Hans Maria Wingler

Hans Maria Wingler (born January 5, 1920 in Konstanz , † January 19, 1984 in West Berlin ) was a German art historian . Expressionist painting , especially Oskar Kokoschka , and the Bauhaus were among the focal points of his art studies . Wingler founded the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in 1960 , of which he was director until his death.

Life

Hans Maria Wingler experienced childhood and youth in the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism . In the autobiographical essay "A son from a middle-class family" he recalls this formative time in detail:

Wingler was born in Constance in 1920 as the only child of Hans Wingler, an industrial clerk, and Gertrud, née Lange. In 1933 the family moved to Frankfurt am Main because the father's company had been taken over by a Frankfurt company.

The political development in the country was not without consequences for the family. The father was democratically minded and was hostile to National Socialism. The mother, a Baltic German , on the other hand, was described by Wingler in retrospect as initially "anti-liberal" and "anti-bourgeois"; however, she became increasingly critical, joined an American religious community and was temporarily imprisoned. School days were not carefree for Wingler either; he was the only student in his class that did not belong to the Hitler Youth because his father would not allow this.

Wingler's “niche” was art. Since his school days he has attended theaters, concerts and, above all, the Frankfurt museums . His preference was for modernism, especially expressionist and abstract painting , which had since been banned as "degenerate art | degenerate". He could not take the planned trip to the Paris World Exhibition in 1937 because he, the 17-year-old, was refused to leave because of "political unreliability". After graduating from high school in 1938, Wingler began studying art history at the University of Frankfurt . Since he did not belong to any Nazi organization, admission to the course was not a matter of course. In 1939 Wingler spent a semester at the University of Vienna .

The Nazi propaganda exhibition " Degenerate Art " showed hundreds of confiscated works of art of the forbidden modern age in numerous German cities from 1937; for Wingler it was the only opportunity in Frankfurt in 1939 to see New Art, the art of modernism, in public in the original. In 1940 Wingler was drafted into the Reich Labor Service , and in 1941 he joined the Air Force as a radio operator . In 1943 he barely survived the crash of his plane during a maneuver in Italy. This was followed by stays in the hospital, shortly before the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the English, from which he was released in 1945.

Wingler resumed his studies in Frankfurt; until 1948 he was a "scientific assistant" (the official name, because on the one hand he has no academic degree, on the other hand there was no academic graduate at the institute) at the art history institute of the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main also entrusted with the management of the institute, since he had not belonged to any NS party organization and there was no similarly unencumbered professor available. Wingler could not submit the completed dissertation because the academic teachers had been dismissed due to Nazi membership and the appointment of new professors was delayed (The development of historicism in European art, illustrated using examples of architecture from the 17th and 18th centuries to the The beginning of Classicism is primarily concerned with the survival of the Gothic into the 18th and 19th centuries; as a manuscript in the Bauhaus archive.) For financial reasons - Wingler had a wife and children in the meantime - he waived an academic degree and worked since 1949 as a journalist and art writer. Through contacts with contemporary artists - he was in contact with Bernard Schultze until his death - he became an excellent expert on (West) German post-war modernism, Wingler gave lectures and works as an exhibition curator at home and abroad: 1953 in Sweden, where he organized the exhibition "German prints since 1945" at the Göteborgs Konstmuseum . This brought international recognition for Wingler, who in 1954, 1956 and 1958 was responsible as curator for the (West) German contributions to the “International for Contemporary Color Lithography” at the Cincinnati Art Museum (Ohio / USA). From 1954 Wingler devoted himself primarily to the work of the painter Oskar Kokoschka and the Bauhaus.

Wingler's interest in Kokoschka was reinforced as early as 1949 through personal acquaintance with the painter, who was then living in London. Wingler developed - with his then wife Anna Maria Scherwitz - the critical catalog raisonné of the paintings (published in 1956) and edited further publications on the life and work of Kokoschka. In 1975 the oeuvre catalog of Kokoschka's prints was published, which Wingler collaborated with the art dealer and publisher Friedrich Welz to create (the supplementary volume appeared in 1981, after the deaths of Kokoschka and Welz in 1980).

Emil Rasch owner of the wallpaper factory Gebr. Rasch in Bramsche near Osnabrück and since 1929 producer of Bauhaus wallpapers , commissioned Wingler in 1954 to write a commemorative publication "25 years of Bauhaus wallpaper". This resulted in a contract between Rasch and Wingler in 1956 for the creation of documentation on the history of the Bauhaus. Rasch later set up his own printing and publishing house for this book.

