Helmut Kolle

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Self-portrait in hunting costume , around 1930

Helmut Kolle (born February 24, 1899 in Charlottenburg , † November 17, 1931 in Chantilly near Paris ) was a German painter (pseudonym Helmut vom Hügel ). He was one of the few German painters to establish himself on the French art market in the 1920s .

life and work

Standing person with a peaked cap , around 1926

Born as the second son of the bacteriologist Wilhelm Kolle , Helmut Kolle received painting lessons as a child. From 1906 the family lived in Bern , from 1917 to 1918 in Frankfurt am Main . There he met the homosexual Wilhelm Uhde , who was over 20 years his senior , and who also became his mentor , and lived with him until his death.

Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde , around 1930

In 1918 he took brief painting lessons from Erna Pinner in Frankfurt . From 1919 to 1922 he lived with Uhde at Lauenstein Castle in the Franconian Forest . From 1919 to 1920 he worked on the magazine Die Freude, published by his friend . It was there that he also began to paint in oils and initially signed with his pseudonym. In 1922 he was diagnosed with endocarditis ; that year he and Uhde moved to Berlin . As early as 1924 he was able to organize his first solo exhibition in Dresden at the Richter art salon .

Self-portrait “Le cuisinier et le coq” , Paris 1924

In 1924 he followed Uhde to France , where Uhde promoted the painting of his former cleaning lady Séraphine Louis . In Paris in 1926, Kolle was able to sell almost all of his pictures at an exhibition in the Bing Gallery . From then on, he signed under his real name. Through Uhde he met Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque and Henri Rousseau . Picasso discovered “great vitality” in his paintings. In 1928 he and Uhde moved to Chantilly , where, already seriously ill, he discovered, among other things, the subject of the mounted Algerian sipahis . In 1929 he exhibited in the Georges Bernheim gallery in Paris and in 1930 in the Wertheim Gallery in London . In 1931 Kolle died in his place of residence. Uhde set up a commemorative exhibition for him in the Bonjean Gallery in Paris in 1932 .

Large male nude with arms crossed , 1925

Until the major retrospective in the Lenbachhaus in 1994/1995, curated by Hartwig Garnerus, Helmut Kolle was not very well known among the German public , which could be due to his early death and the resulting small number of pictures, but also that only a few of his paintings were in the Holdings of German museums. The exhibition in the Lenbachhaus met with an international response and had 40,000 visitors, a breakthrough for a hitherto unknown artist. The exhibition catalog was the first fundamental published research on Kolle. The text of his mentor Wilhelm Uhde, The Painter Helmut Kolle, the portrait of an early completed man (Zurich 1935) was reproduced in the catalog, as was Klaus Mann's text The painter Helmut Kolle (1936).

In 1995, the Deutsche Post honored Helmut Kolle with a special stamp. As a result of the exhibition in the Lenbachhaus , two permanent loans from Kolle ( Large Male Nude with Crossed Arms [1925] and the Suicide [1930]) were shown. The suicide was transferred to the museum from the Hartwig Garnerus collection in 2003. The State Gallery of Modern Art, Munich, and subsequently the Pinakothek der Moderne, show permanent loans from the Garnerus Collection from time to time.

Self-Portrait with Palette , 1925
Self-portrait , 1930, Städel Museum

Exhibitions

Kolles has been working in four exhibitions, 1952/1953 in the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover , in the Hamburger Kunstverein and in the Städel Museum shown in Frankfurt, 1970 in Osthaus Museum Hagen , 1994/1995 in Munich Lenbachhaus and 2010/2011 Gunzenhauser Museum in Chemnitz the Presented to the public. The exhibition in Chemnitz was titled Helmut Kolle - A German in Paris and showed 90 exhibits including numerous loans. From May 2011 this exhibition was shown (slightly changed) in the Ernst-Barlach-Haus in Hamburg (May 29th to September 25th 2011). In 2014 the Städel showed Forgotten Bodies: Helmut Kolle and Max Beckmann .

In France, his works hang in the Musée de Grenoble , the Musée d'Art in Senlis and in the Castle Museum of Vitré .

Movie

In the 2008 film biography Séraphine about the naive painter Séraphine Louis , Helmut Kolle is portrayed by Nico Rogner .

In 2010 the film Greed for Life and Bitterness, The Painter Helmut Kolle was filmed in the house of the collector Hartwig Garnerus with more of 30 main works by Kolle (bilingual text).

literature

  • Thomas Bauer-Friedrich : Kolle, Helmut . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 81, de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-023186-1 , p. 216 f.
  • Wilhelm Uhde: The painter Helmut Kolle. The portrait of an early completion . Atlantis, Zurich and Berlin 1935.
  • Richard Möring : Helmut Kolle (Helmut vom Hügel). First exhibition in Germany . Vaudrey, Hanover 1952.
  • Hartwig Garnerus: The painter Helmut Kolle . With a foreword by Helmut Friedel, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-88645-122-4 .
  • Ingrid Mössinger u. a. (Ed.): Helmut Kolle. A German in Paris. , Edition Minerva, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-938832-73-8 .
  • Stefanie Heraeus (ed.): Forgotten bodies: Helmut Kolle and Max Beckmann . Transcript, Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 978-3-8376-3281-1 (book accompanying the exhibition “Forgotten Bodies: Helmut Kolle and Max Beckmann” in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main from July 17 to September 21, 2014).

Web links

Commons : Helmut Kolle  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernd Roeck: "From Bismarck to Picasso": Wilhelm Uhde and the birth of the avant-garde. In: Wolfgang Hartwig: Orders in the crisis: On the political cultural history of Germany 1900-1933. , Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-58177-5 , pp. 481-500, here p. 484
  2. ↑ PDF at sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu
  3. ↑ Note on the website of the Barlach House ( memento from December 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on June 4, 2011
  4. ↑ Michael Hierholzer: Androgynous and athletic bodies . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , July 25, 2014, p. 39
  5. ^ Joconde database , accessed on July 21, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Kolle, Helmut
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hügel, Helmut vom (pseudonym); Kolle, Helmuth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH February 24, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Charlottenburg
DATE OF DEATH November 17, 1931
Place of death Chantilly