Helmuth Westhoff

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Helmuth Westhoff (born March 7, 1891 in Bremen , † August 16, 1977 in Fischerhude ) was a German painter .

Life

Helmuth Heinrich Bruno Westhoff was the third and youngest child of the businessman Friedrich Heinrich Eduard Westhoff and his second wife Johanna Caroline Natalie, née. Hartung, born in Bremen. The Westhoff family ran a trade in colonial goods such as grocery stores in downtown Bremen, Wachtstrasse 11. B. Coffee, tea and cocoa, which soon developed into one of the most important large roasting companies and coffee trading companies in Germany. His sister Clara Henriette Sophie, who is 13 years older, is the sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff . Helmuth Westhoff grew up in what was then a village and now the Bremen district of Oberneuland. His father Friedrich was already a painter of watercolors and aroused Helmuth's interest in painting, so that he began to draw and paint in the Wümmewiesen very early on. Through the inheritance after the early death of his father, he gained financial independence for a few years and used this time to take his first painting lessons with Carl Weidemeyer in Worpswede. To do this, he broke off attending secondary school. He also broke off his commercial apprenticeship in Hamburg in order to take further painting lessons from Otto Modersohn in Fischerhude in 1908/1909 . During this time he dealt intensively with painting, especially the still lifes of Paula Modersohn-Becker , who died in 1907 . In 1911 it belonged to Johann Heinrich Bethke (1885–1915), Fritz Cobet (1885–1963), August Haake (1889–1915), Rudolf Franz Hartogh (1889–1960), Wilhelm Heinrich Romeyer (1882–1936) and Bertha Schilling (1870–1935) to the Junge Wilde from 1911 in Fischerhude.

Westhoff later went to Berlin to study nude and portrait painting with Lovis Corinth . He continued his studies at the academy in Munich with the then respected portrait, landscape and figure painter Hermann Groeber. Due to temporary depression, he underwent psychoanalysis with Viktor Emil von Gebsattel in the winter and spring of 1911/12 , who later made a name for himself as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. In Munich he became friends with the French sculptor Gérard Vuerchoz and followed him to Paris, where he continued his studies with Lucien Simon at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière , an open art school on Montparnasse. During this time, Westhoff mainly painted portraits and still lifes that deal with the influences of the late Impressionists, including van Gogh and Gauguin , but also Toulouse Lautrec. At the beginning of the First World War Westhoff met the sculptor Ernst Barlach during his military training in Güstrow in 1914/15 . On August 30, 1915, Barlach described the 24-year-old painter as a good, dreamy boy whose loyalty and abandonment he perceived as a tendency towards idyllic gazebo happiness. From 1918 Fischerhude, where his sister, the sculptor Clara Westhoff , lived, became the focus of his artistic work, where he settled completely in 1931. In the first years of the war, Westhoff fought as an artilleryman in Champagne in northern France.

In 1926 he met the architect, dancer and painter Hellmut Müller-Celle (1903–1982) in Berlin , with whom he spent the war years 1943–1945 in his studio in Celle and with the Mehring / Kahle family in Ahnsbeck near Celle. After the war he returned to Fischerhude, where his sister Clara and his mother also lived. He devoted himself to landscape painting, but at the same time took lessons from Leo von König in Berlin. Several study trips took him to England in 1948, where William Turner's painting became a lasting experience for him. Until 1962, he spent the summer often with the Bremen-born poet, translator and architect Rudolf Alexander Schröder and his sister Dora in Bergen / Obb. to guest.

From 1954 he shared a studio with Hellmut Müller-Celle in Fischerhude and both lived together until his death. Together with Clara Westhoff, both became “the spiritual focal points of Fischerhude, where guests and friends from near and far came together in a love of literature and the fine arts”.

Westhoff was a member of the Bremer Künstlerbund and the Reich Association of Visual Artists in Berlin. He was brother-in-law of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke , who was married to Clara Westhoff . Helmuth Westhoff died on August 16, 1977 as a result of a stroke in his house on the Wümme in Fischerhude, he was buried in Fischerhude in the family grave of the Rilke family.

Works

  • Still life with an apple , around 1910.
  • Still life with a glass bottle , around 1920.
  • Summer flood , 1920.
  • At the Wümme near Fischerhude , 1923.
  • Flower still life with autumn flowers , 1930.
  • Boat trip on the Mühlenlaake , 1930.
  • Bouquet of flowers with delphinium and dahlias , 1931.
  • Boats on the Wümme , around 1940.
  • At the Wümme in Fischerhude , 1947.
  • Summer bouquet in a blue vase , around 1960.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ernst Barlach: The poetic work in three volumes. Edited by Friedrich Droß, Munich 1959, Volume 3: Die Prosa II , p. 286, see also pp. 309, 704.
  2. ↑ Hellmut Müller-Celle. on: washausen.de
  3. ^ Fischerhude cemetery (Ottersberg, Verden). In: grabsteine.genealogy.net
  4. ↑ Jürgen Schultze (Red.): Artists in Fischerhude. Brockkamp-Verlag, Bremen 1984, pp. 170-173.
  5. ^ Bremer Nachrichten, August 17, 1977
  6. ↑ http://grabsteine.genealogy.net/tomb.php?cem=98&tomb=12&b=M&lang=de
personal data
SURNAME Westhoff, Helmuth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 7, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH August 16, 1977
Place of death Fischerhude