Henry Gowa

Henry Gowa (born May 25, 1902 in Hamburg ; died May 23, 1990 in Munich ) was a German painter and set designer .

Life

Henry Gowa in memoriam in Les Milles

Gowa was born as Hermann Gowa in Hamburg. After studying in Munich, he made a name for himself as a set designer and worked in Munich, Leipzig and from 1928 at the Frankfurt Art Theater. Gowa married the art historian Sabine Spiero , daughter of Heinrich Spiero , in 1929 , and they divorced in exile in 1936. In his second marriage, Gowa was married to the French Annie Roussel, they had three children.

In 1931 the gallery owner Ludwig Schames dedicated an exhibition to him where his pictures and stage designs were shown for the first time in a solo exhibition. When the Nazis came to power , Gowa emigrated to Paris and was interned during the war . In disgust for his namesake Hermann Göring , he changed his first name to Henry. Thanks to his contacts with the Resistance , Gowa was able to hide in a mountain village in the south of France and escaped the Shoah .

After 1945 Gowa was first head of the school for arts and crafts in Saarbrücken , where he appointed Frans Masereel . He later became director at the Werkkunstschule in Offenbach am Main (today the University of Design ), where he made a significant contribution to its internationalization, including a. through several exhibitions such as "The young painting of France" (Offenbach et al., 1955), "The young German painting" (Paris, 1955). Gowa became general commissioner for the German department of the Biennale . In 1959 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit. He spent his old age in Oberschleißheim , where his legacy from 1200 works was stored. This is now on permanent loan in the Ludwig Meidner archive of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt . Parts of the scenographic estate are in the theater studies collection of the University of Cologne.

plant

Gowa was only an admirer of Cézanne and was shaped in exile by the protagonists of the avant-garde in France whom he got to know personally, such as Bonnard , Chagall , Matisse and Picasso . After the war he increasingly looked for more universal forms of expression, abstract compositions emerged in the field of tension between explosive dynamics and balanced harmony.

Fonts (selection)

• Gowa, H. Henry: Matisse, paintings 1939–1946, 1947
• Gowa, H. Henry: Impressions of Nice: Summer 1947, 1948
• Gowa, H. Henry: Texts and Reviews, 1984

literature

• Gowa, Hermann Henry , in: Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 407
• Sylvia Görke: Gowa, Hermann . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 59, Saur, Munich a. a. 2008, ISBN 978-3-598-22799-8 , p. 418 f.
• Brunner, Werner and Pit Mischka (eds.): Art is free - the details are determined by the police. Political repression in the cultural field of the 1920s, 1977
• Huder, Walter: Picture and stage design an exhibition from the work of Hermann Henry Gowa, 1982

Web links

• Biography at exilarchiv.de