Heinrich Seufferheld
Heinrich Seufferheld (born January 27, 1866 in Weinsberg , † February 20, 1940 in Tübingen ) was a German draftsman, painter and etcher . From 1909 until his retirement in 1933 he was a university drawing teacher, from 1918 also an associate professor at the University of Tübingen .
Life
Seufferheld came from a middle-class family that originally came from Franconia . His ancestors were councilors and doctors in Schwäbisch Hall . His great-grandfather Carl Seufferheld was a pastor in Hohenlohischen , his grandfather Schultheiss in Dürrenzimmern in the Oberamt Brackenheim . Seufferheld's father Carl married Seufferheld's mother, the farmer's daughter Christine Bihl, at the age of 22 as an auditor's assistant.
Heinrich Seufferheld was born in Weinsberg. From 1870 to 1875 the family lived in Waldenburg , where father Seufferheld was mayor. In 1875 he took over the same position in Weinsberg and the family returned there. When Heinrich Seufferheld was eleven years old, his mother died giving birth to his brother Karl. His father did not die until 1914, until he was in the office of mayor. Seufferheld himself believed that his whole being, his tenacity and clumsiness, he had inherited from his mother; He had had little from his father, a strong-willed person with quick, determined energy.
Following the Latin school in Weinsberg, Heinrich Seufferheld attended grammar schools in Heilbronn and Schwäbisch Hall. According to his father's will, he was to become a pastor, and in 1880 he passed the so-called Landexamen, which entitles him to attend Protestant monastery schools. He completed his school education at the Protestant theological seminars in Schöntal and Urach . Seufferheld was not happy in these schools and with the planned pastoral career. His uncle, also by name Heinrich Seufferheld, sent drawings by the young artist to Carl Theodor von Piloty , director of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts , who recognized his talent. Despite his father's skepticism about the non-bourgeois profession, Seufferheld was able to study art.
He then studied for two and a half years, from 1884 to 1887, in Munich at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he made friends with his fellow student Max Slevogt for the duration of his studies . Seufferheld, who, in his own estimation, was phlegmatic and inclined to “useless daydreams”, only responded evasively to his father's urge to earn a living with art and lived in Munich on a modest basis on the money that his family gave him.
Seufferheld did his one-year military service in Berlin in 1887/88 at the suggestion of his uncle . Despite urging from home to change his profession, he continued to want to be an artist: "I would rather be a poor portrait painter than a rich priest."
After the military year he stayed in Berlin and attended the painting class of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts . At the beginning of 1889 he returned to Munich, where Friedrich August von Kaulbach , then director, made it possible for him to attend the art academy for a further two years until 1891. During this time he made friends in Munich with a group of artists from Transylvania , with whom he went on a trip to their home country in the summer of 1890. He also got to know two people who supported him in the following years: the widow Frau Professor Geifrig and the painter Erich Riefstahl. During this time in Munich, Seufferheld turned to etching for the first time in 1890 on the advice of a cousin .
After completing his studies, he retired to Neidlingen on the edge of the Swabian Alb in the summers to paint and draw in isolation, and over the winter attended the Royal Art School in Stuttgart as a master student . After nine years, in 1900 he moved into his own studio in his parents' house in Weinsberg. In the same year, with a grant from the Württemberg Ministry of Culture, he went to Paris and to the Paris World Exhibition for several weeks . Seufferheld's work received attention, he was represented in large exhibitions and was included in national art magazines.
In 1909 he applied as a university drawing teacher at the University of Tübingen and was hired at the suggestion of the Tübingen professor for art history Konrad von Lange , who thought he was the most suitable candidate. Seufferheld moved to Tübingen and reformed the university drawing lessons, which until then often did not meet artistic standards and in which one had often only copied templates and drawn plaster heads. Seufferheld introduced in Tübingen, based on the model of the art academies, landscape drawing based on motifs outdoors and portrait and life drawing based on models. His educational achievements were recognized. After several unsuccessful attempts by the university to upgrade the "subaltern" position against the resistance of the K. Württemberg Ministry of Churches and Schools, he was appointed associate professor in 1918. In 1920 he married the sculptor Margarete Pietzcker (1888–1962), who was 22 years his junior.
