Helmut Braig

Portrait of the artist

Children's drawing from 1935

Showpiece for Steiff

Double act (airbrush) from 1998

Scout troop (painting) from 1998

Sculpture in the Welzheimer Wald from 1952

Helmut Braig (born March 16, 1923 in Allmendingen ; † December 11, 2013 in Giengen an der Brenz ) was a German painter , sculptor , graphic artist, filmmaker and book author .

In his work he followed the spirit of surrealism , with a very pronounced potential for expression. He became known in 1963 for his film The War of the Ants , the world's first animated puppet film , which was not shot using the stop-motion method that was customary up to that point , but in real gear . Braig says of himself that he is not a graphic artist, painter, sculptor, filmmaker, author, but an experimenter.

Life

Childhood and youth

Helmut Braig was born into a middle-class family as the son of a master carpenter. As a child he was friends with the son of Konrad Freiherr von Freyberg zu Eisenberg . This gave him access to Allmendingen Castle . The many art objects in the halls and the paintings on the walls and ceilings impressed and inspired the young Braig. He made impressive drawings of everything that touched his artist's soul. Konrad Freiherr von Freyberg zu Eisenberg recognized his artistic talent and encouraged him.

Although an eye disease almost blinded him as a nine-year-old and made his right eye unusable in the long run, Braig developed an eye for colors and shapes, including technical contexts. He first saw his name in the press when he was twelve years old: A newspaper with a publishing house in Berlin that was spread across Germany at the time carried out an action entitled Young Draftsmen to the Front . Encouraged by his father, he submitted his drawing Walk to Christmas Mass and received first prize for it. After finishing school, Braig received an apprenticeship as a designer at the toy company Steiff through efforts at Eisenbergs .

Studies and war

After Braig had demonstrated his talents in three and a half years of apprenticeship, the Steiff company sent him to the Württemberg School of Applied Arts in Stuttgart in 1941 to further promote the same. From there, after one semester, he switched to the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart .

The widening war put an end to my studies. Braig 1942 got the pattern command . It is true that the director of the academy, Fritz von Graevenitz , was able to use his connections to the military district command to prevent Braig from immediately having to rush to arms. But the postponement only lasted a semester. In 1942 Braig was recruited and, as he himself says, "trained to be a killer in France". Then came what was probably the worst time of his life, when he was sent to Russia for partisan warfare for a year and was taken prisoner in the Harz Mountains in April 1945. The senselessness, cruelty, indignity, privation and suffering experienced in these times were later processed by Braig in many of his pictures. In 2009 the Heidenheimer Verlagsanstalt published his book Fragments , which contains 90 short stories and drawings; many of them describe those war experiences.

Braig lived in Giengen an der Brenz from 1949 .

Act

As a showpiece designer for toy companies

After returning home from captivity, Braig started a meager but new life in freedom and self-determination in bombed-out Stuttgart. In the summer of 1949 he received another visit from the managing director of the Steiff company, as he did when he was a boy, who brought him back to the factory in Giengen an der Brenz. There he was supposed to rebuild the show and advertising department, which the artist with the special talent of expressing great art from “fragments” succeeded in despite the barren post-war conditions. During his time at Steiff he designed around 300 small and large showpieces; many of them can now be seen in museums.

Braig came up with a number of ideas for the show pieces: he staged Steiff animals by developing not only the composition of the scenery and arrangements but also all the technology that brought movement to the otherwise inactive figures and their surroundings. Braig created the houses, ships and other surrounding elements using a production technique he developed himself: The individual elements were made from rubber using a molding process and then reinforced with fiberglass. Then the sets were mechanized and electrified.

All over the world toy manufacturers became aware of Braig's special skills. He also built showpieces for the Mattel company in California, reconstructed a Viking shipyard from 850 for the Helle model company and developed the so-called Braig landscape carpets for railway accessories and pewter figure manufacturing companies. For the German performance show in Tokyo in 1984, Braig built a smurfland around 10 m in circumference that was fully mechanized. The exhibit caused a sensation and was recreated eleven times for different major cities in Europe. Several reports about this impressive show have also been broadcast on Japanese television.

As a filmmaker

In 1959 Braig wrote and drew the screenplay for the film Der Ameisenkrieg , which he produced , a puppet cartoon with around 250 ants about 15 cm in size cast in rubber. In it he processed his own war experiences and combined them with an appeal to the people to put an end to the nonsense of armed conflicts. In 1963 the film was shown for the first time on German television. From then on, he went around the world and won many prizes and gold medals. The success is partly due to the fact that this film was shot in real gear instead of stop-motion, which was an absolute novelty for the state of film technology at the time. In this context, the film was included in the Guinness Book of Records in 1998. The film achieved a kind of enthusiasm record in Japan, from where Prince Takamatsu, a son-in-law of Tennō , sent Braig a personal, precious gift in recognition of his cinematic achievements.

