his apprenticeship with Heinersdorff, but broke it off in 1910 after he had attended a celebration for the 1st May had been reprimanded. In 1913 Heinersdorff went on a study trip to France with Jan Thorn Prikker . In 1912/13 he worked with Carl Otto Czeschka from Hamburg for the window of the new arts and crafts school at Lerchenfeld in Hamburg (architect Fritz Schumacher ). The collaboration was abandoned because of the complexity of the artistic design of the clear glass windows.

On April 1, 1914, Heinersdorff's art institute for glass painting, lead glazing and glass mosaic merged with the much larger Berlin competitor Deutsche Glasmosaikanstalt Puhl & Wagner , known among other things for the manufacture of the windows and the large gold mosaics of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church , to form the United Workshops for Mosaics and glass painting Puhl & Wagner, Gottfried Heinersdorff . Puhl & Wagner owned their own glassworks and since 1905 the imperial patent on gold mosaic glass, the manufacture of which had been forgotten for centuries. Heinersdorff was not only a partner, but also the artistic director and finance director of the merged company, his partner was August Wagner (1866–1952), whose previous partner Friedrich Puhl left the company with the merger. Also in 1914, Heinersdorff published the basic handbook The glass painting, its technology and its history in the publishing house of Bruno Cassirer . At the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne, Heinersdorff showed much acclaimed glass windows based on designs by Thorn Prikker, which were intended for the Dreiköniginnenkirche in Neuss, but were not installed at the instigation of the Archdiocese of Cologne. Heinersdorff had previously produced windows with Prikker for Peter Behrens' journeyman's house in Neuss. The originals are now in the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld; duplicates are built in.

In 1918 the company merged with the Royal Bavarian Court Mosaic Art Institute, Prof. Theodor Rauecker . The Munich company was henceforth run as a branch of the United Workshops for Mosaic and Glass Painting , Munich-Solln (also called United South German Workshops ).

The different artistic views of the two partners in the company as a whole - Wagner, who was loyal to the emperor, on the one hand, and Heinersdorff, a reformist, on the other - led to conflicts. In 1926 August Wagner prematurely terminated the 15-year partnership agreement. Heinersdorff, however, took legal action, supported by affidavits from Max Pechstein, Franz Becker-Tempelburg and Reichskunstwart Edwin Redslob , which confirmed his importance for the development of the company. Ultimately, Wagner had to withdraw the termination of the contract first. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Wagner succeeded in terminating the partnership agreement by filing an additional criminal complaint against Heinersdorff for alleged "insult and fraud" and with reference to Heinersdorff's Jewish ancestry. The process ended with a settlement in which Heinersdorff undertook not to work as a glass painter again in Germany in exchange for a severance payment that was never fully paid.

On the basis of the Nuremberg Race Laws , Heinersdorff was declared a "half-Jew" in 1935. He was also permanently banned from working in the glass mosaic and glass painting trade. On December 23, 1938, the Berlin Chamber of Crafts informed Heinersdorff that he had been deleted from the craft register at the end of the year and asked him to return the craft card. Deprived of his previous livelihood, he opened a photo studio in Berlin. In 1937, through the intercession of Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht, he and his son took part in an exhibition in Paris. However, neither of them returned to Germany, but instead asked for political asylum there and opened the Ego photo studio in Paris. Her commissions included a portrait of Cardinal Jean Verdier . When Germany declared war on France on September 3, 1939, both Heinersdorffs were to be interned as hostile foreigners. While Eberhard Heinersdorff went into hiding, Gottfried Heinersdorff stayed until January 1940. When the Germans occupied France, the French released all prisoners. Gottfried Heinersdorff fled to the Dordogne to Mouleydier near Bergerac . There he lived in the small "Chateau Les Merles", where, according to the community's death certificate, he died on October 24, 1941 at around 10 p.m., according to the doctor's certificate of cancer. The place of his grave in Mouleydier is no longer known today.

