Herbert Dunkel

Herbert Dunkel (born November 14, 1906 in Berlin , † December 8, 1966 in Norden (East Friesland) ) was a freelance artist and art teacher in East Friesland .

Life

Herbert Dunkel grew up in Berlin in close contact with art. His father was a city architect and curator at the Märkisches Museum . He included the son early on in his work, which also included archaeological excavations. Herbert Dunkel drew found objects and exhibits at an early age. He also took part in the art and cultural history lectures that his father attended and he got to know scientists and artists (including Max Liebermann ). Through his father's contacts, he also visited the other Berlin museums. These influential influences for Herbert Dunkel led to the desire to become a painter. He did not achieve that at the Köllnisches Gymnasium in BerlinAbitur and left school at the age of 17.

From 1923 to 1940 Herbert Dunkel completed a technical apprenticeship and worked as a design engineer at Siemens and Telefunken in Berlin. At the same time he was studying at the Berlin School of Applied Arts . A first attempt to earn a living as a freelance artist failed.

In 1941 Herbert Dunkel married Hanne van Stipriaan from the north (East Frisia). In 1942 his only son, Volker, was born. Today, Volker Dunkel lives in Bremen (retired - worked as a garden architect ) and has already co-organized and staged several art exhibitions about his father. A bomb attack destroyed all of his previous artistic work in Berlin in 1943. Until the end of the war, he was spared an assignment in the Wehrmacht , as he worked as a design engineer at Siemens. He was taken prisoner by the Soviets and released after five months. Then he went north (East Frisia).

Between 1946 and 1953 he lived in Norden as a freelance artist and became a founding member of the Federal Association of Visual Artists (BBK) Northwest Germany, district group East Friesland. Herbert Dunkel's artistic new beginning was characterized by the work on picture cycles such as I paint the march (title of the first exhibition in Norden 1945), A port city after the war ( Bremerhaven ), The port of Emden , and the North Sea Works . Herbert Dunkel benefited from his agility and sociability. It received funding from the US military government in Bremerhaven and from Emden business circles. He first exhibited in East Frisia and later in the Netherlands. He turned to modern trends in the art world early on. He found his way into an expressive abstraction through an intensive discussion with the international group CoBrA . A friendly relationship developed with Anton Rooskens , the oldest CoBrA artist. In the 1950s, Dunkel also exhibited in Delfzijl , Groningen , Winschoten , Arnhem , Leeuwarden and The Hague in addition to Amsterdam . Herbert Dunkel's work is particularly impressive due to the confident and experimental handling of the various artistic techniques.

In 1954 Herbert Dunkel became an art teacher at the Ulricianum grammar school in Aurich . At the same time he took over the chairmanship of the BBK. He made it his business to make modernism in East Friesland known to his students and a wider audience. Herbert Dunkel was extremely popular with his students as an art teacher and was fully recognized as a subject, although as a side entry he had no general pedagogical and subject-specific training. He made teaching projects in the style of action painting and encouraged his students to understand this art form, which was very controversial in Germany at the time.

Between 1955 and 1961 Herbert Dunkel traveled to Iceland and South Africa with subsequent exhibitions of the pictures he painted on the way. As a special feature, he also included student works in his exhibition activities. In addition to depictions of landscapes, city and port views, there are images that focus on people. They lead into the world of the circus as well as into African mythology.

From 1961 a series of large-format commissioned works for public buildings in Aurich, Leer and Wilhelmshaven was created . Another field of activity was stage sets that were implemented together with his students from the Ulicianum grammar school. He also involved his students in his extra-curricular commissioned works, for example in the relief in the officers' casino of the Aurich Air Force barracks made of vertical blue stripes and white birds (made of wood), which his students built in class.

Under the pseudonym Pia Fraus , Herbert Dunkel dealt with issues of art in newspaper articles.

On December 8, 1966, Herbert Dunkel had a fatal accident in a traffic accident on the way from the north to his place of work, the Ulicianum grammar school in Aurich.

literature

• Friedrich Scheele (Ed.): Herbert Dunkel: 1906–1966; Color, shape, rhythm . (on the occasion of the exhibition in the Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum Emden from November 11, 2006 to February 11, 2007), Oldenburg 2006

Web links

• Literature by and about Herbert Dunkel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Example: Composition Jem (1958)