Helen Wiehen

Helen Wiehen (born March 9, 1899 in Verden , † 1969 ) was a German painter and parament embroiderer .

Helen Wiehen painted several murals, mostly of a sacred nature. In 1926 she painted the baptistery of the Church of St. Cosmas and Damian in Cologne-Weiler. Helen Wiehen thus joined the guard of those Expressionist wall painters who were striving for a new liturgy ( liturgical movement ). One of the aspects of this movement was to give the baptistery its own space again, as it was handed down from early Christianity . Recollection should raise the value of the sacrament of baptism. Other church expressionists such as Peter Hecker , Ludwig Baur and Heinrich Dieckmann also painted the baptismal rooms redesigned by modern church architects such as Dominikus Böhm .

After her studies, Helen Wiehen was based in various European cities such as Paris in Cologne. With the artist Hildegard Domizlaff , who had converted to Catholicism , she had a house built in Cologne-Müngersdorf in which the two of them lived. Presumably, Helen Wiehen owed the commission to paint Cosmas and Damian's baptistery, the connection to Hildegard Domizlaff, who had previously designed the Sacred Heart altar of the small church in Weiler.

The three murals in the baptistery by Cosmas and Damian were only moderately enthusiastically received by the art world. Inspired by the Italian fresco, the frescoes by Helen Wiehen lack the reflection of the present or new liturgical concepts typical of church expressionism.

literature

• Elisabeth Peters : Church wall painting in the Rhineland 1920–1940. A contribution to the history of the Cologne Institute for Religious Art . CMZ-Verlag, Rheinbach, 1996, ISBN 978-3-87062-026-4 .
• Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. Volume 5: V - Z. Supplements A - G. Seemann, Leipzig 1961, p. 129.
• Martin Wackernagel : Helen Wiehen's religious wall paintings. In: The Christian Art . Vol. 25, 1928, ZDB -ID 214648-4 , pp. 230-236, with illustrations.