Seufferheld's expectations of being able to build on his artistic recognition around 1900 were not fulfilled. To an increase in the demand for graphic cycles - it occurred in the wake of the economic crisis after the First World War and is interpreted as a flight to safe investments in times of inflation - he responded by publishing his own graphic cycle, Des Todes Lied . However, it was only published in 1924 and therefore too late, since interest in graphics declined again after the currency reform in 1923. In 1933 he retired. He died on February 20, 1940 in Tübingen and was buried in the Weinsberg cemetery. He bequeathed his estate to the city of Weinsberg as the Heinrich Seufferheld Foundation , where it is kept. Parts of it can be seen in the Weinsberg Weibertreu Museum.
His sister Hedwig Martha (1889–1987) was married to the painter Albert Volk (1882–1982), and the couple moved into Seufferheld's parents' house in Weinsberg towards the end of the Second World War. Albert Volk took over Seufferheld's Weinsberg studio and cataloged Seufferheld's estate in 1970.
plant
Seufferheld worked both as a painter and as a graphic artist - using various techniques such as etching, engraving , drawing and others. What is best known today are his landscapes and cityscapes, which show his hometown Weinsberg, his long-term summer residence on the Swabian Alb in Neidlingen and his later residence in Tübingen. His portraits often show friends, family and acquaintances or himself, but also other models. Also acts are represented in the factory. Commercial graphics were created, for example, for Theobald Kerner and Erwin Hildt's letters of honor from the city of Weinsberg . He has repeatedly addressed death, in self-portraits with death, pictures of skulls and finally in his etching cycle Des Todes Lied , published in 1924 , whose eleven sheets bear titles such as Der Flötende Tod , Das dying Rococo or The Temple of Death . In some works Seufferheld's apparently national-conservative political attitude is evident, for example in the sheet German Renaissance from 1914, which shows a regiment in the flag-adorned Heilbronn under the tower of the Kilianskirche , or in the 1939 drawing violence in Bromberg , which Nazi propaganda reports on (alleged) atrocities during the so-called Bydgoszcz Blood Sunday are taken over and illustrated - a prominent figure in the picture is a man hung from a beam and nailed to his feet.
Seufferheld cannot be clearly assigned to a specific artistic direction. In the course of his work he opened up to various artistic directions, Art Nouveau and Expressionism , but did not pursue them consistently. An avant-garde he never belonged to.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Norbert Jung: 1914 - Albert Volk - War Memorials - 2014. Heilbronn 2014, ISBN 978-3-934096-39-4 , pp. 36-37.
literature
- Thomas Beck: Heinrich Seufferheld. In: Evamarie Blattner, Wiebke Ratzeburg, Ernst Seidl (ed.): Artists for students. Pictures of the university drawing teachers 1780–2012. Stadtmuseum Tübingen 2012 (= Tübingen catalogs. No. 94), ISBN 978-3-941818-13-2 , pp. 97-102.
- Seufferheld, Heinrich . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 30 : Scheffel – Siemerding . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1936, p. 538 .
- Th. Musper: Heinrich Seufferheld as a graphic artist. In: Württemberg. Monthly in the service of the people and homeland. 1936, pp. 314-325.
- Seufferheld, Heinrich . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 4 : Q-U . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1958.
- Heinrich Seufferheld 1866–1940. Graphics . University town of Tübingen, Tübingen 1984 ( Tübingen catalogs. No. 21).
- H [einrich] T [heodor] Musper: Heinrich Seufferheld. The etched work. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1941.
- Elke Schulze: Nulla dies sine linea. University drawing lessons - a problem history study. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-515-08416-9 ( Pallas Athene. Volume 12).
Web links
- Literature by and about Heinrich Seufferheld in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Seufferheld, Heinrich |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 27, 1866 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Weinberg |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 20, 1940 |
| Place of death | Tübingen |