Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer

Self-Portrait, 1936

Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer (born July 7, 1875 in Hohenhameln near Hanover , † April 26, 1945 in Berlin-Zehlendorf ) was a German painter and book author .

Life

Origin and youth

Hermann (Philipp, August) Knottnerus-Meyer was born in Hohenhameln near Hanover as the son of the businessman August (Knottnerus-) Meyer and his wife Antonie, née. Marbach born. Most of the family came from Lower Saxony , East Frisia and the Netherlands . Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer spent his childhood and youth in Hanover, where he attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, which he left with the school-leaving certificate.

education

From an early age, Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer showed a pronounced love of nature and an artistic talent. Nevertheless, at the request of his father, he first completed an apprenticeship in business before he began studying art in Munich . Paul Schad-Rossa (1862–1916), a student of Ludwig von Löfftz and Franz Defregger, should be mentioned as his teacher . A study trip to Egypt was extremely interesting for the foreign subjects of his later work . Returning to Hanover in 1898, he met the local poet Hermann Löns (1866–1914), who was almost nine years older than him, from which a deep friendship developed. The common circle of friends also included the writer and painter Wilhelm de Witt, the painter and sculptor Erich Fricke and the architects Hans Roediger and Georg Thoféhrn .

First creative period (1895–1918)

With the passionate poet and committed hunter Hermann Löns, the young painter Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer went on extensive hikes through the Solling and Lüneburg Heath . The landscapes and their typical people shaped and determined his early work expressly; the friend was also portrayed several times.

In addition, Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer apparently also gave lessons in Hanover. In connection with the artists Walter Schliephacke (1877–1955) and Carry van Biema (1881–1942) there is even talk of a painting school. In 1912 Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer joined the Deutscher Werkbund , and the following year Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer went on a trip to Rome to see his brother Dr. Theodor Knottnerus-Meyer, who headed the zoological garden there based on the model of Carl Hagenbeck .

The separation severely interrupted the male friendship with Löns, but it was abruptly ended by the First World War, when Löns enthusiastically volunteered and fell after two months on September 26, 1914 near Reims . Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer also had to do military service. In the penultimate year of the war, on July 25, 1917, the forty-two-year-old married Margarete Renschhausen (born April 22, 1897 - December 2, 1935), the daughter of Adolf Renschhausen, who was an import-export merchant and a trading company after 1890 owned in Morocco. The following year, their only child, their son Adolf, was born on December 19, 1918.

Second creative period (1918–1935)

The young family lived in Berlin (first: Yorkstrasse 46, from 1928/29: Steglitz , Leydenallee). A fruitful creative period began, and by building up a larger circle of friends and acquaintances, several commissioned works were in the pipeline. The artist, who has matured in the meantime, got inspiration mainly from trips to Germany and abroad that he undertook with his family: 1922 to St. Peter-Ording and the Lüneburg Heath, 1923 via Venice to Rome, 1925/26 to his in-laws to Morocco . In addition, there were invitations to cities such as Frankfurt an der Oder and Duderstadt , where he was awarded the contract for six large panel paintings for the town hall for the millennium. In addition to such home-related images, his main motifs were determined by the exotic, especially the North African impressions. In addition, sacred themes such as the birth of Jesus , the Lord's Supper and the crucifixion reflected the special shape and color as well as the craftsmanship of the stylistically unbound artist.

