Hildegard Grunert

Hildegard Bartoschek-Grunert (born June 20, 1920 in Soldin / Mark Brandenburg, today Myślibórz , Poland ; † April 24, 2013 in Waldbrunn ) was a German painter and ceramist .

Artistic career

Hildegard Grunert showed a talent for painting and drawing early on , which she was able to train in her first job as a cartographer . After the Second World War, she lived in the Sauerland and earned her living with arts and crafts, thanks to her technical, technical and artistic dual talent.

It was here that the painter Emil Bartoschek - a former student of Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus Weimar and Otto Mueller at the Art Academy in Breslau  - discovered her extraordinary ability to create art and gave her painting and drawing lessons from 1946 to 1948.

In 1949 Hildegard Grunert moved to Cologne to begin studying ceramics at the Cologne factory schools with professors Dominikus Böhm , Wolfgang Wallner , the sculptor Ludwig Gies and the ceramics teacher Georg Roth . In 1951 Emil Bartoschek also moved to Cologne and became her partner. Grunert finished her art studies in 1952.

In 1957 she opened her own ceramic workshop in Cologne and showed her ceramic pictures in glaze painting as well as idiosyncratic pottery in several Cologne exhibitions and galleries .

Studies in France and Italy have left their mark on some of her works. Further study trips took her to Egypt, Sudan, Greece, Turkey and Spain.

Special ceramic technique

Influences of Romanesque art can be seen in the porcelain painting on plates or in her ceramic painting, where she applies large picture compositions on clay plates or on tiles that are first put together to the size of the picture (in the kiln each tile must then be burned again individually). After the firing, the picture with the tiles is then put together when the firing is satisfactory. Hildegard Bartoschek-Grunert masters this complicated technique. In order to paint such tile pictures on clay plates (fired or unfired), a reliable drawing technique is required, but also the ability to “blindly paint”, because the glazes made for them are different in their raw state than after firing. The artist must therefore have the colored image in the back of her mind even before the fire. Sometimes the results are surprising. Every brand is always an experience. In 1960 the international ceramic magazine for technology, science and art , Lübeck , published an illustrated article about their technology. This skill also earned her a large order from a Cologne company in 1962, the entrance hall of which she designed with a fountain, a wall with ceramic picture plates and a company coat of arms.

Working according to nature

Decorative painting, painting and drawing based on the nature of animals, birds, plants and flowers in the Botanical Garden in Cologne and in the Museum Koenig in Bonn were also part of the training in ceramics . In Prof. Schröder's class for decorative painting, she learned to depict ornamentation, the first designs of which were shown in Cologne in 1950 in the Werkbund exhibition in the Cologne exhibition halls and were bought by the Rasch company in Hanover .

More work

She modeled sculptures, illustrated plates with faience and majolica painting , worked on oil paintings , watercolors , etchings , copperplate prints and chalk drawings . Among other things, she was able to show her works in the exhibition “German Arts and Crafts” and in several galleries. She had to earn the living money in a pharmaceutical company in Cologne and later in the publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch . Hildegard Grunert and Emil Bartoschek married in 1965 and retired to Waldbrunn in the Westerwald to live their art undisturbed from the hustle and bustle of the big city. But Emil Bartoschek died in 1969. In all the decades of artistic creation, demanding literary works, poems, essays, travelogues and reflections have also emerged. Hildegard Bartoschek-Grunert died on April 24, 2013 in an old people's home in Waldbrunn.

In the museum

Paintings and ceramics by Hildegard Bartoschek-Grunert can be seen in Waldbrunn- Ellar , in the Ludwig-Bös-Haus local history museum initiated by Walter Rudersdorf , and in the Brandenburg House in Fürstenwalde / Spree.

Art reviews

M. Koelmann wrote on November 14, 1959 in the Kölnische Rundschau about an exhibition by Hildegard Grunert in the Evangelical Library on the Ubierring in Cologne:

"[...] the first exhibition by an artist [...] that encourages writing more than just an art-critical appraisal. Hildegard Grunert is one of the very few, perhaps the only one, who has mastered the rare art of ceramic painting. [...] "

M. Koelmann noted about Hildegard Grunert's ceramic exhibition in the Thoma Gallery :

“[…] She has come to the large, pictorial form and creates landscapes, style levels, figurative images from assembled, painted ceramic plates. [...] Her bowls and plates also have a very special touch, are somewhat reminiscent of Pompeian frescoes, just as their vases and jugs have their own shapes. [...] "

- Seeing H. Grunert again . In: Kölnische Rundschau . November 12, 1960

Alfred T. Keil wrote about her work in the Weilburger Tagblatt on November 5, 1976 :

“[...] unmanageable, this variety of motifs, techniques. [...] A “tropical impression” is dabbed and trowelled onto a ceramic plate - with the fingertip and with the thumbnail: “mechanistic” in technology, but rampant nature in the effect. On the dissecting gaze, the trunks look like spiral springs, the treetops like human brains. [...] An oker landscape was created on another ceramic plate. It looks like an old print and like a yellowed photograph of the world after the nuclear disaster: crazy visions, aesthetic utopia. The foreground is rigid, long fragments shoot up, clouds hang in the sky like twisted, frozen laundry. The middle forms a quiet, mute water surface. The horizon is black, with a white cardiogram flashing through it […] space motifs and Buddha heads everywhere and: Demeter-Lilith. Enameled once in a copper bowl. At first glance an icon, gold rims surround this face, which the viewer does not want to let go of. The eyes, so big and blue, the lips so green and yellow: the most brutal and tender sensuality, Demeter, the goddess of fertility and: Lilith, woman's death-bringing beauty [...] "

Sonja Diefenbach reported on March 30, 2008 in the Weilburger Tagblatt in the section The Portrait about Hildegard Bartoschek-Grunert:

“[…] Although her two mainstays, as she says, are painting and pottery, she also tries in other directions: Sculptures, plate painting, etchings and paper cuttings hang in her converted farmhouse in Fussingen, whose rooms have been prepared like a small museum are. [...] "