Hans Warnecke

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Hans Warnecke 1960, Stuttgart

Hans Warnecke (born August 17, 1900 in Güsten ; † May 16, 1988 in Oberstaufen ) was a German designer of jewelry, lamps and equipment, product designer and professor of metalworking and industrial product design at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart .

Life

Training, workshop in Pforzheim, trade fair visits

From 1914 to 1918 Warnecke completed a craft apprenticeship in a graphic arts institute , from 1919 to 1922 he studied with Karl Fiebiger at the Magdeburg School of Applied Arts . He went public with his first enamel work through exhibitions in the Magdeburg artists' association “ Die Kugel ” and at the Leipzig trade fair . He was fundamentally inspired in 1919 when he visited the Bauhaus week in Weimar . In 1920 he became a member of the Bund Deutscher Kunsthandwerker and, in particular, in 1921 as a member of the Deutscher Werkbund, his developing ideas were exemplarily represented. In 1922 he worked for a short time as a designer in industry.

Tea caddy, designed in 1924 together with Erika Habermann in the studio in Pforzheim, enamel and gold
Egg cup device, designed in 1928 together with brother Erhard in the studio in Frankfurt, enamel and steel

From 1922 to 1927 he ran his own workshop in Pforzheim together with Erika Habermann-Leistikow . During this time trend-setting enamel work, jewelry, equipment and furniture were created. A wide variety of purchases were made at trade fairs and exhibitions by museums, including in Leipzig , Dresden , Magdeburg , Stuttgart , Tokyo and Osaka .

Lecturer at the Städelschule and workshop in Frankfurt

In 1925 Fritz Wichert appointed him as a teacher at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main to head the workshop for enamel, jewelry and tools. From 1926 to 1939 he also ran his own workshop in Frankfurt with his brother Erhard. As a colleague at the Städelschule, a friendship with Willi Baumeister developed from 1928 . The 1920s in Frankfurt were characterized by the extensive design standards of the city of Frankfurt, which were expressed in the urban planning program of the “New Frankfurt” under the newly appointed city planning officer Ernst May . In addition, it was a socio-cultural reform movement that encompassed many areas of life and in which the Städelschule, where Hans Warnecke taught, was also included. He was also a member of the "Oktobergruppe Frankfurt", which had the aim of involving scientists and artists in the project "New Frankfurt". Other members included Ernst May, Ferdinand Kramer , Mart Stam , Hans Hildebrandt , Franz Schuster , Martin Elsaesser , Willi Baumeister, Leberecht Migge , Adolf Meyer and Hans Leistikow .

Hans Warnecke took part in the Werkbund exhibition in Japan in 1927, in the exhibition in the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Stuttgart in 1928, in the exhibition in the German pavilion of the world exhibition in Barcelona , the so-called " Barcelona Pavilion ", in 1929 in the important Werkbund exhibition in Paris under the direction by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer .

In 1930 Warnecke gave up teaching at the Städelschule in order to concentrate entirely on the manufacture of lights, jewelry and equipment in the Frankfurt studio. He made the acquaintance of Adolf Loos , Le Corbusier , Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , Otto Ernst Sutter , Paul Hindemith , Lilly Reich and other personalities of Frankfurt society. In 1939 he married Gertrud Elhardt, a fashion teacher at the Städelschule and assistant to Professor Margarete Klimt. In the same year he was drafted into the military.

Through the mediation of the architect and art collector Heinz Rasch , Hans Warnecke participated between 1940 and 1943, together with Oskar Schlemmer , Willi Baumeister and Franz Krause, in the legendary collaboration with the Wuppertal paint factory Kurt Herberts . During the time of the greatest isolation, the group manufactured panels for the development of lacquer-technical surface treatments. In 1944 the studio and Warnecke's apartment above in Frankfurt were destroyed by bombing, which resulted in the total loss of his work and all of his facilities.

Professorship in Schwäbisch Gmünd and Stuttgart

Shortly after the war, in 1946, Hans Warnecke took over a professorship at the State College for the Precious Metals Industry in Schwäbisch Gmünd , today's Schwäbisch Gmünd University of Design, and set up the master class there. In 1947 he was one of the first to sign the “Post-War Appeal”, a founding appeal for the German Werkbund.

Silver cutlery, 1954, manufactured by OKA Altensteig

At the instigation of Richard Döcker , Willi Baumeister and Theodor Heuss , he took over the metal department at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart in the summer semester of 1949 ; the professorship in Schwäbisch Gmünd passed to his pupil Karl Dittert .

In the years that followed, Warnecke in Stuttgart shifted the focus of his department there from manual training to industrial product design. In addition, he made drafts for industry and published articles on product design and teaching. He belonged to the circle of avant-garde artists around Willi Baumeister who met in the “Bubenbad” restaurant. In 1966 he retired and two years later moved to Oberstaufen im Allgäu.

In 1977 he took part in the exhibition Art School Reform 1900–1933 in the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin. In 1980 he was made an honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and the Association of German Industrial Designers (VDID).

