Heinz Demisch

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Heinz Demisch (born October 7, 1913 in Königsberg ; † November 24, 2000 in Saarbrücken ) was a German painter , draftsman and writer .

The twelve-part "Tree Cycle", which Demisch created from January to August 1946 immediately after his return from Soviet captivity, was to become his main painterly work. In the symbolic condensation of less abstract motifs such as "sun", "tree", "mountain" and "veil", these images acquire a luminosity that increases the mature colorism of pre-war images. At the same time, they surprise with their strict, almost classic line language. From picture to picture, the cycle revolves around the main theme of the first post-war period: spiritual renewal. After this climax, Demisch only wanted to work socially and from then on worked as a lecturer and writer, both verbally and in writing.

Life

After Heinz Demisch had had his first academic training at a private painting school in Königsberg at the age of 14, he studied from the winter of 1931/32 in Königsberg at the Academy of Fine Arts with Alfred Particle - in the class for landscape painting - and with Wilhelm Worringer Art history at the university. Although Particle wanted to make him a master student, Demisch tried to continue his further education in the West. In the winter of 1932, the 19-year-old moved to the Weimar art school . After only two semesters he broke off his studies after the director, Paul Schultze-Neumann , threatened him with a paramilitary stay in a camp for the purpose of re-education. Confronted with the cultural ideological barbarism of the Nazis at such an early stage, Demisch fled almost penniless to Palermo in autumn 1933. There he worked out the basis for his later landscape poetry during the following months. Until his military training at the beginning of 1939 and when he was called up at the beginning of the war, he had only five years left for his own artistic development, which he spent in Weimar, Hagen and Berlin. The war ended for Demisch in September 1943 with a gunshot wound and two years of Soviet imprisonment. The harassment in a labor camp and daily piecework in a primitive coal mine brought him to the brink of death. Religious borderline experiences kept him going. Seriously ill, he was able to return to his Berlin studio on the first prisoner transport in November 1945. While still convalescing, from January to August 1946 he painted his main work, a cycle of twelve pictures. The symbol of the tree that rises towards the sun appears as a continuous main motif. It gains strength and space from picture to picture. Further symbols such as “mountain” and “veil” were added to finally refer to the Christian path from passion to resurrection in an encrypted way using the metaphor of the dead and newly germinating tree.

The cycle from 1946, outstanding in its bright colors, formal rigor and conceptual stringency, meant for Demisch at the same time and without having followed an intention in it, an inner conclusion. He now wanted to have a more direct impact on the cultural scene. From 1947 he worked as a writer and lecturer for the rest of his life. In the same year he married the writer and editor Eva Maria Lichtenstern, b. Mankiewicz (1915–1969), who later developed a rich field of activity under the initials EMD at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as editor responsible for the “fine arts”. In 1948 their son Ernst-Christian Demisch was born.

In the summer of 1947 Demisch closed his little book Franz Marc. The painter of a new beginning . It was published in 1948 and was immediately found by Maria Marc u. a. m. to great acceptance. Demisch also wrote in numerous newspapers. Until 1959 he helped in Berlin to publicize the cultural impulse of anthroposophy by organizing highly regarded congresses. For years he volunteered to support the public relations work of the Berlin Waldorf School. From 1955 until the early 1970s he worked as a freelancer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and at the same time developed extensive lecturing activities in the fields of modern and ancient art.

In 1959 the company moved from Berlin to Schönberg near Kronberg im Taunus. In 1971 he moved with his second wife, Antonie Vellemann , to Eppstein im Taunus and in 1989 to Frankfurt am Main to live with his step-daughter, Christa Lichtenstern , in order to move with her to the management of the Art History Institute of Saarland University in Saarbrücken in 1998 on the occasion of her appointment. On November 24, 2000 Demisch succumbed to his long suffering.

Work development as a painter

Demisch's painterly work finds its way into the public posthumously today. In the few years that he remained as an artist and in which the National Socialist obstacles, the war and the Soviet imprisonment severely hindered his development, it nevertheless attests to an astonishing maturity and independence. While his beginnings were still based on the New Objectivity, at the age of twenty, since the summer of 1934, he had found his own penetration of color and imagination. Remarkably, his pictorial poetry - u. a. Mountain landscapes, gorges and caves - based on well-founded studies of Goethe's and Rudolf Steiner's theory of colors, in order to develop freely and independently in them until 1939. This led to the elaboration of entire series of pictures in blue / red / yellow (only in a lost watercolor) / purple and green. The rationality of this approach corresponds to Demisch's well-considered technique of calm, layer-by-layer painting that avoids everything handwritten. The targeted objectification of the brush language should support his systematic practice in color laws. The very conscious, flush application of paint can almost be seen as a distinguishing feature of Demisch's painting. In the small painting “Die Felsenschlucht” from June 1934 he made a decisive contribution to the beginning of his “Transcendent Landscape”. The term aims at the phenomenon that from 1934 Demisch tied his pictorial motifs largely to the metaphysics of colors. It is also part of the fact that from this point in time his pictures are often also geared towards the light as a spiritual center.

