Han Coray

Pestalozzi School in Zurich-Hottingen, today a cantonal laboratory

Mural by Hans Arp at the entrance to the Pestalozzi School, 1916

Han Coray (born April 26, 1880 in Thal SG ; † October 23, 1974 in Agnuzzo ), actually Karl Heinrich Ulrich Anton Coray , also Han Coray-Stoop and Heinrich Corray , was a Swiss educationalist and art collector.

Life

Han Coray was born the son of a doctor and a nurse. The father had already left the mother at birth, which Karl Heinrich Coray and his sister gave to relatives. After her mother's death, Coray was sent to the St. Gallen orphanage . There he was supported by the householder to such an extent that he was able to enter the Unterstrass teacher training college in Zurich . After attending the Protestant teachers' seminar and acquiring the teaching license, he worked as a primary school teacher in the canton of Zurich from 1904 , initially for four years in the community of Wald and then in Kilchberg . During his time in Kilchberg, Coray became a pioneer of forest education , as he took his primary school classes outdoors every Wednesday afternoon for forest school lessons. He published his experiences with eight- and nine-year-old schoolchildren under the name "Heinrich Corray" in the book Neulandfahrten . In this book he explains his concept of the forest school .

From the spring of 1912 Coray acted as director of the Beust'sche private school in Zurich, which had to be closed in autumn. In 1913/14 a three-story school building was built in the still rural Zurich Hottingen, based on Coray's designs. Until 1917 he took over the management of this also private Pestalozzi School.

Coray's idea was to set up two guest apartments and a studio on the top floor and to make it available to needy cultural workers free of charge. Hermann Huber , Johann Wilhelm von Tscharner , Gregor Rabinowitsch , Leonhard Frank , Friedrich Glauser and Emmy Hennings lived in the studio apartment until 1918 . He helped other artists ( Otto van Rees , Hans Arp , etc.) by buying works from them, commissioning illustrations for his publications or making the hall in the schoolhouse available for readings, lectures, concerts and dance performances.

From 1916 to 1917 he was the owner of the Coray gallery in Zurich and Basel, where he exhibited works by the avant-garde and the Dadaists . At the same time he separated from his wife Domenica, with whom he had three children, including the later designer and creator of the Landi chair, Hans Coray . He quit his well-paid position as school director in August 1917. Due to high debt, he had to give up his work as a gallery owner. He then worked as a book and art dealer in Zurich until 1919. He was the first sponsor of Max Gubler and Ignaz Epper .

At the age of forty Coray married his second wife Dorrie Stoop, daughter of a Dutch oil magnate. During the almost ten-year marriage, Coray amassed an immense, but second- to third-class art collection. He had to liquidate the collection after his wife's suicide in 1928, with great loss. From 1919 to 1928 he built a private museum for European art from the 15th to 18th centuries on his country estate in Erlenbach . Century. Coray was the first Swiss to also collect African art . Parts of his Africa collection are now in the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich and in the Museum Rietberg in Zurich.

From 1930 he lived in Agnuzzo , where he built the Hotel Casa Coray and furnished it with remnants of his collection and newly acquired objects.

Works

As Heinrich Corray

• The companion. Yearbook for 1913. Meyer, Leipzig / Aarau / Vienna 1912.
• Sheaves and wreaths. Good art and literature for school and home. Meyer, Leipzig 1912.
• New land drives. A book for parents, teachers and children. Meyer, Leipzig 1912.
• The companion. Yearbook for 1914. Trüb, Aarau 1913.
• Brave and loyal. Images from Swiss history. Huber, Frauenfeld / Leipzig 1916.

As Han Coray

• The life. Poems. Orell Füssli, Zurich 1928.
• What was left. Poems. Casa Coray, Agnuzzo 1961.

bibliography

• Eberhard Bolay, Berthold Reichle: Forest pedagogy: manual of forest-related environmental education. Part 1: Theory. Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, Baltmannsweiler 2007, ISBN 978-3-8340-0311-9 .
• Markus Bürgi: Han Coray. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . March 1, 2005 , accessed February 22, 2020 .
• Rudolf Koella: The Lives of Han Coray. Scheidegger and Spiess, Zurich 2002, ISBN 978-3-85881-137-0 .
• Jürgen Oelkers: Reform Education. 4th, completely revised and expanded edition. Juventa Verlag, Weinheim / Munich 2005, ISBN 3-7799-1525-1 .
• Klaus Seeland: Limits of the sensory experience for forest education. In: Swiss journal for forestry. October 1999, pp. 378-381.

Web links

• Kilchberg's school - yesterday, today and tomorrow , chapter The forest school of a Kilchberg teacher (p. 11 of the PDF).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Urs Steiner: Biography of a possessed person . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , January 15, 2002.
2. ↑ Neue Zürcher Zeitung of January 11, 1999: How the first abstract murals were created in Zurich  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.