His literary inclination also bore fruit. The memoirs of his friend Hermann Löns published in 1928 with the title “The Unknown Löns” was followed in 1934 by the treatise “Vom Wesen der Kunst”. (See below: On the literary work)

Third creative period (1935–1945)

The decision to build a single-family house with a large studio in Berlin-Zehlendorf should give the artist a new focus of life and creativity. Unfortunately it turned out differently. Tragically, his wife, however young, could no longer see the completion and the move; she died on December 2, 1935 as a result of an operation. Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer never recovered from this difficult stroke of fate. The self-portrait from 1936 gives an idea of ​​the deep shock and despair that overshadowed and shaped the last ten years of the already sensitive person's life. When efforts to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin failed, Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer finally withdrew from socializing with friends and acquaintances in his studio house in order to devote himself entirely to his work. In this last creative period, he received targeted orders for representative panel paintings, some of which were up to 6 m wide, from larger institutions such as city administrations ( Berlin , Pyritz in Pomerania , Wittenberge an der Elbe) and regional associations (Landesbauernschaft Hannover). He received well-deserved recognition in 1941 when he was appointed honorary member of the Hermann Löns Society in Hanover, for which he returned the favor with a cycle of paintings.

The life of the painter Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer ended on April 26, 1945 - six days before the surrender of Berlin, further weakened in body and soul by the final phase of the Second World War with its appalling side effects.

To the painterly work

Tiger in the jungle, 1933

Locations

As far as is known, Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer never took part in exhibitions during his lifetime . Today we do not find him in any art history and so far in no lexicon. Only since an exhibition at the beginning of 2010 in Duderstadt have his life and work been in the focus of public interest again.

His pictures were in great demand during his lifetime. In the 1930s in particular, several German cities - such as Duderstadt, Wittenberge an der Elbe, Pyritz in Western Pomerania, and Berlin - commissioned Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer with large-scale pictures to decorate their public buildings. Institutions such as the former state farmers' union and the Hermann Löns Society in Hanover also order paintings from the Berlin artist, and the Oldenburg-Portugiesische Dampfschiffs Rhederei in Hamburg has him paint their ship salons.

After the end of the war in 1945, however, most of these works - if they still exist at all - came to the depot or remained lost. Only a few paintings are still verifiably in public hands - preferably in the city of Duderstadt, in the Historical Museum of the City of Hanover and in the Bomann Museum in Celle .

Most of the paintings that were still in the studio house in Berlin-Zehlendorf after the end of the war went into the private ownership of the son, who passed some of them on to his four children and grandchildren, to friends and to public institutions - for example to the Flensburg Ev.-Luth. Parish of St. Gertrud and the Municipal Museum of the City of Flensburg.

A small number of paintings are in private hands in Schwerin, Berlin, Neumünster and Flensburg.

Through intensive research and fortunate circumstances, several, mostly large-format works by Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer were rediscovered in the course of 2009 and saved from destruction. Thus, more than 100 paintings by the artist are currently known and mostly their locations.

Painting technique

Draft of a panel for Duderstadt, 1928

The surviving paintings by Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer show neither form-outward nor content-motif-related unity. Basically, the artist has used all relevant image formats, painting techniques and all types of images in the course of his fifty years of creativity . However, certain focal points can be identified in his three creative periods. Over the years, the tendency towards large format (panel paintings up to 6 m wide) grows, which can certainly be explained by the order situation in the thirties.

As a painting technique, Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer prefers oil tempera , a paint whose pigments are mixed with a binder from a water-oil emulsion. It is known that he usually produces his colors himself. It is also known that tempera paints spoil more easily than pure oil paints , and this is the reason why most of Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer’s oil tempera paintings have darkened considerably and have lost their former luminosity. This fact of course makes it difficult to properly assess many works today. It is different with his watercolors and especially with his pastels , which, due to their special charisma, occupy an exposed position.

Image genres

Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer seldom paints still lifes . But the three that are still there are impressive in terms of shape and color. Especially the lilac hedge with blackbird , which was created in 1945, the year he died, shows something of the artist's desire to dream away from the cruelty of everyday life in Berlin - into an intact nature with colorful flowers and birdsong. The bright light in the background is symptomatic: the humanistically educated artist knows that in the West, “light” is always associated with “hope”. Unfortunately it does not come true.

Nude painting is not exactly Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer's strength. All too often his pictures of naked women seem like exercises from the time he was studying in Munich around 1895/96. The artist is much more creative with his exposed female beings when he places them as nymphs in some forest or by a river.

