Gustav Wunderwald

Self-Portrait, 1914.

Gustav Wunderwald (* 1. January 1882 in lime ; † 24. June 1945 in Berlin ) was a German stage and new objective painter of modernity . The National Socialists branded his art as " degenerate " and banned him from working.

life and work

Gustav Wunderwald was the son of the gunsmith Karl Wunderwald and his wife Adelheid, b. Hirtz. His uncle was the Düsseldorf flag painter Alex Wunderwald, whose children Wilhelm and Ilna also became artists. Gustav Wunderwald began an apprenticeship (1896–1898) with the Cologne master painter Wilhelm Kuhn, switched as a backdrop painter (1899–1900) to Prof. Max Brückner in Gotha and was a painter at Georg Hartwig & Co.'s studio for theater painting from 1900 to 1904, Berlin-Charlottenburg, active. From 1904 to 1907 he worked as a set designer at the Royal Stockholm Opera and from 1907 to 1908 he was a member of the "Drama and Music Board" of the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus under Louise Dumont and Gustav Lindemann . It was there that he made his exhibition debut, and he met his long-time friend, the Rhenish writer and playwright Wilhelm Schmidtbonn (1876–1952). In May 1908 he married Amalie Minna Gerull (1881–1941). He spent 1908/09 with her and the Schmidtbonn couple in Tegernsee - for a short time August and Elisabeth Macke from Bonn also lived in the Villa Brand there.

He gave up his position in Düsseldorf, which earned him recognition from well-known theater experts, to initially work and live “in nature” for a year. He ended this phase of life, which he understood as an “experiment”, in 1909 when he briefly worked as a “member of the technical staff” at the Tyrolean State Theater in Innsbruck . As early as 1910 he moved to Freiburg , where he held the position of "studio head of the painter's room" at the city ​​theater until 1911 . In March 1911, he participated in an exhibition by the Freiburg Art Association. In 1912, Wunderwald made the career leap to Berlin: Wunderwald worked as a decorative painter at the German Opera House in Berlin-Charlottenburg until 1917 . However, this activity was interrupted from 1915 to 1918 due to his front-line deployment in what was then Macedonia during the First World War.

From 1919 he lived as a freelance painter in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Up to the First World War, realistic paintings and drawings of landscapes in the Rhineland, Tyrol, Black Forest, Havel and East Prussia as well as figurative pictures of his wife, family members and war comrades were created in addition to stage sets . In 1918, Wunderwald realized his lifelong dream: he became a freelance painter in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

In 1924, the Berlin art and bookshop Landsberg organized its first extensive solo exhibition with 20 issues; In 1925 and 1926, Wunderwald was represented at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition , and from 1927 at numerous national exhibitions with works on the subjects of Berlin industrial landscapes in Moabit and Wedding, street canyons in Prenzlauer Berg, tenement houses, back houses and yards in Spandau, bridges, underpasses, train stations , Billboards, but also villas in Charlottenburg, rural areas in the immediate vicinity of Berlin, Havel, Spree and East Prussian landscapes. He reduced people to the role of anonymous back figures.

These Berlin city vedutas , formulated from 1925 to 1930 in a realistic, documentary style language, form Wunderwald's outstanding artistic achievement in accordance with his creative motto: "The most dreary things have done to me and are in my stomach, Moabit and Wedding grab me the most, this interesting sobriety and Desolation ”(1926). The art critic Paul Westheim (1886–1963) dedicated a monographic essay to Wunderwald in 1927 on the occasion of the group exhibition “The Face of Berlin 1926” in the Berlin gallery Neumann & Nierendorf in the January issue of the “Kunstblatt” he published and characterized it as “Berliner Utrillo ”, a label that really flattered Wunderwald.

The Great Berlin Art Exhibition in 1934 marked the end of Wunderwald's exhibition activities. During the time of National Socialism , his works were rejected by the Nazi rulers as so-called degenerate art , from 1934 he was neither allowed to exhibit nor sell works because his painting style was in contrast to art under National Socialism . By coloring advertising films for Ufa and the Mars film, Berlin-Ruhleben, he tried to contribute his part to the living, which of course was largely covered by his wife, a seamstress. After her death in 1941, Wunderwald married Berta Ludwig (1900–1990).

