Hans Lünenborg

Hans Lünenborg (born April 20, 1904 in Mönchengladbach ; † April 1, 1990 in Cologne ) was a German painter and glass artist. In particular, he created stained glass windows in churches.

Life

Hans Lünenborg was born the son of a medical councilor. After graduating from high school in 1922, he studied from 1923 to 1925 first at the Kunstgewerbeschule-Krefeld (today: Hochschule Niederrhein ) and then in Hamburg at the state art school (today: Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg ). In 1926/27 he finished his studies at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf and from 1928 worked as a freelance artist in various studios. Under the National Socialists , Lünenborg's works were considered degenerate . He was drafted in 1941 to the military Notwithstanding this assessment of his art and was at war in US - a prisoner of war . In the meantime, during the bombing raids on Mönchengladbach, most of his early work had fallen into flames.

From 1951

In 1951 Lünenborg moved to Cologne , where his younger brother Georg Lünenborg taught as an architecture professor at the Cologne factory schools . In addition to numerous orders, both sacred and profane, mosaics , portraits and pictures, including stained glass for the staircase design of the Cologne Gürzenich , he was co-editor of the Weltwarte newspaper , a supplement to the church newspaper with articles and pictures on the art scene at the time. At the same time, an artist regulars table developed among its visitors, in addition to Lünenborg, also Ewald Mataré (1887–1965). B. designed the entrance portals of Cologne Cathedral . Hans Lünenborg died on April 1st, 1990 in Cologne.

role models

Hans Lünenborg shaped representatives of Expressionism such as Heinrich Nauen (1880–1940), Emil Nolde (1867–1956) or Erich Heckel (1883–1970), and later also the mask paintings by James Ensor (1860–1949). He was friends with Heinrich Campendonk (1889–1957), an artist from the Blauer Reiter group .

plant

Lünenborg's work not only includes pictures in the sense of the classical concept, but also numerous drawings, designs and cardboard boxes for glass windows. The windows he created after the Second World War in the Cologne churches of St. Peter and St. Maria Lyskirchen, as well as St. Antonius in Kevelaer and St. Laurentius in Marmagen deserve special mention . A special feature of Lünenborg's windows is “its extraordinarily expressive, surreal representation with its own symbolism and the special amalgamation of Christian and secular themes” (Nestler [2005], 7). A motif with equally idiosyncratic symbolism are the depictions of insects: flies , beetles , grasshoppers . This peculiarity was even taken up in an article in the Decheniana supplements, which are self-published by the Naturhistorisches Verein Bonn, under the title Insect representations in the work of the Cologne artist Hans Lünenborg. Insects belong to a group of living beings that are usually not referred to as beautiful animals, but rather as vermin or pests and therefore not, from the limited human perspective, are an image of a good creation: the Colorado beetle , a destroyer of crops and trigger of Famines, or the grasshopper, already mentioned in the Old Testament as the eighth plague and a symbol of need and misery (Ex 10.12-15). Viewed in their entirety, the church windows in Lünenborg may make the churchgoer thoughtful, but they do not depress, but point to the destination of our journey.

Web links

Commons : Hans Lünenborg  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Hans Lünenborg in the catalog of the German National Library