Heinrich Brocksieper

Heinrich Brocksieper (born April 15, 1898 in Hagen ; † April 24, 1968 there ) was a German photographer , experimental filmmaker and painter .

life and work

Heinrich Brocksieper was born in Hagen in 1898. His father was a self-employed master painter, his grandfather ran an art forge in Hagen. After attending primary school and business school, he attended the municipal painting school in Hagen from 1915 to 1916, where Max Austermann taught drawing, painting and designing. In 1916 he was drafted into military service in Russia and France. After illness and hospitalization, he returned to the Hagen School of Painting at the end of the war in 1918.

Encouraged by the Hagen impulse about the patron Karl Ernst Osthaus , who showed the first major Lyonel Feininger exhibition in 1919 in the Museum Folkwang in Hagen, encouraged and supported by his teacher Max Austermann, he went to the newly founded Bauhaus in Weimar for the winter semester of 1919 . There he attended the preliminary course (basic apprenticeship) with Johannes Itten . His artist friends Reinhard Hilker and Erna Mayweg from Hagen were there with him . His war illness caused an interruption of his studies for a spa stay in Merano . He then continued to study at the Bauhaus until 1922 and worked in the Bauhaus print shop with Lyonel Feininger, from whom he received formative artistic impulses.

From 1923 to 1924 he went hiking with his friend Hugo Isenberg in southern Germany, Austria and Italy. They earned their living through restoration work. In 1924 he had to go to Meran for another spa stay. In Hagen his artist friends included Albert Buske , August Agatz and Will Lammert . Until 1927 he was a member of the Hagen artist association Hagenring . He encouraged his friend August Agatz to visit the Bauhaus ; Albert Buske, Max Gebhard and Waldemar Alder also went to the Bauhaus in Dessau. Through numerous trips to Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, he maintained close contacts with the Bauhaus until 1933.

From 1927 photography and experimental films dominated his artistic activity, and he set up a photo and film studio. “Perpetratoristic” animated films and cartoons were made on 35 mm film material that he edited himself. After his father's death, he worked for a living alongside his artistic work in his mother's small paint and glass shop. In the early 1930s he had a second small studio in addition to his film studio in Hagen-Wehringhausen, where the neighboring painter Emil Schumacher (1912–1999) , who lived in the neighborhood, was often a guest and with whom he had a lot until the mid-1950s cultivated artistic exchange.

In 1933 he refused a studio visit and exhibition participation to the National Socialists. In 1938 he married Annemarie Bauer, their son Utz Brocksieper (sculptor) was born in 1939 and their son Klaus was born in 1940 († 1995). In 1939 he was called up for military service and was a soldier on the Eastern and Western Fronts until 1945. In 1944 his house and studio were destroyed by a bomb attack; his pictures, drawings, photos and films were destroyed except for fragments. From 1945 he started again with his artistic activity; the "linear drawings" and charcoal drawings were created to depict materiality. He discovered the “perspective of nearby things” by means of “feeling by feeling” and from then on painted his pictures from this perspective. He earned his living in his small paint and glass shop until his death. He got in touch with his Bauhaus friends again, wrote to Maria Rasch and Gustavo Keller-Rueff in Chile. 1950 followed an exchange of letters with Lyonel Feininger in New York . In 1954 he traveled to Weimar for the first time after the Second World War to meet the philosopher Harry Scheibe and the artist Martin Pohle , two friends from the Bauhaus era. On this trip he also met the graphic artist and poet Arno Fehringer (1907–1974) from Weimar , with whom he had an intensive correspondence until his death.

The late work was created from 1955; Everyday objects with traces of use, portraits and self-portraits in their materiality were his central theme and were visible in his pastels according to his formula "FORM, FARBE + MATERIE".

A cross-section from all creative periods of his work - drawings made at the Bauhaus in 1919, early photographs, fragments of the film work, linear charcoal drawings and pastels - is in the possession of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar / Bauhaus-Museum next to the correspondence with Lyonel Feininger from 1950 .

Exhibitions

• 1920: Lower Rhine exhibition, Kunstkabinett-Kollock, Hagen
• until 1927: exhibitions with the artists' association "Hagenring"

(Heinrich Brocksieper no longer exhibited from 1927 until his death.)

