Hermann Lungkwitz

Hermann Lungkwitz (born March 14, 1813 in Halle (Saale) , † February 10, 1891 in Austin (Texas) ) was a romantic American landscape painter of the 19th century of German origin.

Life

Karl Friedrich Hermann Lungkwitz was born the son of the stocking manufacturer Johann Gottfried Lungkwitz and his wife Friederike Wilhelmine, née Hecht, in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt. From 1840 to 1843 he studied painting at the Dresden Academy with Adrian Ludwig Richter . After graduating, he spent three years in the Salzkammergut and the Northern Limestone Alps in Bavaria . In protest against the refusal of the Saxon King Friedrich August II to recognize a constitutional monarchy , he took part in the Dresden May uprising in 1849 with his brother-in-law Richard Petri . When this failed, the Lungkwitz and Petri families emigrated to the USA in 1850 . In 1852 they bought a farm of 320 hectares in Texas for $ 400. Petri drowned in an accident in 1857. In 1864 they gave up the farm again. In 1866 Lungkwitz founded a photo studio in Austin (Texas) with Carl G. von Iwonski . From 1870 to 1874 he carried out a lucrative major contract from the Texan Land Registry; Richard Petris' brother-in-law, Jacob Kuechler, was the head of this agency. His daughter Martha Lungkwitz-Bickler was also employed there as a civil servant. In 1877 his son-in-law Jacob Bickler founded the Texas German and English Academy in Austin, where Lungkwitz taught drawing and painting. His wife Elisabeth, née Petri, died in 1880, Lungkwitz himself in 1891. Both are buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Austin.

Works

Lungkwitz left a work of an estimated 350 pictures, mostly pencil and oil studies, some of them from Europe. He was enthusiastic about the wild and romantic landscape of the Texas Hill Country. His favorite subjects were Enchanted Rock , Bear Mountain, the foothills north of Fredericksburg , the Pedernales, and the Colorado River Valleys. His carefully crafted compositions in the tradition of European landscape painting were created as pencil sketches in front of nature and were executed in bright colors in the studio .

Art historical classification

The departure of German academics like Lungkwitz to America after the unsuccessful bourgeois revolution of 1848 was an intellectual bloodletting for Europe, and at the same time a stroke of luck for America. Otherwise we would hardly have an unobstructed view of the primeval landscapes of the American south. America's few academic artists were trained by the country on the east coast at that time; the University of Texas was only founded in 1883. Second-hand heroic clichés of the American South, such as in the novels by Karl May in Germany or in the paintings by Frederic Remington in America, were widespread at the time and were uncritically perceived as reality.

But Lungkwitz is not entirely free of ideological implications either. With him, the typically romantic attitude of restoring paradise with the means of art becomes the program. Small human settlements fight against the merciless nature, a primarily romantic disposition. Almost deserted landscapes become a metaphor for hopes that the political narrowness of Europe did not allow at the time. These archaic motifs reflect the unfulfilled longings of Europe's bourgeois intellectuals for freedom and independence from authoritarian monarchy. His meticulousness and attention to detail testify to his determination to find in art what the deficit political reality in Germany had previously denied him. In America he had found acceptance, but also a present full of racism and the terrible American Civil War and its consequences. In this respect, Lungkwitz was not really released through his emigration: he was caught in the lifelong search for an ideal that he was never really allowed to experience himself. His grandiose paintings live from this tension.

Exhibitions

After his death, Lungkwitz was initially forgotten, but was rediscovered in the 1930s. His paintings are now the gems of many state galleries and public buildings in Texas. A large retrospective of works took place in 1983/1984 at the University of Texas in San Antonio .

literature

• Mae Estelle Meyers: The Lives and Works of Hermann Lungkwitz and Richard Petri (MA thesis, University of Texas, 1933).
• Esse Forrester-O'Brien: Art and Artists of Texas (Tardy, Dallas 1935).
• Pauline A. Pinckney: Painting in Texas. The Nineteenth Century (University of Texas Press, Austin 1967).
• William W. Newcomb and Mary S. Carnahan: German Artist on the Texas Frontier. Friedrich Richard Petri (University of Texas Press, Austin 1978).
• James Patrick McGuire: Hermann Lungkwitz (University of Texas Press, Austin 1983).

Web links

• The-Athenaeum
• tshaonline.org
• American Galleries