Two years later, using the same real aisle technique, the film Romance in Müll was made , a scenic and symbolic representation of the social throwaway mentality. This film was also shown on German and international television.

As a painter

In addition to the numerous charcoal and pencil drawings, Braig created hundreds of paintings in the course of his life. According to his own statement, he does not know whether there are 500 or 5000. While the drawings depict reality true to detail, the paintings lift the viewer into a dreamlike - sometimes nightmarish - world, one that rises above reality. You can always find opposing topics such as love and hate, war and reconciliation, sensuality and sobriety. There is also a rich variety of depictions of nature. All pictures are designed with a mixed technique of airbrushing and brush work, preferably with acrylic paints. Braig also made the appropriate frames for all paintings himself.

As a sculptor

In 2001 Braig accepted the order to transform a barn in the village of Bartholomä into a special event location ( "Braighausen" ). He developed the idea of ​​lining the room with a medieval-romantic backdrop so that the impression of a medieval market square is created. The entire system was architecturally developed by Braig, creatively designed and manufactured by hand using the stone casting process . Buildings up to eight meters high were built in Braig's studio in transportable parts and then transported by truck to Bartholomä, where they were assembled and painted. Around 4,500 artist hours were necessary for this.

As a photographer

The artistic works of Helmut Braig, which show his photographic works, are relatively little known. He not only documented his work with the camera, but also designed other artistic ideas and ideas using the camera. Selected images and graphics were projected onto human bodies, from which new recordings were made. These photos show further, surprising facets from the infinitely varied work of the multi-artist. Even the negatives or slides of the resulting recordings were partially processed manually using the scratch technique. Some of these works will be presented to the public for the first time in Birkenried in 2013. (Exhibition "Between Stalingrad and Eroticism", May 1 to August 31, 2013)

In the Welzheimer Wald , Braig created a forest house with a sculpture landscape for himself and his wife, integrated into the nature of the forest. The Braig forest area is bordered by a 3 m high and 160 m long relief wall . At the beginning of 2004, the Braig sculpture park was built in the center of Giengen . Nine very different sculptures with a height of three to four meters adorn the space between the city wall and the river Brenz . His sculptures are also in a hotel garden in the Spessart and in private gardens in the Black Forest and in Frankfurt am Main .

Exhibitions

• Violence - yesterday, today, tomorrow , Theater Ulm 1982
• Steigenberger Hotel Frankfurt, Airport
• “The journey is more than the goal” November 1993
• Köflach, Austria
• Zeulenroda, Thuringia
• Sculptures , Rathaus-Galerie Aalen 2002
• Master of the region , GEK Schwäbisch Gmünd
• Documenta Kassel
• Air France palace, avenue des Champs-Élysées , Paris
• Le Musee des Automates, Temple du Mouvement de La Rochelle, France
• Braig object , German exhibition Tokyo, Japan
• District art exhibition Giengen, town hall
• Giengen Sculpture Park 2004
• "Art from Giengen", Giengen / Brenz 2005
• Art - Paths - Transformation , Giengen 2000
• The city under roof ( Braighausen ), Bartholomä 2006
• "Old Masters" Künstlerbund Stuttgart 2007
• "Helmut Braig - on the way" Giengen / Brenz 2008
• "Surrealist between war experience and eroticism", Birkenried 2008
• "Fragments", Heidenheim Press House, Heidenheim / Brenz 2009
• "Street of Peace", Giengen / Brenz 2011
• "An artist between Stalingrad and eroticism", Birkenried 2013

Works

Movies

• The ant war
• Romance in trash
• Man people
• Forest life

Books

• 3 photo books about Helmut Braig, Karin Upahl
• Fragments , Heidenheim Publishing House 2009
• Straße des Friedens , photo book for the exhibition 2011, Karin Upahl
• Helmut Braig "The Sculptures and Pictures" 2012, Karin Upahl
• Helmut Braig "Erotic Landscapes", 2012, self-published

Individual evidence

1. ^ Heidenheimer Neue Presse , Kulturspiegel January 23, 1993 "An erotic and vehement pacifist" - Anatol Schneider
2. ↑ Südwest Presse , http://www.swp.de/heidenheim/lokales/giengen/Welt-der-Kunst-trauert-ums-Leonardole-vom-Brenztal;art1168894,2354165
3. ^ Berliner Zeitung of February 24, 1935
4. ↑ Schwäbische Zeitung of March 5, 1992 "A man who gave the Smurfs a home"
5. ↑ Swabian Post on August 23, 1979 - "The Ant War"
6. ↑ www.braighausen.de
7. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau of December 2, 1993
8. ↑ Heidenheimer Zeitung of May 12, 1984 - "Enthusiasm in distant Tokyo"
9. ↑ Heidenheimer Zeitung of December 24, 1983 - "A fairy tale from the land of stockings - show piece for the performance show" by Heinz Kleimaier

Web links

• photofieber.de gallery by Helmut Braig (website no longer exists)
• Braighausen - art project