Helene Blum-Gliewe

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Helene Blum-Gliewe (born December 17, 1907 in Stolp in Pomerania , † January 31, 1992 in Kiel ) was a German stage designer and architectural painter.

Life

Helene Blume-Gliewe was the daughter of the carpenter Hermann Gliewe; her brother was the local historian Siegfried Gliewe .

education

She grew up with her brother in the old part of Stolp and attended the upper secondary school there . Inspired by school performances and visits to the theater, she developed the desire to design decorations and costume designs for the theater. Gregor Rosenbauer , director of the Municipal School of Crafts and Applied Arts in Stettin, recommended that she seek an apprenticeship in the then European theater city of Berlin.

She found a job as an assistant to the set designer Edward Suhr (1899–1971) at the Volksbühne am Bülowplatz , which was then the most modern and technically perfect theater in Germany. In addition, she studied from 1924 at the University of Fine Arts in Charlottenburg as a student of Cesar Klein , Emil Orlik and Karl Hofer . In Berlin during the Weimar Republic she was trained to be the first and for a long time only female stage designer in Germany.

Activity as a set designer

In 1926 she was hired at the Grenzlandtheater , the state theater of the city of Schneidemühl , a peep-show theater with a hall stage. Here she is already able to implement the scenario in the smallest of spaces within a space-appropriate stage design, and she also developed costumes that were cheap but looked stylish.

From 1928 to 1939 she worked as a freelance set designer and conducted during this time in Mönchengladbach- Rheydt as head of equipment for all theaters, opera, city theaters and the Kammerspiele, 40 employees; During this time she was also a member of the artistic board of the theaters as an artistic adviser. On 20 March 1930, the piece was Woyzeck by Georg Büchner by Paul Legband in City Theater Gladbach-Rheydt staged what they did make the appropriate scenery.

In addition, she received several guest commissions in the Netherlands , Wuppertal , Dessau and Altona and took part in exhibitions in Milan , Madrid , Bayreuth here with executed designs for Wagner productions . Together with the subordinate stage staff, she has helped around 400 stage works to create an optical, spatial and scenic effect.

During the occupation between 1940 and 1942 she worked for the Brussels Opera House La Monnaie / De Munt , the Royal Theater in Antwerp , the Belgian State Theater in Antwerp and the French Grand Théâtre in Lille .

When she was bombed in Mönchengladbach , she was forced to return to Stolp, where her husband died of an epidemic disease after the Russian invasion, which he contracted when he was ordered to provide medical care to the citizens imprisoned in prison. The remainder of the family was not expelled, as Helene Blum-Gliewe was obliged to work to design period furniture for a factory manufacturing for export.

Activity as an architectural painter

After she, together with her mother and daughter, smuggled into a transport of deported persons, she was able to escape from Pomerania to Holstein in the summer of 1946 and settled in Mönkeberg in 1947 . After arriving at a school in Schleswig-Holstein, she got into conversation with the master painter Kurt Weinreich, who had been commissioned to paint the classroom; he was not a simple craftsman, but had attended the art school and offered her to employ her in construction. In the following 20 years she worked successfully with the master painter and his daughter and they were able to implement many common ideas. During this time she began with personal painting work and so between 1954 and 1960 she created panel paintings on the subject of “Heimat Pommern” almost exclusively with glazed casein colors ( tempera ); in addition, she created pen and charcoal drawings with religious themes.

In 1953 she increasingly turned to architectural painting by creating sketches , watercolors and paintings and received numerous commissions in the field of art in the building sector from the 1950s to the 1970s, creating wall paintings , sgraffiti , large wall friezes and more. In 1961 she executed, among other things, the counter hall of the Gaardener Volksbank Kiel with a sgraffito made of concrete and glass and in 1975 the mural The Great Passion on the organ gallery of the church in Felde near Kiel. She was also commissioned to furnish one wall of the conference room in the state medical center in Bad Segeberg with an oversized painting. With the help of the professor for historical medicine at the University of Kiel, she filtered out appropriate motifs for the work from eight hundred years of medicine in three months and then presented the highlights of the history of medicine on fifty square meters. Also the painting on the altar wall of the Maria Stella church Maris in Heikendorf on the Kieler Förde , in which a mighty Madonna in protective cloak wraps frightened men in a boat, was executed by her. In 1965 she created the mural Fischer am Strand at the Henriettenheim retirement home in Bergstrasse in Heikendorf.

She also dealt with glass painting based on the model of Anton Wendling , whose church window she had seen on the Lower Rhine .

She designed her pictures mostly in a highly simplified figurative language that tends towards abstraction and negating the spatial.

During her time in Schleswig-Holstein, she created 52 large-format wall paintings, sgraffitos and glass pictures.

The Theater Studies Institute at the University of Cologne , founded by Carl Niessen , acquired 180 stage designs, figurines, models and posters from her, which were shown, among other things, in the exhibition From Stage Design to Art in Architecture in 1977/1978 in the Kiel Opera House .

She began writing and published three novels at the age of 70.

Helene Blum-Gliewe was married to the doctor Dr. Josef Blum, they had a daughter together:

Awards

  • In 1986, Helene Blum-Gliewe was elected Culture Prize winner for the Plön district.

Writings and works (selection)

Works (selection)

  • Sgraffito in the counter hall of the Gaadener Volksbank in Kiel.
  • Frieze The Great Passion on the organ loft of the Advent Chapel in Felde.
  • Large-scale painting with highlights from the history of medicine in the conference room of the State Medical Center in Bad Segeberg.
  • Painting on the altar wall of the Maria Stelle Maris church in Heikendorf.
  • Mural fishermen on the beach at the retirement home in Heikendorf.

Fonts (selection)

literature

  • Helene Blum-Gliewe In: Ulrike Wolff-Thomsen: Lexicon of Schleswig-Holstein female artists . Westholsteinische Verlagsanstalt Boyens & Co. 1994. ISBN 3-8042-0664-6 . P. 67 f.
  • Siegfried Gliewe: Helene Blum, a Pomeranian artist . Baltic Studies , Volume 62, 1976, urn : nbn: de: gbv: 9-g-322281 .
  • Sabine Leonhardt: From stage design to art in architecture . Verlag der Kunst Dresden Ingwert Paulsen jr., Husum 2019, ISBN 978-3-86530-253-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfram Viehweg: Georg Büchner's "Woyzeck" in the German-speaking theater: Part 2: 1918–1945 - Volume 1: 1918–1933 . BoD - Books on Demand, 2008, ISBN 978-3-8334-7546-7 , pp. 484 f . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  2. ↑ On the trail of art. Retrieved October 13, 2019 .
  3. ↑ "Inspirations of their mental restlessness" - On the exhibition of the Pomeranian artist Helene Blum in the foyer of the Kiel Opera House. (PDF) In: Das Ostpreußenblatt, p. January 9 , 1978, accessed on October 13, 2019 .
  4. ↑ RP ONLINE: Helene Blum-Spicker heads the district museum in Zons: "Wallflower" full of energy. Retrieved October 13, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Current and historical information in the Westensee parish. Retrieved October 13, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Blum-Gliewe, Helene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blum, Helene; Gliewe, Helene Blum-; Gliewe, Helene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German stage designer and architectural painter
DATE OF BIRTH December 17, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Stolp , Pomerania
DATE OF DEATH January 31, 1992
Place of death Kiel