Helmut Ammann

Helmut Ammann while portraying

Helmut Ammann (born October 21, 1907 in Shanghai , † January 28, 2001 in Pöcking am Starnberger See) was a Swiss sculptor , painter , graphic artist and glass painter . He had lived in Munich since the early thirties , where he worked as a freelance sculptor for sixty years . The Chinese place of birth shaped his Far Eastern philosophical thinking all his life, his upper-class Protestant parents his deep piety. Both were of great importance for his work.

Live and act

Youth and education

The Swiss Helmut Ammann, born in Shanghai in 1907 as the son of the founder and director of the local “German Medical School Prof. Dr. Waldemar Ammann ”, grew up in Berlin . As a teenager he was fascinated by recitation and theater , music and painting , which he wanted to make his profession. This basic musical education also shaped his later work in a variety of ways. A stay in Paris in 1927 enabled him to study with sculptors such as Émile-Antoine Bourdelle , Ossip Zadkine and Charles Despiau . 1930–1932 he studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin with Otto Hitzberger and Wilhelm Gerstel , and in 1933 he studied graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Adolf Schinnerer . Since 1942 he was in an intensive artistic dialogue with the Munich sculptor Karl Knappe .

The years 1933 to 1945

As a Swiss citizen, he was little affected by the measures taken by the Nazi regime . He did short military exercises in Switzerland and did not have to go to war. However, he belonged to the more distant circle of friends of the “ White Rose ”: Alexander Schmorell , who wanted to become a sculptor, kept his tools in Ammann's studio. At two meetings before the student resistance group was arrested, the Ammanns, together with the Scholl , Christoph Probst and Kurt Huber siblings , were invited to a convivial evening among friends and artists in Kaulbachstrasse. Warnings against hasty, rash action went unheard. A bomb hit destroyed Ammann's Munich studio in 1943, whereupon he and his wife Carmen were evacuated to Castell in Lower Franconia until 1947 .

Reactions to the war

War memorial Pöcking, 1983

Helmut Ammann said that he only found “his weapons” against the war after 1945. He created some works that can be judged as retrospective time commentaries: The Lament , the Pain , Cain and Abel and others. Above all, his memorial against the war in Pöcking on Lake Starnberg from 1983 summarizes warning and remembrance in one form. However, he was not a “political artist”.

family and friends

Helmut Ammann was married to Carmen Inés Stubenrauch from 1935 to 1976, born as the daughter of German parents in Valparaíso , Chile . In art she was a model for many of his female characters. After her death, Ammann lived with Gisela Krauss van Erkelens for over 20 years, who also took care of his works.

Ammann cultivated close friendships with artists, for example with the painters and writers of the Seerosenkreis , with the pianist Claudio Arrau or the painter, stained glass artist and musician Franz Grau ; but also with his drawing teacher at the Berlin-Friedenau grammar school, graphic artist and painter Ernst Zipperer , who shaped him early on and with whom he was a close friend until his death in 1982. With some evangelical deans and pastors like the Würzburg Wilhelm Schwinn , Dietrich Barnstein from Bad Honnef or the theology professor Richard Riess he felt connected through the theological conversation and friendly interaction. The fruitful collaboration with architects such as Reinhard Riemerschmid (1914–1996) or Olaf Andreas Gulbransson in the reconstruction of churches was also based on personal friendship.

Work and reception

Artistic and graphic work

Helmut Ammann was artistically active with many materials: he worked in wood, stone and bronze, he set stone mosaics and glass windows , he was a painter and graphic artist and he made numerous woodcuts and etchings . In addition, well over 5000 sketches by “Anonymous Contemporaries” were created on the train, in cafés or at conferences. For over 25 years he drew Morning Greetings to Carmen for his wife Carmen , a graphic diary of which around 800 sheets have survived. During the "Seerosenen" time he wrote shaking verses like (reminiscent of Irene Hallmann (-Strauss)): "Nobody has the courage to whitewash / what Lothar Diez does for Munich."

On behalf of the Protestant Church

The Evangelical Church was the most important client for the freelance sculptor Helmut Ammann for almost thirty years: The creative solution of altars , chandeliers , baptismal fonts and church windows was the focus of his work from the 1930s until well into the 1960s. For this he also won several major competitions. Over a period of 60 years, over 70 large church windows were created in 25 churches in Germany, for example in the Christ Church and the Luther Church in Munich, in the Ansgariikirche Bremen, in the Weilheim Apostle Church , in the Castle Church of Meisenheim and the Gothic monastery church Lambrecht (Palatinate) or also in Nuremberg . He also created numerous large wood carvings such as the crucifixion group in St. Stephan in Würzburg or the Returning Christ in St. Johannis in Würzburg , as well as large crucifixes and winged altars in Bielefeld , in the Hospital Church in Hof , Marxgrün or Munich .

