Gustav Marx by sons

Gustav Marx von Sons (* 1882 in Vohwinkel near Elberfeld (today Wuppertal ); † 1960 near Heidelberg ) was a German painter .

Life

Gustav Marx von Sons was born in Vohwinkel near Elberfeld (now Wuppertal) in 1882 as the son of a manufacturer. Gustav Marx von Sons went to the Kassel Art Academy and studied there as a student of Louis Kolitz and Hermann Joseph Knackfuß . He developed a preference for Cézanne at an early age, but also for painters of northern German landscapes such as Fritz Overbeck and Fritz Mackensen. In addition to academy pieces, including portrait drawings as well as bird and anatomy studies from the period from 1906 to 1908, there are various pencil drawings from free hand that document his early wanderings. Several of them were created in the area around Kassel, others also elsewhere, including some with the location Buchenau, where he was repeatedly a guest in the castle of the same name of Baron Schenk zu Schweinsberg (province of Hesse-Nassau) (demonstrably in December 1906 and - probably - in autumn 1910, when he stopped several times along the Werra during the months of September and October to draw, including in (Bad) Sooden-Allendorf and in Fürstenstein).

In the years that followed, the places where he worked as a painter often have in common that they can be easily reached by train. In the period between 1910 and 1912, Marx von Sonen stayed temporarily in Fischerhude, where Otto Modersohn had settled in 1908 (Worpswede, which Overbeck had given up in 1905 in favor of Bracken at Vegesack and which Mackensen had left with for a decade in 1908 only from the end of 1910 via rail connection). Usually in the period of spring or early summer, Marx von Sons made several trips to the area around Varel in the then Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, where the now drained Büppelmoor, its gnarled bog birches, peat cutters and its gnarled bog birches, peat cutters and bog trees stretched south of the place in the last years before the First World War He repeatedly took peat piled up to dry with lead, watercolor and oil. The famous mill at Dangast was also held in lead. Further trips led to the area of ​​the East Frisian Islands , to Holland and probably also to Belgium , to northern France and Italy (captions allow the itinerary of these trips to be traced at least in outline until the autumn / winter of 1913), and only found in 1922 the painter returned to Fischerhude and Worpswede . In the meantime, he married in 1914, but separated again a short time later.

During the First World War , Marx von Sons served with the rank of lieutenant of the reserve as an artilleryman in a measuring troop division. On the western front he was stationed at Nancy and Verdun , then transferred to Tarnopol on the eastern front. There he was wounded and released to Heidelberg, where he was treated in the hospital in the town hall. In 1915/16 he came to the Bad Soden area as an officer; then he spent a spa stay in Langenzell Castle / Wiesenbach near Heidelberg . Promoted to captain, after the end of the war he was able to continue his painting activity primarily in north, north-west and central Germany: By giving details of places on several of his works from the period after the First World War , travel to Emden and Greetsiel in 1920 and 1921, to Fischerhude and Worpswede in 1922 and 1923 (initially via Recke near Rheine), finally in 1923 to the German North Sea coast north of Wilhelmshaven ( Horumersiel ) and, one year later, before the opening of the Hindenburgdamm in 1927, to Sylt (1924). From 1925, immediately after the Locarno treaties , Marx von Sons began to paint abroad again, above all by the sea, especially in northern France around Le Havre . In this and the following year he visited Fécamp , Étretat and Honfleur near the Seine estuary; In 1930, the search for a motif led him to the Gulf of St. Malo, as soon as he had returned from his second trip to Italy to Lake Lugano (1929).

In 1931 or 1933, Marx married a second time (one child was born from this marriage). Dated works from the 1930s appear to be completely absent. A large-format painting in oil for a passenger steamer that was sunk in the Second World War is probably one of the most spectacular works by Marx von Söhnen from this period. He spent most of the Second World War in Haan near Düsseldorf . But various trips, of which the artist's notes and notes exist, took him during the war years to the German low mountain range, especially near the Knüll (for example in April 1941), to the Eifel (1942), to the Bergisches Land, to the Büdinger Forest , the Taunus and the landscape between Solling and Harz (all in 1943) and back to the Marburg area (1945).

After his second marriage, Marx von Sons worked briefly as a teacher at the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts . In 1951, memories of the Heidelberg hospital stay or his cure above Neckargemünd led him back to Heidelberg, where he settled first in Dilsberg, then in Eberbach.

His artistic estate, including a third edition by Rainer Maria Rilkes Worpswede (Leipzig 1910), was acquired by a couple from Heidelberg, who were art dealers.

Works in public collections

• From the Heydt Museum, Wuppertal
• Two pictures in the municipal gallery in Wuppertal (after Vollmer)

literature

• Marx of sons, Gustav . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 3 : K-P . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1956, p. 340 .

Web links

• Gustav Marx von Sons on artnet