Herta Wescher

Herta Wescher (* 1899 in Krefeld , † March 3, 1971 in Paris , née Kauert) was a German art historian who worked in France . She was a connoisseur of modern art, an authority on the art form of collage and an art critic .

Live and act

youth

Herta Kauert's parents were the businessman Heinrich Kauert and Maria geb. Jentges. She attended high school and was also privately tutored. In 1917 she graduated from high school in Bonn. After graduating from high school, she began studying art history , history and archeology at the Universities of Heidelberg , Munich (with Heinrich Wölfflin ) and Freiburg . In Munich she made close friendships with later art historians , including Heinrich Wölfflin's students Franz Roh , Hans Curjel , Sigfried Giedion and Carola Giedion-Welcker . This group of avant-garde art enthusiasts sparked a passion for modern art in Herta Kauert . In Freiburg, Kauert studied under Hans Jantzen . In 1923 she met the art historian and Jantzen student Paul Wescher . She married Paul Wescher in the same year and received her doctorate from Jantzen in 1924 on the painter Sebastian Dayg, who was active in the 16th century.

Activity in Berlin

After graduating, her husband got a job at the National Museums in Berlin . Herta Wescher also worked there on a voluntary basis in the graphics department under the direction of Max J. Friedländer . Friedländer gave her the opportunity to work on the catalog raisonné of Peter Paul Rubens together with the art historian and Rubens researcher Ludwig Burchard . In addition, she was involved in the contemporary art scene in Berlin, influenced by Franz Roh, Curt Glaser, Siegried Curjel and the Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy .

Emigration to France

As advocates of the Weimar Republic and the Bauhaus School, the views of the Weschers stood in direct contrast to the conservative art ideology of National Socialism . After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the Weschers emigrated to Paris.

Herta Wescher worked as a journalist and between 1936 and 1937 as a correspondent for the English art magazine "Axis". She helped organize the Free Artists Association, of which the art historians Sabine Spiro and Paul Westheim were members.

After France entered World War II, she was interned in 1940. Herta Wescher and her husband fled to Basel in Switzerland in 1942 . After the war ended, Herta Wescher separated from her husband in 1945 and returned to Paris.

Art journalist and critic

As a freelance journalist she wrote in the early 1950s for the art magazine "Art d'aujourd'hui". 1953 she helped found the magazine "Cimaise." Among her favorite subjects included at that time the art form of collage . 1968 wrote Wescher the monograph "Die Collage", a standard work to this day.

Herta Wescher died in Paris in 1971. She was best known for her specialization in the previously relatively undiscovered area of ​​collage as an art form. In this area she became an early advocate of non-representational art.

Publications

• Sebastian Dayg: Contributions to the history of Franconian-Swabian painting in the 16th century. Freiburg, 1924, unpublished dissertation
• Picasso: Papiers collés. Paris, F. Hazan, 1960.
• The collage: history of an artistic means of expression. Cologne, DuMont, Schauberg, 1968.

literature

• Wescher, Herta , in: Ulrike Wendland: Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Art Historians in Exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . Munich: Saur, 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 753-755

Web links

• Literature by and about Herta Wescher in the catalog of the German National Library
• H. Wescher in the dictionary of arthistorians