Prior to this, Wingler published six books on Expressionist artists at Buchheim-Verlag Feldafing, examples of post-war literature which, in small steps, represented the beginning of the art-historical analysis of modern art of the 20th century.

In 1955, when the Ulm School of Design was opened , Wingler met  the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and former Bauhaus students such as Max Bill . During this time Wingler decided to write a comprehensive work on the Bauhaus theme. From 1957 to 1960 Wingler researched the Bauhaus intensively. He visited archives at home and abroad and made contacts with former Bauhaus members who had been scattered all over the world during the Nazi era, most of whom emigrated or fled.

During the preparatory work for the Bauhaus book, Wingler was unreservedly supported by Walter Gropius, as well as later with the establishment of the Bauhaus archive. Through the mediation of Gropius, he was able to stay as a research fellow at Harvard University at the Busch-Reisinger Museum in Cambridge / Massachusetts (USA) in 1957/58 and 1959/60 . Gropius made his archive materials available for research; the Busch-Reisinger-Museum already had art and documents on modernism, u. a. Bauhaus, collected. During this time Wingler came up with the plan to found his own Bauhaus Institute in Germany.

The support not only of former Bauhaus teachers such as Gropius or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , but also of former students, which Wingler was able to win over for this idea of ​​founding a Bauhaus institute, became important. Wingler was the first to systematically collect the student work from the preliminary course as well as the work from the workshops. Around 1960 he received the first pledges for donations and bequests.

On May 5, 1960, the Bauhaus-Archiv e. V. founded - with the aim of spreading the idea of ​​the Bauhaus and acting as the sponsoring association of a Bauhaus archive. On April 8, 1961, the Bauhaus Archive was opened as an institute and museum on the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt in two rooms of the Ernst Ludwig House. Wingler became its director and ran it until his death in 1984. Since there were now rooms for exhibitions, it was also easier to find donors to donate material for the Bauhaus collection.

After extensive research, which in the 1960s also led to Weimar and Mulhouse in Thuringia in the GDR (at that time only under difficult conditions), Wingler's basic documentation and interpretation Das Bauhaus 1919–1933 Weimar Dessau Berlin was published in 1962. This standard work - in the 2nd edition from 1968 - has been published repeatedly since then. From 1965 Wingler published the "New Bauhaus Books", when he died in 1984 the series contained 17 titles. Wingler is the author or editor of numerous catalogs and other titles, he designed exhibitions and gave lectures on Bauhaus and related topics.

In 1964 Walter Gropius designed a functional building for the Bauhaus archive at Wingler's suggestion, originally planned for the Darmstadt Rosenhöhe . The collection had grown significantly, and adequate presentation and storage was not possible without a new building. The city of Darmstadt was unable to complete the construction for cost reasons. After long negotiations, the sponsoring association accepted the offer of the (West) Berlin Senate to build the Gropius design in the Tiergarten district . In 1971 the Bauhaus Archive moved to West Berlin, where it was initially temporarily housed in Charlottenburg (Schlossstrasse) and since 1979 in its own building on the Landwehr Canal. The name was added to the "Museum of Design".

In 1980 Wingler received an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Munich in recognition of his work for the Bauhaus archive and his research on the Bauhaus .

Wingler's extensive records, his freelance correspondence and his academic legacy are located in the Bauhaus Archive as the Hans Maria Wingler Archive. His private library is located in the German Forum for Art History / Center Allemand d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris.

Death and grave

Grave of Hans Maria Wingler in the Heerstraße cemetery in Berlin-Westend , former Cassirer hereditary burial

Hans Maria Wingler died in January 1984 after a long illness at the age of 64 in Berlin. He was buried in the former hereditary burial of Max Cassirer's family in the state-owned cemetery in Heerstraße in Berlin-Westend (grave location: 7-D-10/11).

The grave wall made of shell limestone blocks, inspired by ancient Egyptian art, was designed by Ernst Lessing. On both sides of the inscription plate, which covers the original grave inscription for Hedwig Cassirer (1862–1928), there are friezes in relief showing two goats on the left and two sheep on the right. They were created based on drawings by August Gaul . The Greek inscription "EN KAI PAN" ("one and everything") for Hans Maria Wingler is intended to remind of his non-denominational religiosity.

The widow Hedwig Wingler had a small terracotta plaque erected on the grave, commemorating members of the Cassirer family.