Gustav Wunderwald died after being poisoned with water on June 24, 1945 at the age of 63 in Berlin. He was buried in the Heerstrasse cemetery in Charlottenburg in what is now the Westend district . The grave was leveled in 1970.

The rediscovery of Wunderwald after the Second World War was initiated by the Berlin Art Office director Friedrich Lambart in 1950 with the retrospective "Berlin in Pictures" in the Tiergarten town hall. This was followed by solo exhibitions in Berlin (Haus am Lützowplatz, 1962, and Galerie Bassenge, 1971/72), Munich (Galerie Gunzenhauser, 1972) and, from 1965, as a result of the growing interest in the art of New Objectivity, participation in numerous national and international group exhibitions. The most comprehensive solo exhibition was realized by the Berlinische Galerie in 1982 and the Städtische Galerie Albstadt in 1982/83 on the occasion of the painter's 100th birthday.

Wunderwald's painterly oeuvre includes around 180 paintings, most of which are in German private ownership or in the possession of the following museums: Berlinische Galerie , Berlin; New National Gallery , Berlin; City Museum Berlin; City Museum Bonn ; Hessisches Landesmuseum , Darmstadt; Theater studies collection of the University of Cologne ; Art forum Ostdeutsche Galerie , Regensburg.

literature

• Wilhelm Schmidtbonn: The right to the name. In: The Schaubühne, April 8, 1909.
• Oskar Maurus Fontana: Gustav Wunderwald. In: Der Merker, 1st year, issue 16, 1910.
• Paul Westheim: Gustav Wunderwald. In: Das Kunstblatt, 11th year, volume 1., 1927.
• Fritz Burger: Introduction to Modern Art. Potsdam 1928.
• Felix Dargel: Berlin without make-up. In: Depesche, July 25, 1950, No. 89.
• Wilhelm Schmidtbonn: Gustav Wunderwald. In: Kurt Loup (Ed.): The festive house. The Dumont-Lindemann theater in Düsseldorf. Mirror and expression of time. Cologne / Bonn 1955.
• Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke: Memory of August Macke. Stuttgart 1962.
• Wieland Schmied: New Objectivity and Magical Realism in Germany 1918–1933. Hanover 1969.
• Wunderwald calendar 1982. Texts: Hildegard Reinhardt and Eberhard Roters. Published by the Information Center Berlin. Berlin 1981,
• Berlinische Galerie and Städtische Galerie Albstadt (ed.): Gustav Wunderwald, paintings, hand drawings, stage designs. An exhibition for the 100th birthday of the artist. Berlin 1982 (Auss. Cat.).
• Hildegard Reinhardt: Gustav Wunderwald. Life and painterly work. In: Gustav Wunderwald. The painter and the stage. 1882-1945. Exhibition catalog of the Theater Studies Collection University of Cologne. Cologne 1995.
• Hildegard Reinhardt: Gustav Wunderwald (1882–1945). Investigation of the visual artistic complete works. Olms Verlag, Hildesheim / Zurich / New York 1988, ISBN 3-487-09079-1 .
• Hildegard Reinhardt: Gustav Wunderwald (1882–1945). Portraitist of Berlin in the twenties. In: Die Kunst, H. 9, Munich 1985.
• Städtische Galerie Albstadt and Berlinische Galerie (ed.): Gustav Wunderwald. Paintings, hand drawings, stage sets. An exhibition for the 100th birthday of the artist. Berlin 1982.
• Hildegard Reinhardt (ed.). Gustav Wunderwald and Wilhelm Schmidtbonn. Documents of a Friendship 1908–1929. Bonn 1980 (publications by the Bonn City Archives).
• Gustav Wunderwald. The painter and the stage 1882–1945. Texts: Joachim Geil and Hildegard Reinhardt (Auss. Cat.). Edited by the Institute of Theater Studies at the University of Cologne. Cologne 1995,

Web links

Commons : Gustav Wunderwald  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Gustav Wunderwald in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gustav Wunderwald. Painter, set designer . Short biography at http://www.berlin.friedparks.de/ . Retrieved November 22, 2019.