His son Eberhard (called Peter) had emigrated to France with his father and joined the Foreign Legion after the German invasion . He was captured by the Vichy government and interned in Colomb-Bechar in Algeria, where he was later freed by the British and used as a photographer for the Pioneer Corps in Italy. After the war Eberhard first went to Paris, married a Jewish woman, separated from her and went to London in 1946. There he became a well-known advertising photographer under the stage name Peter Dorp. He lived with Elisabeth Chat, both of whom worked for Picture Post , among others . Gottfried Heinersdorff's wife Gertrud and their two daughters moved to the home of their father Otto Bolte in Cappenberg after the bombing raids began on Berlin .

Selection of works

Baptism of Jesus , Neustrelitz City Church (1931)

Almost all of Heinersdorff's windows and other works of art were destroyed in the Second World War.

• 1905–1906: Evangelical Church in Marne (Schleswig-Holstein), completely preserved cycle in the upper storeys, anointing in Bethanien, crucifixion, lamentation of Christ, apparition of the risen Christ to Mary of Magdala
• 1906: Schöneck Castle , completely preserved glazing in the stairwell of the Villenburg
• 1907–1909: Evangelical Church in Behrenhoff (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), stained glass in the choir (Maiestas Domini, Resurrection and Birth of Christ)
• January 1913: Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kansas City (Missouri) , so-called "Munich Window", based on the design of the German-American Mary Fraser Wesselhoeft (1873–1971). The window is the earliest known work by Heinersdorff in North America - and therefore one of the few works that were not destroyed during the war.
• 1916/17: Gutshof Schulze Wischeler in Selm-Netteberge , St. Georgs mosaic (design; execution by Bengsen, Berlin)
• 1920s: Ehrenhof Düsseldorf: Large-scale mosaics in the gate buildings of the complex, large glass windows after Thorn Prikker in the foyer of the Museum Kunstpalast
• 1925: Wall mosaic in the church Zum Vaterhaus in Berlin-Baumschulenweg
• 2011: Completion of the new execution of the window designs for the stairwell in the Grassi Museum Leipzig based on the designs by Josef Albers. First execution by Gottfried Heinersdorff; second by the Peters glass painting in Paderborn.

Fonts

• Gottfried Heinersdorff: The glass painting, its technology and its history. With an introduction and an appendix on modern glass painting by Karl Scheffler. Bruno Cassirer, Berlin 1914

literature

• Annemarie Richter: Gottfried Heinersdorff (1883–1941): A reformer of German glass art . Berlin, Technical University, Faculty 01 - Communication u. History, dissertation, 1983 (3 volumes).
• Helmut Geisert, Elisabeth Moortgat (Red.): Walls made of colored glass. The archive of the United Workshops for Mosaic and Glass Painting Puhl & Wagner, Gottfried Heinersdorff . Berlinische Galerie, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-927873-01-2 (catalog for the exhibition from December 8, 1989– January 21, 1990 in the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin; Contemporary Museum . No. 9).
• Kunst-Museum Ahlen (ed.): Colored light - art and artists in the sphere of activity of the glass painter Gottfried Heinersdorff . Exhibition catalog. ardenkuverlag, Hagen 2001, ISBN 3-932070-35-6 .
• Frank Martin, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Laboratory for glass painting research of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Germany: The Paul Gerhard Heinersdorff workshop . In: Glass paintings in the churches of St. Jacobi, Greifswald, St. Marien and St. Nikolai, Rostock. A project of the German Federal Environment Foundation . Leipzig 2005, pp. 25-40. ISBN 3-361-00594-9 .
• Bettina Berendes: "Carl Otto Czeschka - Beauty as a Message". The stained glass window of the Hamburg School of Applied Arts, 2005 (with correspondence between Gottfried Heinersdorff and Carl Otto Czeschka)

Web links

• Literature by and about Gottfried Heinersdorff in the catalog of the German National Library
• Portrait photographs of Gottfried Heinersdorf in his youth and in old age .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bettina Berendes: Carl Otto Czeschka - beauty as a message. Kiel 2005