Services

Wingler was one of the pioneers of exile research in the Federal Republic of Germany even before the term existed. He worked, for example, on the work and life of Oskar Kokoschka and Ludwig Meidner , two expressionists who survived National Socialism as refugees in England. He performed Kokoschka's drama "Orpheus" (written in 1918) in Frankfurt am Main when there were no available publications by the Austrian poet and painter; In 1956 Wingler edited the first edition of his writings after the Nazi era. Since art was vital for Wingler, he went to the studios in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden as an art critic, for example to Bernard Schultze and his friends of the Quadriga artist group , or to Otto Ritschl , an early abstract painter. For the art critic Wingler, the work of art was important as a phenomenon, but also as a product of manual and intellectual activity. The Bauhaus also attracted him because this most important art and architecture school of the 20th century reflected on the “manufacturing” of products, both in a practical and educational sense and in the sense of creative design. Before 1960, in the middle of the Cold War, Wingler did research in the USA, supported by Walter Gropius, but also in the GDR in Weimar and Mulhouse (restricted military area at the time) under difficult conditions; the two German states were at that time without mutual recognition and belonged to two hostile military blocs.

Wingler was fascinated by the idea of ​​creating a better reality through a more beautiful reality, as he understood the Bauhaus. For him, this also included "doing well" the injustice that National Socialism had created through its ostracism of modernity, not to mention the injustice of the displaced, disenfranchised and murdered.

The Bauhaus research was also partly exile research. Wingler visited the "Bauhauslers" in many countries of exile. He even knew how to bring them together with those who were not displaced in what he sometimes called his “experiment”: “Bauhaus archive”. Countless exhibitions, but also many festivals, are evidence of his activity.

The most extensive collection on the Bauhaus and related trends is also not to be overestimated. Wingler was also a pioneer as a collector: Bauhauslers were happy to donate - after initial reservations about him as an “outsider” - especially when the building was secured for the museum. Buying prices for the objects were still relatively cheap around 1960 when the collection was built.

After his death Wingler was called an “early forensic scientist” and he was credited with being an undoctrinal documentator and commentator on the versatile, interdisciplinary Bauhaus ideas. The Bauhaus undoubtedly contained in itself the contradiction to its historical appropriation; The fact that Wingler's role could therefore sometimes be viewed as controversial is confirmation of how vivid this legacy is. In his book on the Bauhaus (still a standard work since 1962) he wrote: “The judgment on the achievements of the Bauhaus will - a sign of its liveliness - be subject to fluctuations for a long time to come ... It would be welcomed if what was expanded here Material used for further… studies. ”The same can be said about the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, which is one of the internationally renowned institutions in Berlin and which keeps the memory of the founding director alive.

Merits

Wingler's achievements and merits are mainly in the areas of expressionist painting and Bauhaus.

Wingler was an interdisciplinary researcher and discoverer, “rehabilitator”, “networker”, collector and curator.

Wingler made elementary contributions to the rehabilitation of German, especially Expressionist art from the so-called interwar period and German art after the Second World War on a German and international level. Above all, the expressionist painting of German-speaking artists should be mentioned here, namely Oskar Kokoschka. In addition, as an art critic and art writer, Wingler visited the studios of contemporary painters from the late 1940s, which was not common among art historians at the time.

Wingler's other special achievement relates to the Bauhaus theme.

Here Wingler has successfully and sustainably combined very different things: Wingler was a scientist, researcher, “tracker and networker” between scattered, former students and teachers, he was an author and editor, collector and curator. Later he was (with his “Bauhaus Archive”) a successful builder and operator of an institute with its own museum building.

Bauhaus research was also exile research long before the term existed in the Federal Republic of Germany. Wingler visited the former “Bauhaus members” in their countries of exile. He also knew how to bring the scattered “alumni” together in what he sometimes called his “experiment 'Bauhaus Archive'”. Countless exhibitions, but also many festivals are evidence of his work.

In one of the numerous obituaries, Wingler was called an "early forensic person", who had the merit of being an "undoctrinal documenter and commentator of the versatile, interdisciplinary Bauhaus ideas".

The fact that Wingler's role is sometimes viewed as controversial is confirmation of how strongly this legacy continues to have an impact.

In his standard work on the Bauhaus, Wingler wrote: “The verdict on the achievements of the Bauhaus will - a sign of its vitality - be subject to fluctuations for a long time. It would be welcomed if the material presented here were used for further studies. "

The same can be said about Hans Maria Wingler and the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, one of the most internationally renowned institutions in Berlin.

