Heinz Minssen

Heinz Minssen (civil: Heinrich Friedrich Johannes Kurt Minssen ; * December 21, 1906 in Oldenburg ; † April 23, 1994 in the Bordesholm monastery near Kiel ) was a German painter , draftsman and graphic artist of German Impressionism , German Expressionism and New Objectivity . He is buried in the Oldenburg-Osternburg cemetery.

Life

Heinz Minssen was the stage name, the real name was Heinrich Friedrich Johannes Kurt Minssen.

From 1926 to 1932 he studied at the Staatliche Kunstschule zu Berlin with Philipp Franck and Willy Jaeckel , at the College for Free and Applied Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg with Erich Wolfsfeld and at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin on Steinplatz . After completing his studies, Minssen tried to earn a living as a freelance artist, but then took up a position as an art teacher in Bielefeld in 1939 .

Minssen had to serve as a soldier in World War II and drew weather maps for the Luftwaffe , but he invented and drew children's books for his son with Luftwaffe paper and sent them home by field mail . After 1945 he first worked as a theater portraitist for Bielefeld newspapers and then returned to school. His oeuvre is estimated at over 2000 works; most of them are privately owned. The Kulturstiftung Hansestadt Lübeck has 20 drawings and associated text graphics for Thomas Mann's “Mario and the Magician” in public ownership . These drawings are published in an edition of the novella. The Museum Halle / Westfalen owns over 90 of Minssen's works with motifs for expressive dance, masks and puppets. In 1956 the Ligurian city of Cervo Minssen awarded the “Il Pennello d'Oro” award.

Minssen received numerous exhibitions on various facets of his work. A representative cross-section of the work was only presented to the public by the Schleswig-Holstein State Library ten years after Minssen's death . A little more than 100 works from the estate were selected for this purpose. In the catalog it was stated that Heinz Minssen was one of those artists who after the end of the war in 1945 “did not immediately follow the innovative tendencies in painting geared towards radical forms of expression and therefore received less attention as supposed“ traditionalists ”in the period that followed. Heinz Minssen had a great - as he himself repeatedly emphasized - manual skills. This can be seen in the variety of technical processes that he mastered and used to enhance his artistic interests: India ink and pen drawings for his travel notes, watercolors and collages for the “southern scenes” and puppet representations, opaque watercolors on tissue paper for the “Christ Encounters “, Pastel and mixed media for the various series of illustrations for the various texts by world-famous authors. At Minssen, the focus of artistic interest was on people and the light-filled landscape of southern Europe. In his series of illustrations, he did not simply convert the text into pictures, but rather interpreted the content of the message very subjectively. His concern was not the poetic mood, not the entertaining narrative. He was interested in the psychological, mental states and primal fears ”.

Heinz Minssen's artistic estate, which comprises over 700 works, is currently being processed for the creation of a virtual catalog.

literature

• Jürgen Hacker: The strange - Heinz Minssen's picture ideas for Knut Hamsun's stories. Catalog of the Schleswig-Holstein State Library for the Heinz Minssen exhibition, Kiel, 2004
• Mins Minssen: Heinz Minssen and the nervous reality of appearances. In: Thomas Mann: Mario and the magician with pen drawings by Heinz Minssen. Lübeck: Schmidt-Römhild, 2006, p. 87 f.
• Renate Paczkowski: world of images and sensual pleasure. Catalog of the Schleswig-Holstein State Library for the Heinz Minssen exhibition, Kiel, 2004

Web links

• Website
• Selection of images from the Schleswig-Holstein State Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Renate Paczkowski