Hans Rickers

Hans Rickers (born September 10, 1899 in Itzehoe , † August 23, 1979 in Kiel ) was a Schleswig-Holstein landscape painter , whose works were widely recognized in Kiel, among other places.

resume

Hans Rickers was born as the eldest child of the journeyman painter Johannes Rickers and his wife Elisabeth. The later journalist Karl Rickers was his brother. Hans Rickers attended elementary school ("Bürgererschule") and from 1914 to 1917 did an apprenticeship as a clerk with Gerlach, a lawyer and counselor, until he went to the Navy in 1917 as a war volunteer .

After the end of the war in 1918, he returned ashore to work in the old Kiel Naval Academy . In Itzehoe, Rickers remained unemployed for the time being until he was recruited into the Lockstedter camp and finally there for a volunteer corps. However, he was released on request and returned to Itzehoe to work in the office of a network factory. Based on his first independent attempts at drawing during his childhood, Rickers turned seriously to painting and in the summer of 1923 was able to take part in an exhibition (the Itzeho painters' association in the Villa de Vos) with his own landscape and Itzeho city images.

In 1924 he moved to Kiel, where he attended the crafts and arts and crafts school from October 1, 1924 to Easter 1927 . He did his main training in the wood carving class and also attended a large number of classes in the nude and sculpture class. In 1929 the freelance artist, who then mainly worked in landscape painting with oil and watercolor , married Luise Schewe.

From 1928 Rickers was increasingly involved in exhibitions until 1933 when he was disqualified in artistic performance by Nazi “art experts” in Kiel. This was justified mainly with the exhibition of a construction worker sculpture that did not correspond to the National Socialist ideas, which ultimately led Rickers to turn more towards wood carving.

Werkgemeinschaft Kieler Künstler with (from left): Erwin Hinrichs , Leonore Vespermann and Hans Rickers

In the mid-thirties he also turned to watercolor painting using the wet-on-wet technique and joined forces with the painter Leonore Vespermann (Kiel) and the painter Erwin Hinrichs (Rendsburg) to form the watercolor group of the Kiel Artists' Association. In 1938 they were joined by Erich Duggen . The Kieler Werkgemeinschaft existed until the outbreak of war. The artists often worked together, especially on the North Sea on the Eiderstedt peninsula. The work results were shown at joint exhibitions in Liegnitz, Kiel, Hamburg and Wilhelmshaven.

In August 1943 Rickers was drafted into the Wehrmacht . After deployments in the Kiel area, he was still deployed in Finnish waters in 1943. At the instigation of his commanding officer, Rear Admiral Böhmer, the painter was now active as a landscape painter in the Finnish and Estonian coastal areas, whereby Rickers continued his watercolor landscape painting, which he had already started in 1929 with Schleswig-Holstein west coast landscapes.

After the withdrawal from Finland in 1944, the fleet returned to Kiel. In the same year, a bomb attack completely destroyed his studio on Feldstrasse, which destroyed most of the oil paintings and sculptures from the time before the war . A year later, the apartment at Moltkestrasse 46 (Kiel) was completely destroyed.

After the end of the war in May 1945 he was interned in Kiel until July and from there released as a "farmer" to his own small property in Brekendorf ( Hüttener Berge ), where he continued his painting work under unfavorable living conditions with watercolors of landscapes and flowers. In 1948 Rickers returned to Kiel, where he depicted Kiel's rubble landscape in a series of thirty watercolors. The then Lord Mayor Andreas Gayk arranged for the city of Kiel to purchase these watercolors. Then the artist painted numerous landscapes and cityscapes , still lifes and portraits in oil and casein technique .

After 1950 Rickers was commissioned with the design of several wall paintings , mosaics and ceramics, u. a. for the dining room of the Stadtwerke Kiel and the northern entrance to the Canal Tunnel in Rendsburg .

In 1954, the state of Schleswig-Holstein thanked him with the award of the state art prize . Since that year the artist has used the graphic technique of the monotype for the motif circle of satirically oriented scenarios as well as landscape ideograms and animal glossaries. On Ricker's 60th and 70th birthday, exhibitions were held in the Kiel art gallery and in the university library.

Above all, the state government, the city of Kiel, the Landesbank and the metal workers 'association in Frankfurt endeavored to buy Rickers' works.

style

At the beginning of his artistic activity, Rickers mainly devoted himself to his work as a sculptor, until he was finally disqualified by a Nazi art critic in 1933 (see curriculum vitae) and at the end of the 1920s painting and drawing moved to the fore in the artistic work of the freelance artist.

In the early 1930s, Rickers became increasingly interested in oil and watercolor painting. The color palette was initially very meager until the color abundance increased later. The main motifs were landscapes and harbors in Schleswig-Holstein. In the 1940s, Hans Rickers captured the suffering of war and the consequences of the destruction in Europe with his oil and watercolor paintings.

In the following years he experimented with shapes and colors. Various aggressive color surfaces slide into one another, which means that Rickers' pictures show restlessness, nervous play and constant transformation.

In addition to the fascination for urban images, there was also further experimentation with more abstract forms, but landscape images were not neglected in that time. The experiments led the early follower of realism through abstract, strongly colored pictures to approaches of surrealism : In Rickers' pictures more and more well-known creatures from the animal world appeared, but they consist of elements such as wire or wood.

literature

• Irmgard Schlepps: On the work of the painter Hans Rickers . In: Communications from the Society for Kiel City History . Volume 68, Issue 5/6, Society for Kiel City History, Kiel 1982, pp. 97–128.
• Hans Rickers. Exhibition for the 70th birthday. September 10-27, 1969, New University Library Kiel . University library and student union of the Christian-Albrechts-Universitäts Kiel, Kiel 1969.
• Ulrich Schulte-Wülwer: Hans Rickers . In: same: Kiel artist. Volume 3: In the Weimar Republic and National Socialism 1918–1945 (special publications by the Society for Kiel City History; 88), Heide: Boyens 2019, ISBN 978-3-8042-1493-4 , pp. 393–400.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Rickers in the catalog of the German National Library
• Pictures by Hans Rickers in museums in Schleswig Holstein