Staging mythological things is obviously closer to him. The forest with two nymphs is also created in the year the painter died. It is as if he wants to counter the ugliness of being with the beauty of appearances. On April 3, 1945, one month before the capitulation of Berlin and 23 days before his death, Knottnerus-Meyer wrote in a letter: “And yet I am full of the most beautiful artistic problems. As a young man I was no more fertile. It is the tremendous advantage of artists to remain fertile into old age. ”Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer always becomes most fertile - quantitatively and also qualitatively - in his art when he discusses“ the human being ”and“ the human ” brings the canvas. Then he approaches the art maxim of his famous contemporary Paul Klee (1879–1940), who stated in 1920: "Art does not reproduce the visible, but art makes visible." Obviously, Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer uses his portraits and his genre pictures for this To “make visible” what is hidden “behind the facade”, so to speak.

It is well known that portrait painting aims to express the essence of the person in question beyond the image. And so it takes first place numerically with Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer with 24 copies still known. It also includes two self-portraits . Again and again he captures special people on the canvas - imaginative (like Chali and Swaantje from Löns' novel "The Second Face"), realistic (like Heidebauern and young girls), historical (like Luther , Friedrich the Great and Paul von Hindenburg ), beloved (like mother and wife) ... and in a special way Hermann Löns, his namesake and friend nine years older. 27 years after the poet's death and four years before the end of his own life, the large-format painting by Hermann Löns was created in a heather landscape . The painting clearly shows that characterizing people includes their surroundings, because it serves as a sounding board for their nature.

Moroccan storyteller, around 1926

Genre pictures make this idea their own to a particular degree, and consequently Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer is very noticeably involved in this genre as well. He takes us both into the strange surroundings of his in-laws in Spanish Morocco and into the German milieu. The visualized results present human beings of a very special kind - such as B. in the Moroccan storyteller , in the masked ball , in Berlin in the twenties or in the peasant vespers . The fact that Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer considers the types of people set in the local color scheme to be more important than the naturalistic rendering of the real location in his characteristic genre paintings is particularly clear in the six panel paintings he made for the millennium of Duderstadt. The daily press already recognized this back then, for example when the “Eichsfelder Morgenpost” of January 12, 1930 stated: “If you want to appreciate the pictures in the right way, you have to take into account that the artist primarily wanted to identify typical figures and that therefore the landscape and cityscape are only briefly indicated in the background. "

History pictures serve the same purpose. Knottnerus-Meyer uses them to make his individual way of visually characterizing people visible in historical scenes - such as in his large picture Nero looks at Rome .

Landscape paintings by the artist - as the second largest category in terms of numbers - reflect the artist's two worlds: on the one hand, the local environment in the Lüneburg Heath, in Solling or by the sea, on the other hand, the foreign area with the Moroccan city of Larache , the mysterious grave of the Islamic saint Lalla Aischa , the people on the Nile or the tigers in the jungle .

Sacred things still need to be mentioned and should not be overlooked, because Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer considers them to be something special . He is concerned with the three central motifs of the Christian message: the birth of Jesus , the Lord's Supper and the crucifixion . All three representations have something unusual about them, which has not yet come into play in this way in Western sacred art. This includes the fact that the people portrayed are "flesh and blood people who reveal their inner being in their posture, face and expression."

Summary

The work of the painter Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer is expressive, but not really expressionistic . The artist remains in the tradition of an academically trained painter who pursues his (traditional) craft in a "peculiar" way. He is not interested in the avant-garde.

The way it is presented changes with the object and its motif and thus gets something epoch-free - something very “personal”. His large paintings are most likely to be assigned to the New Objectivity .

To the literary work

Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer was also active as a writer. Published as books:

• The unknown Löns. Conversations and memories . Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Jena 1928. Reprint of the Bremen edition: Faks.-Verl., 1982
• On the essence of art . Wolf Heyer Verlag, Berlin 1934.