This view radicalized itself in 1946 in the “tree” cycle. Almost every one of the twelve paintings has the sun in focus. Whether called by human-looking trees as if by “poor people” or raised by individual mountains and ultimately accompanying the die-and-become theme of broken or young trees, the sun always acts like the vanishing point of a striving. As with van Gogh, whom Demisch greatly admired, in this cycle the sun can also become a place of spiritual longing transposed into the cosmos.

The writer

As a writer, Heinz Demisch, in parallel to his books listed below, preferred scientific topics from prehistory and early history, Egyptology and classical and Christian archeology. He also worked in writing and speaking for the interests of the art of classical modernism and the present, whereby he was often able to rely on numerous studio visits. From 1955 to the beginning of the 1970s Demisch was a freelancer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He also wrote as a writer for numerous other cultural magazines, such as B. THE COMING AND THE THREE.

It is striking that Demisch's art-historical standard works (history of the representation of the Sphinx, the raised hands and the "whole" Ludwig Richter) contain multiple correspondences to his painting. In short, his strong relation to the sun as a painter is connected with the solar aspects of the symbolic animal Sphinx that he has worked out. The pleading "arms" of his trees in the 1946 cycle flow seamlessly into the early studies of the Egyptian KA sign of the raised hands. For their part, they laid the groundwork for his sign book.

The closeness to Pietism that existed in Königsberg high school forms the basis of Demisch's basic religious direction. This explains the attention he paid to Richter's pietistic religiousness in his late Richter investigation (completed in 1998). The connection between art and science so authentically lived by Demisch is also evident in his strong relationship with Franz Marc. It is not uncommon for his palette to touch Marc's colors. He absolutely shared Marc's motto: "Know, my friends, what pictures are: appearing in a different place." In 1947 his literary work began with an overview of Marc's work and his ideas and ended 50 years later with an individual investigation into Marc's " Tower of the Blue Horses and the Stoa ”. Here Demisch was able to show how the motif of the four horses staggered upwards may go back to a cosmic vision of the Stoic Dion Chrysostom.

Publications

Book publications

  • Franz Marc. The painter of a new beginning, Berlin (Minerva-Verlag) 1948
  • Vision and Myth in Modern Art, Stuttgart (Verlag Freies Geistesleben) 1959
  • The Sphinx. History of their representation from the beginning to the present, Stuttgart (Urachhaus-Verlag) 1977
  • Hands raised. History of a gesture in the visual arts, Stuttgart (Urachhaus-Verlag) 1984
  • Ludwig Richter. A revision, ed. by Christa Lichtenstern, Berlin (Gebr. Mann-Verlag) 2003
  • Heinrich von Kleist. Who in this world wanted to be happy? Edited by Ernst-Christian Demisch, With an afterword by Christel Kiewitz, Stuttgart (Verlag Freies Geistesleben), 2nd edition 2011 (first edition 1964)

Articles (selection)

  • “Fairy tales and education”, in: Deutsche Rundschau, 70/10, October 1947, p. 42
  • "Surrealism. Escape from the decision? ”, In: Die Kommenden, February 9, 1948, p. 9
  • “The German Association of Artists. A word about his tasks and goals ”, in: Die Kommenden, October 25, 1951, p. 5
  • "Psychiatry and comic books. An American Investigation ”, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 21, 1955
  • “Rembrandt's light experience. At the end of the Rembrandt commemorative year 1956 ”, in: The Agnes Karll-Sister, born 10, October 1956, oP
  • “Caspar David Friedrich and the understanding of art in the 20th century”, in: Neue Schau, January 1960/1, pp. 5–8
  • Obituary for Wilhelm Worringer, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 1, 1965
  • “Rise of the Soul. A Euripides verse in Kleist? ”, In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 20, 1967
  • “In the matter of Kleist - On the research of Helmut Sembdner”, in: Die Drei. Journal of Science, Art, and Social Life, November 1984, pp. 813–821
  • “New observations on 'Nature and Spirit' by Philipp Otto Runge”, in: Yearbook of the Free German Hochstift, 1996, pp. 171–200
  • “Franz Marc's Tower of the Blue Horses and the Stoa”, in: Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 3rd volume, Vol. LI, 2000, pp. 243-256
  • Notes on biography. Unpublished manuscript, Demisch-Archiv, Berlin 1983

literature

  • Christa Lichtenstern: Color and Imagination. Heinz Demisch. Painter and writer, Baden - Baden (aga press), 2016 / ISBN 978-3-945364-05-5 .
  • Christa Lichtenstern, "From the depths". A picture viewing, in: a tempo. Life Magazine, No. 196, April 2016

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Research Center for Culture Impulse - Biographies Documentation
personal data
SURNAME Demisch, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, draftsman and writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 7, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Koenigsberg
DATE OF DEATH November 24, 2000
Place of death Saarbrücken