Fonts

In total, Hans Maria Wingler is the author and editor of more than 40 publications, including (in chronological order):

• In the series Buchheim-Bücher , Feldafing / Oberbayern, published a. a. The Bridge (1954), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner . 40 woodcuts (1954), Der Blaue Reiter (1954), portrait drawings by Oskar Kokoschka (1954), Der Sturm (1955) and Goethe Walpurgis Night. Woodcuts by Ernst Barlach (1955).
• Oskar Kokoschka - The Painter's Work , Salzburg 1956 (English Oskar Kokoschka - The Work of the Painter , London 1958, and Italian Oskar Kokoschka - La vita e l'opera , Milan 1961).
• Oskar Kokoschka - Schriften 1907–1955 , (edited by Wingler) Munich 1956.
• How they saw each other - Modern painters as judged by their companions , Munich 1957.
• Kokoschka primer , Salzburg 1957; (English: Introduction to Kokoschka , London 1958).
• The Bauhaus 1919–1933. Weimar, Dessau, Berlin and the successor in Chicago since 1937 , Cologne and Bramsche 1962. Extended edition 1968; 3rd edition 1975; (Eng .: The Bauhaus. Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago , Cambridge / Mass. 1969 and 1975, 1978; Japan. Tokyo 1969; Italian. Milano 1971; Spanish. Barcelona 1975).
• The artistic graphics of the Bauhaus - New European Graphics , Mainz 1965; (English: Graphic Work from the Bauhaus , London and New York 1969).
• New Bauhaus books series , Mainz 1965ff., 17 volumes by 1980 (edited by Wingler, including English, Italian, Japanese and Hungarian editions).
• Oskar Kokoschka - The graphic work , (published together with Friedrich Welz ) Salzburg 1975.
• Oskar Kokoschka - The graphic work 1975 to 1980 , supplementary volume, Salzburg 1981.
• Art school reform 1900–1933 , (edited by Wingler) Berlin 1977.
• Small Bauhaus primer. History and work of the Bauhaus 1919–1933 , (edited by Hans Maria Wingler and the Bauhaus Archive Berlin) 2nd, supplemented edition, Berlin 1979.
• Bauhaus Archive Berlin. Museum of Design , in the series Museum des Westermann-Verlag, Braunschweig 1979, ISSN  0341-8634 .

• In addition, editions of more than 35 catalogs and lecture brochures from the Bauhaus archive; Contributions to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Kindler's Painting Lexicon and other compilations as well as numerous lectures, essays and reviews.

• Arrangements for numerous exhibitions for the Bauhaus Archive and other institutes.
• As a member of the preparatory commission responsible for the traveling exhibition 50 Years of Bauhaus (1968), which was shown in Stuttgart, Paris, Chicago, Toronto, Pasadena and Buenos Aires.

literature

• Hans Maria Wingler: A son from a middle-class family. In: Between Resistance and Adaptation - Art in Germany 1933–1945 . Catalog of the Academy of the Arts (Ed.), Berlin (West) 1978, ISBN 3-88331-905-8 , pp. 69-75.
• Manfred Bosch : Hans Maria Wingler. In: Bohème on Lake Constance. Literary life on the lake from 1900 to 1950. Libelle, CH-Lengwil am Bodensee 1997, ISBN 3-909081-75-4 , pp. 109–111.
• JP Hodin : In memory of two great historians of contemporary art. In: Art & Artists. No. 220, London, January 1985, ISSN  0004-3001 .
• Claus K. Netuschil (Ed.): Bauhaus Archive Darmstadt: Balance sheet and global impact. Art Archive Darmstadt eV, Darmstadt 2019, ISBN 978-3-9808630-9-4 .

Web links

Commons : Hans Maria Wingler  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Hans Maria Wingler in the catalog of the German National Library
• bauhaus.de/bauhausarchiv ( Memento from October 23, 1999 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Enrico Santifaller: How Walter Gropius secured his legacy , in: Bauwelt , Heft 10, 2019, accessed on June 1, 2019.
2. ↑ Werner Durth: Value and Change - On the origin and impact of the artists' colony in Darmstadt , in: ICOMOS - Hefte des Deutschen Nationalkomitees, Heft 64, 2018, S. 271-2282, accessed on August 9, 2019.
3. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 . P. 497.
4. ^ Tomb Cassirer / Wingler . In: Jörg Haspel, Klaus von Krosigk (Ed.): Garden monuments in Berlin. Cemeteries . Imhof, Petersberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-86568-293-2 . P. 36.
5. ↑ Birgit Jochens, Herbert May: The cemeteries in Berlin-Charlottenburg. History of the cemetery facilities and their tomb culture . Stapp, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-87776-056-2 . P. 220.
6. ↑ BAUHAUS: Once Heaven , in: Der Spiegel 46/1963, November 13, 1963, accessed on June 1, 2019.
7. ↑ Extract , accessed on August 9, 2019.