Grete Jahr-Queißer

Grete Jahr-Queißer (born December 28, 1899 in Strehlen , † November 4, 1978 in Marburg ), b. Margarethe Queißer, was a German painter and graphic artist.

life and work

Margarethe (Grete) Queißer grew up in the small town of Strehlen, which is around 40 km from Breslau, as the daughter of a senior civil servant. Both she and her three brothers received a good education. In 1918 Grete Queißer began to study art at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Breslau . At the former Royal Art and Trade School, women had not only been admitted to the drawing teacher seminar since the 1880s, but also to training as painters, sculptors and craftsmen. The Matisse student Oskar Moll taught there from 1918, and Otto Mueller received a professorship a year later . Queißer first studied with Moll, then switched to Mueller, where she was accepted as a master class student in 1923. In 1925, Mueller gave her a state scholarship that allowed her to travel through Italy.

Towards the end of her studies, she married Walther Jahr, who gave up his job as an authorized signatory to become a writer. After graduating from the art academy, Jahr-Queißer set up her own studio in Wroclaw. Numerous commissioned portraits of people from Wroclaw society and their children formed a solid basis for this. Grete Queißer used a wide variety of techniques for the portraits, which she mainly painted in the contemporary style, for example in pencil, charcoal, red chalk, pastel, watercolor and oil. Very early on, she was a member of the newly founded Silesia group in GEDOK . As a larger commission, she created a Christian mural for the hall of the First Church of Christ religious community in Breslau. In addition to the commissioned work, landscape paintings, still lifes, book illustrations and woodcuts formed her portfolio. In her freelance works, based on her teacher Otto Mueller, she worked preferably in an expressionistic way.

In 1945 she fled with her husband and two daughters from Breslau to Thuringia, where the family settled in Suhl . She had to leave her works in her house in Wroclaw and they are considered lost. Walther Jahr and Grete Jahr-Queißer got involved in the newly founded Kulturbund for the democratic renewal of Germany and took part in the organization of the culture week in Suhl in May 1946. Walther Jahr died in the winter of 1946/1947. Grete Jahr-Queißer, who in the meantime had also given birth to a son, continued to be involved in the Suhl Culture Weeks , created commissioned portraits, for example produced a series of woodcuts that reproduced the various works in a nearby factory, and also accepted orders for advertising graphics. In 1950, together with a painter colleague, she received the order for two large framed wall paintings for the community of Suhl, which thematized the founding of the GDR.

In 1952 she moved to Hesse to live with her two smaller children in the immediate vicinity of her eldest daughter Helga, who is now studying in Marburg. In Marburg she joined the Marburg Artists' Circle and regularly took part in its group exhibitions. Jahr-Queißer also joined the Kulturwerk Schlesien eV and the Nordostdeutsche Künstler-Einigung eV in order to make their art known to a wider public in the large exhibitions that were organized by these associations at that time. She received further funding from the Federal Ministry of the Interior, which bought six of her pictures from the funding pool for displaced and refugee artists in the years 1962–1966. Grete Jahr-Queißer worked as an artist until her death in 1978.

literature

• For biographical information see Irene Ewinkel: Grete Jahr-Queißer. In: Irene Ewinkel (ed.): The other life. Review of Marburg artists. Marburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-942487-06-1 , pp. 192–203 as well as a short handwritten biographical outline by Grete Jahr-Queißer, Marburger Kunstverein archive.
• Johanna Brade : painting / hand drawing. Tradition versus modernity: academic painting and drawing lessons in times of change. In: Modern workshops. Teacher and pupil of the Breslau Academy 1903–1932. Halle an der Saale 2004, ISBN 978-3-89923-061-1 , p. 92.
• Teresa Laudert: About the liberal atmosphere at the academy and Otto Mueller. Memories of the painter and graphic artist Grete Jahr-Queißer. In: Dagmar Schmengler u. a. (Ed.): Painter. Mentor. Magician. Otto Mueller and his network in Breslau. Kehrer, Heidelberg a. a. 2018, ISBN 978-3-86828-873-5 , pp. 278-285.
• Role change. Women artists in Silesia around 1880 to 1945 (exhibition catalog), Görlitz 2009, ISBN 978-3-938583-44-9 , p. 29.
• Rainer Zimmermann: Visit to the studio: Inspired by Otto Mueller. A portrait of the painter Grete Jahr-Queißer. In: Oberhessische Presse, August 21, 1965.
• Name abbreviation uh: the variety of topics is impressive. Grete Jahr-Queißer exhibits. In: Oberhessische Presse, October 13, 1978.
• Helga Bernsdorff: With courage and imagination. The Marburg painter Grete Jahr-Queißer would now have been 100 years old. mex (Marburg extra), No. 53, December 29, 1999.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biographical information see Irene Ewinkel: Grete Jahr-Queißer. in: Irene Ewinkel (ed.): The other life, pp. 192–203.
2. ^ Johanna Brade: Painting / hand drawing, p. 92; Role change, p. 29.
3. ^ Zimmermann: Visit to the studio. In: Oberhessische Presse, August 21, 1965.
4. ↑ Change of roles, p. 115.