Honor

• 1941: Appointment as an honorary member of the Hermann Löns Society

exhibition

• January 21 to February 7, 2010 (posthumously): Citizens' Hall of the historic town hall in Duderstadt

literature

• Erich Griebel: Hermann Löns - the Low German . Wolf Heyer Verlag, Berlin / Leipzig 1934.
• Fritz Klein: Hermann Löns. Autographs and correspondence . Hanover 1974.
• Willfried Janßen: Hermann Löns as a scientist . In: Naturschutz 'und Naturparke 10/1982, p. 23 ff.
• Hans H. Möller: The town hall in Duderstadt. On building history and restoration . Vol. 6 of the research on monument preservation in Lower Saxony . Publishing house CW Niemeyer, Hameln 1989.
• Adolf Knottnerus-Meyer: The painter Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer - from his life and work . Manuscript, Flensburg 1989.
• Adolf Knottnerus-Meyer: The poet Löns and the painter Knottnerus-Meyer. A creative friendship with artists . Photo presentation, printed in: Hermann-Löns-Blätter 34th vol., 2/1995, p. 15 ff., As well as 35th vol., 1/1996, p. 2 ff., And 35th vol., 4/1996 , P. 4 ff.
• Melle Goemann Klinkenborg (ed.): The Meyers, also: Knottnerus-Meyer, of the Tjarks-Janssen tribe, a large clan that goes back to East Frisian and Upper Palatinate origins. Attempt to create a chronicle from the origins to the present day . Self-published, Hanover 2004.
• Bruno Grönke: Against forgetting. A documentation about efforts for the life and work of the painter Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer . Bound manuscript, Neumünster 2009.
• Bruno Grönke: Action to save paintings by the painter Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer . Bound manuscript, Neumünster 2009.
• Bruno Grönke: The unusual Lord's Supper. Thoughts on a picture by the painter Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer . Bound manuscript, Neumünster 2009.
• Nils Ballhausen (ed.): Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer in Duderstadt . With contributions by Hans-Reinhard Fricke and Bruno Grönke. Self-published, Berlin 2010.
• Bruno Grönke: Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer. Action Duderstadt in January 2010 . Bound manuscript, Neumünster 2010.
• Bruno Grönke: Löns' best friend: the painter Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer. His life and work: results of a search for clues . In: Hermann-Löns-Blätter 49th vol., 2/2010, p. 18 ff.
• Bruno Grönke: The painter Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer . In: Yearbook 2011 for Zehlendorf , 15th year 2010, p. 63 ff.
• Ek Noerg. Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer in Duderstadt. A picture exhibition and its surprising effects . In: Eichsfelder Heimatzeitung , 54th year 2010, p. 403 ff.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer in the catalog of the German National Library
• In the footsteps of the painter Knottnerus-Meyer , Göttinger Tageblatt , January 21, 2010

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See: Bruno Grönke: Action to save paintings by the painter Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer . Bound manuscript, Neumünster 2009.
2. ↑ The letter is in the private possession of the Adolf Knottnerus-Meyer family.
3. ↑ See: Kasimir Edschmid (ed.): Schöpferische Konfession . In: Tribune of Art and Time. A font collection . Reiss, Berlin 1920.
4. ↑ See: Duderstadt, City Archives, Newspapers Dept., Eichsfelder Morgenpost 1930. - See also: Nils Ballhausen (ed.): Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer in Duderstadt . With contributions by Hans-Reinhard Fricke and Bruno Grönke. Self-published, Berlin 2010.
5. ↑ See: Erich Griebel: Hermann Löns - the Low German . Wolf Heyer Verlag, Berlin / Leipzig 1934, p. 403. - Cf. also: Bruno Grönke: The unusual Last Supper. Thoughts on a picture by the painter Hermann Knottnerus-Meyer . Bound manuscript, Neumünster 2009.