Hans Bönnighausen

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Hans Bönnighausen (incorrect spelling Hans Bönninghausen documented in one case (born June 17, 1906 in Dortmund ; † May 3, 1988 in Cologne ) was a German painter and vagabond .

Life

Hans Bönnighausen came from the house of a mineral water manufacturer. After graduating from school, he did a bookbinding traineeship and got a job in a publishing bookstore. But wanderlust and a certain penchant for fugue (as the scientists call it) made him a vagabond of his own free will. He himself wrote about it later in the Vagabunden-Zeitung: “Parents and brothers gave up on the eternally discontented. And since he even left his position in life ... they thought he was the prodigal son ... He became a complete scoundrel. A free person, vagabond, seeker of home ” .

Foundation of the artist group

At that time he wandered in the summer months, in the winter months he studied at the Stuttgart Art Academy until 1928 . Here in Stuttgart he also met Hans Tombrock and Gregor Gog , as well as Gerhart Bettermann (1910–1992), all of whom were co-founders of the artist group of the Brotherhood of Vagabonds (1927–1933). In 1929 Hans Bönnighausen took part in the 1st Vagabond Meeting in Stuttgart and in the Vagabund art exhibition at the Kunsthaus Hirrlinger. Then he wandered through Yugoslavia, Italy and Greece. In 1931 he took part in the First Great Leipzig Art Exhibition. In the same year he married Helene Harnisch, with whom he had a son named Rudolf. Bönnighausen also played a small role with Tombrock in the feature film Der Vagabund (Germany 1930) directed by Fritz Weiß .

Wanderings

In 1932 Hans Bönnighausen went hiking again, this time in Egypt and North Africa. He and his colleagues sold numerous pictures. “We finally lived there once,” he wrote. In 1933 Bönnighausen's second son, Klaus, was born. After the Nazis came to power, the vagabond movement was crushed. Hans Bönnighausen went into internal emigration. From 1933 to 1940 he was a member of the Leipziger Künstlerverein, his pictures were exhibited in Leipzig. In 1940 he was drafted as a soldier and became a prisoner of war.

Sedentariness

After the end of the Second World War , the Ministry of the State Government of Brandenburg appointed him to Potsdam. Hans Bönnighausen became a speaker for fine arts and lecturer for art education at the Brandenburg State University. From 1949 to 1952 he was state chairman of the Association for the Protection of Visual Artists. He hoped to be able to continue his social engagement in the Soviet occupation zone, but he failed because of the conflict between socialist demands and the bureaucratic hurdles and ideological goals that his ideals were not up to.

In 1953 he resigned from all offices at his own request and moved to Karlsruhe . He became a member of the Badischer Kunstverein and took part in Documenta 1 together with artists from Karlsruhe in 1955 . In 1961 Hans Bönnighausen moved to Cologne. At first he worked as a freelancer, then from 1966 to 1976 he worked as a specialist teacher for art and craft education at the secondary school in Düren . After his retirement he lived as a freelance artist in Cologne.

Works

In his artistic works, woodcuts, linocuts and drawings, Hans Bönnighausen primarily depicted simple people in their working world and survival on the street (" coking workers ", " homecoming from the catch " or the " crouching ", the " beggars. " “), The realism of his artistic attitude saved him from succumbing to ideologies, his drawings from his time as a soldier reflect the destructiveness of martial violence. Again and again, workers and the homeless, ordinary people, are the focus of the paintings.

estate

The Fritz Hüser Institute for Literature and Culture in the Working World in Dortmund has the estate of Hans Bönnighausen, which consists of around 160 wood and linocuts, drawings and watercolors as well as 50 printing plates.

literature

  • Art and culture in the Gulliver: Hans Bönnighausen - A painter's drift , an exhibition by the Fritz Hüser Institute, Edition KARO DAME.
  • Klaus Trappmann (ed.): Landstrasse, customers, vagabonds. Gregor Gog's League of the Homeless , Gerhardt Verlag, Berlin 1980.
  • Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Ed.): Residence: Nirgendwo - About life and survival on the street , Verlag Frölich and Kaufmann, Berlin 1982.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the article on Hans Bönninghausen in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors )
  2. ↑ Vagabunden Fritz-Hüser-Institut on dortmund.de, accessed on September 21, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Bönnighausen, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bönnighausen, Johannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and vagabond
DATE OF BIRTH June 17, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Dortmund
DATE OF DEATH May 3, 1988
Place of death Cologne