Teaching and design philosophy

Hans Warnecke was a pioneer at the key point between art, craft and industrial design. He belonged to the circle of teaching personalities who convincingly and authentically introduced and developed the idea of ​​the 1920s, which were important for our cultural development, into the post-war period.

In Frankfurt and Schwäbisch Gmünd as well as in Stuttgart, his field of work was initially handicraft products, objects of daily use, objects to decorate, objects for the table, objects for the living area, but also objects from the social and cultic areas, ecclesiastical and representative items Equipment that was part of his workshop's repertoire of orders. Although he had great success with his handicraft production, he began to design models for series production in addition to such individual pieces in his time in Frankfurt. After his appointment at the Stuttgart Academy, he worked determinedly towards this turn to industrial products, which was prepared in the late 1920s. For some time, handicraft-oriented and industry-oriented tasks ran side by side in Stuttgart without ideological gaps.

In his teaching as well as in his design work, Warnecke placed the human being at the center of his considerations and understood the world of things as "a socially ordered part of the overall order". In doing so, he tied in with the ideas of the Werkbund. “Useful and usable, tolerable and inexpensive” were the succinct criteria for this quality, which were opposed to an arbitrary product differentiation of current product design and to which he countered the “typical design goal” with conviction.

Warnecke was not at the Bauhaus , but had contact with many Bauhaus members and their thinkers since the 1920s, especially with Oskar Schlemmer and Willi Baumeister . He was familiar with the ideas cultivated and developed there and developed a criterion that went beyond the Bauhaus, that of the "material order" - the order of the materials in their optical, haptic and graceful quality. This was intended to express that the material quality of a thing in the “society of things” must prove its correctness. He sees this as exemplified in the Japanese house and garden, as well as in the wall pictures by Baumeister.

Warnecke was convinced that at the core of every thing there is a “good guy” who is what makes the task so attractive. For him, the path to this requires the designer to step back behind the object of his work, because “taste ends where culture begins”. He understood it to be the best form of use of an object, the form of an object that was stripped of any individualistic intention. For him, however, the “good type” of an object was not a production-related standardization in the technocratic sense, but an expression of a culturally determined use, shaped by cultural-historical conditions, the essence of an object dressed in a shape, independent of trends and fashions.

Web links

literature

Essays by Warnecke
Secondary literature
  • The new Frankfurt. In: Das Neue Frankfurt , Volume 4 (1930), Issue 11, p. 247 ( online ).
  • Willi Baumeister : The Unknown in Art. DuMont, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-7701-2159-7 .
  • Horst Bachmayer , Klaus Lehmann, Otto Sudrow: The typical as a design goal: the teacher and product designer Hans Warnecke (= contributions to the history of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart . Volume 3). State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, Stuttgart 1980.
  • Wilhelm Lotz: enamel devices. In: The Form. Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit, 11/1928 edition, pp. 324-330 ( online , with numerous images of Warnecke's work).
  • Klaus Lehmann, in: Association of German Industrial Designers (Ed.): Extra II´88.
  • Ulrike May: Hans Warnecke . In: Evelyn Brockhoff (Ed.): Actors of the New Frankfurt (= Archive for Frankfurt's History and Art . Volume 75). Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-95542-160-1 , p. 191.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Email, jewelry and devices. In: Das Neue Frankfurt , Volume 3 (1929), Issue 5, p. 98 ( online ).
  2. ↑ Willi Baumeister : The unknown in art. DuMont, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-7701-2159-7 .
  3. ↑ William Lotz: email devices. In: The Form. Journal for creative work, issue 11/1928, pp. 324–330 ( online ).
  4. ↑ companion. Archive Lilo Rasch-Naegele, accessed on October 16, 2015.
  5. ↑ Willi Baumeister's diary from 1942, entry from March 5th (available as digital and transcript at willi-baumeister.org ).
  6. ^ "Post-war call" 1947. In: Document collection of the German Werkbund , D 4407, D 4408, Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge Berlin.
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Kermer : Thirty years ago . In: Akademie-Mitteilungen , Volume 7, Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, Stuttgart 1976, pp. 1–8, here p. 6.
  8. ↑ a b c d e Horst Bachmayer , Klaus Lehmann, Otto Sudrow: The typical as a design goal: the teacher and product designer Hans Warnecke (= contributions to the history of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart . Volume 3). State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, Stuttgart 1980.
  9. ^ Bubenbad artists' meeting place. Kulturpur.de, accessed on October 16, 2015.
  10. ↑ Hans Maria Wingler (Ed.): Art School Reform 1900–1933. Exhibition catalog Berlin 1977, Mann, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-7861-1191-X .
  11. ^ A b Klaus Lehmann, in: Association of German Industrial Designers (ed.): Extra II´88.
  12. ↑ Hans Warnecke: Paths to Design. In: Architektur und Wohnform , 75th year (1967), edition 2, pp. 148–150.
  13. ^ A b Hans Warnecke: Tasks of design. In: Werk. Swiss monthly for architecture, art, arts and crafts , year 45 (1958), issue 12, pp. 409–411 ( PDF; 6 MB ).
personal data
SURNAME Warnecke, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German designer of jewelry, lamps and appliances, product designer and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH 17th August 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Güsten
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 1988
Place of death Oberstaufen