Posthumous exhibitions (selection)

• 1970: Atelier in the courtyard, Hagen (solo exhibition)
• 1971: Tatkreis Kunst der Ruhr, Forum Kunst, Essen (solo exhibition)
• 1972: City Gallery Torhaus, Dortmund (solo exhibition)
• 1975: "Aspects of Post-War Art", Forum Kunst, Essen
• 1978: Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum Hagen (solo exhibition)
• 1980: "bauhaus-2. generation “, Galerie Symbol, Cologne
• 1984: "The Folkwang Idea of ​​Karl Ernst Osthaus - The West German Impulse 1900–1914", Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Hagen
• 1992: “From the Folkwang Museum to the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum”, Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Hagen
• since 1995: Klassik Stiftung Weimar / Bauhaus Museum
• 1995: "basis bauhaus ... westfalen", Westphalian Museum Office, Münster
• 1997: “Bauhaus Weimar - European Avant-garde 1919–1925”, Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Prague
• 1998: "Heinrich Brocksieper - Nahsichten", Klassik Stiftung Weimar / Bauhaus-Museum (solo exhibition)
• 1998: "Heinrich Brocksieper - Nahsichten", Märkisches Museum (Witten) , (solo exhibition)
• 1999: “Light images on paper photography in Westphalia 1860–1960”, Westphalian Museum Office, Münster
• 1999: "75 Years of Hagenring", Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Hagen
• 2001: "Collage Worlds - On Collage in the 20th Century", Art Museum, Ahlen
• 2002: “Understanding hands”, Phyletic Museum , Jena
• 2005: "Max Austermann and Students", Hagenring Gallery, Hagen
• 2006: "Heinrich Brocksieper, Bauhaus-fotografie-filmexperimente", Friends of the Bauhaus University Weimar eV, Haus am Horn , Weimar (solo exhibition)
• 2009: “Bauhaus in Action”, film exhibition, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation , Dessau
• 2009: “From Hagen to the Bauhaus”, Distance University in Hagen , Hagen
• 2013: "Bauhaus - The Art of Schoolchildren", Bauhaus Dessau Foundation / Gallery of the City of Remscheid
• 2013: “Bauhaus - Photo.Filme”, exhibition Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and Bauhaus Archive Berlin / Museum of Design, “Alemanha + Brasil 2013–2014”, Secs Pinheiros São Paulo, Goethe-Institut Porto Alegre, Goethe-Institut Curitiba, Goethe -Institute Salvador, Media Center Oi Futuro Rio de Janeiro, Museu Nacional Brasilia, Brazil
• 2014: "Bauhaus.Film", exhibition Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and Bauhaus Archive Berlin / Museum of Design, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile
• 2019: "Heinrich Brocksieper - A Hagener at the Bauhaus. The materiality of things", Emil Schumacher Museum , Hagen
• 2020: "bauhaus.film.expanded", Center for Art and Media , Karlsruhe

literature

• Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum Hagen (ed.), Johann Heinrich Müller: Heinrich Brocksieper. Hagen 1978.
• Wolfgang Wangler (Ed.): Bauhaus. 2nd generation. Cologne 1980, ISBN 3-9800350-0-X .
• Westfälisches Museumsamt Münster (Ed.): Basis bauhaus ... westfalen. Münster 1995, ISBN 3-927204-31-5 .
• Heimatbuch Hagen + Mark (ed.), Horst Kniese: Perspective of the near things. Hagen 1998.
• Weimar art collections (ed.), Michael Siebenbrodt: Heinrich Brocksieper. Near vision. Weimar 1998, ISBN 3-929323-15-X .
• Volker Jacob (Ed.), Ullrich Hermanns: Light images on paper. Photography in Westphalia 1860–1960. Münster 1999, ISBN 3-87023-143-2 .
• Michael Siebenbrodt (Ed.): Bauhaus Weimar. Drafts for the future. Hatje, Ostfildern-Ruit / Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-7757-9030-6 .
• Burkhard Leismann (Ed.): CollageWelten 1. The experiment. On the collage in the 20th century. Bramsche 2001, ISBN 3-935326-52-1 .
• Christian Tesch, Ulrich Völkel (eds.): Small lexikon bauhaus weimar. Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-939964-14-8 .
• Thomas Tode (Ed.): Bauhaus & film. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-205-78708-2 .
• Anja Gutenberger, Christian Hiller, Philipp Oswalt, Thomas Tode (eds.): Bauhaus.foto.filme. São Paulo 2013.
• Oliver Zybok, Wolfgang Thöner (Ed.): Bauhaus. The art of the student. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2013, ISBN 978-3-7757-3600-8 .
• Ulrich Schumacher, Rouven Lotz (ed.): Heinrich Brocksieper - A Hagener at the Bauhaus. The materiality of things. Druckverlag Kettler, Dortmund 2019, 978-3-86206-744-2
• Christian Eckert, Ulrich Völkel (ed.): The Bauhaus Weimar. Weimarer Verlagsgesellschaft, Wiesbaden 2019, ISBN 978-3-7374-0224-8 .

Web links

Literature by and about Heinrich Brocksieper in the catalog of the German National Library

• Website about the artist
• Heinrich Brocksieper - experimental films (YouTube)
• Contribution to WDR local time, 1998 (YouTube)
• Contribution MDR Thüringen Journal, 1998 (YouTube)