In public space

Gravestone for Heinz Rühmann

Works such as Die Verstrickung (1977, European Patent Office , Munich), the Three Newspaper Readers for the Press Club in Bonn (1982), the wooden sculpture Nepomuk (1981) in Starnberg or the group of figures The Conversation in the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing can be found in public spaces . For the hall of honor of the Deutsches Museum he created the marble busts of the physicists Werner Heisenberg (1991) and Otto Hahn (1976), for the Cantonal Hospital Schaffhausen / Switzerland the large stone group Ross and Wächter made of shell limestone (1959/1961). The tombstone was created for Heinz Rühmann in 1995, a bronze ribbon on travertine .

As a portraitist

As a portraitist of well-known personalities, he created well over 100 works in bronze and stone . He portrayed the conductor Hans Knappertsbusch (1966, Prinzregententheater Munich), the director and artistic director Wieland Wagner (1968, Bayreuth town hall) and the pianist Jan Odé (1969, Conservatory of Music); the writers Leonhard Frank (1963, Würzburg Trade Union House ), Martin Gregor-Dellin (1986, private property) and Heinz Flügel (1976); the entrepreneur Rolf Rodenstock (1987, Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Munich), the economic politician David Hansemann (1987, German Industry and Trade Day in Bonn ) and the banker Ernst Matthiensen (1972, Investment Institute Frankfurt, private property New York); the University Professor of Dermatology Alfred Marchionini (1965, University Hospital Munich) and the University Professor of Chemistry Heinz A. Staab (1993, Max Planck Society , Munich).

Poetic-literary works

For Helmut Ammann, writing a diary was a medium for artistic reflection: “The sculptor's task is to create the 'present' so that the past and the future merge into it. The intensity of the action in the material creates traces of the presence, which are then equal to the presence of the action ”. At work he immersed himself in meditation ; the diary gave him the necessary distance. In the diary, Helmut Ammann noted a variety of artistic considerations that he could later fall back on and that were an important source of ideas for him. At the same time he wrote numerous lectures and reflections on art, an extensive autobiographical fragment of a novel, numerous poems and narrative fragments.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

• 1976: Catholic Academy in Munich
• 1979: "Retrospective", Museum Schaffhausen
• 1982: Bonn Press Club
• 1987: “Developments”, Ignaz Günther House, Munich
• 1987: "The new face", in the Schweizerhaus, Munich (for his 80th birthday)
• 1997: “Retrospective for the 90th birthday”, art rooms of the Dresdner Bank, Munich

Group exhibitions

with the Neue Münchner Künstlergenossenschaft in Haus der Kunst (since 1950; also juror for Dept. Sculpture), with the artists of the water lily, but also z. B. at the Evangelical Church Congress in Nuremberg (1979), Düsseldorf (1985) or Frankfurt (1987)

Awards

• 1966: Schwabinger Art Prize , Munich
• 1971: Albert Schweitzer Prize for Art, Amsterdam
• 1984: Pygmalion Medal: Prize of the German Art Foundation for Business, Munich
• 1995: Grand Prize of the Bavarian People's Foundation, Munich

Publications

Texts

• with Robert M. Helmschrott : calls, texts, tones. Images for meditation. Munich 1985.
• Poems in stone. Memmingen 1987.
• Secret basic structures and strange conjunctions of chance. In: Richard Riess (ed.): I carry three lines with me. Words that accompany a life. Freiburg im Breisgau 1995, pp. 178-183.

• Work diaries, edited by Erich Kasberger
  • The whole of heaven has fallen into me with a thousand revelations and I into it ... Work diaries of a sculptor and painter, Vol. 1, 1921–1965. Munich 2007.
  • Track and seal of my years… . Work Diaries Vol. 2, 1966–1996. Munich 2007.
  • Fragments, cycles, reflections. Work Diaries Vol. 3, 1966–1996. Munich 2015.
  • Morning greetings to Carmen , Work Diaries Vol. 4, 1950–1976. Munich 2009.
  • GlasFensterKunst , Werkagebücher Vol. 5, 1934–1992. Munich 2017.

literature

• Erich Kasberger: Helmut Ammann. Sculptor, painter, graphic artist. Munich 1997.
• Erich Kasberger, Marita Krauss : Jakob in the fine arts using the example of Helmut Ammann. In: Richard Riess (ed.): A wrestling with the angel. Essays, poems and pictures on the figure of Jacob. Göttingen 2008, pp. 205-212.
• Exhibition objects in the catalogs for the major art exhibitions in the Haus der Kunst in Munich, 1950 to 1960.
• New views of the stained glass windows by Helmut Ammann in the Christ Church in Munich-Neuhausen. published in 2015 by the Christ Church Foundation in Munich , with photos by Isabella Krobisch.

Web links

Commons : Helmut Ammann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Galerie Helmut Ammann in Pöcking on Lake Starnberg