Ida Kerkovius

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Ida Kerkovius (born August 31, 1879 in Riga , Russian Empire ; † June 7, 1970 in Stuttgart ) was a German painter and tapestry weaver who belongs to the Stuttgart circle of avant-gardists and one of the most important female representatives of Classical Modernism in Germany.

Biography and artistic work

Ida Kerkovius was born as the fourth of twelve children into a Baltic German landowner and merchant family in Riga. She spent her childhood at Saadsen Manor (today Lat .: Zādzenes muiža , about 60 km east of Riga). At the age of 18 she began her training at a private painting and drawing school in Riga. She finished her training in 1899 with a diploma that entitles her to teach art. Enthusiastic about the works of an Adolf Hölzel student, she made the decision to continue her studies in Dachau . In 1903 she made an educational trip to Italy and visited Venice, Florence and Rome. She then studied for five months as a student of Adolf Hölzel in the Dachau artists' colony . This short time was very formative for her, because it was there that she learned the flat vision taught by Hölzel, with which one can transfer three-dimensional nature onto the two-dimensional canvas. She subsequently returned to Riga at the request of her parents.

Flowers against a blue background by Ida Kerkovius (around 1914) from the holdings of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
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In 1908 Kerkovius was able to study at Adolf Mayer's private painting school in Berlin, but soon realized that his naturalistic nude studies did not bring her any new knowledge. The artist went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart , where she became a master student of Adolf Hölzel, who had directed a school of composition there since 1905. From 1911 she taught as his assistant to private students who had not yet been admitted to the academy and introduced them to his teaching, including Johannes Itten . In 1911 she took part in an exhibition at Herwarth Walden's “Sturm” in Berlin . In 1912 she saw works by Vincent van Gogh , Paul Cézanne , Cubists , Italian Futurists and Brücke painters for the first time in an exhibition . In Adolf Hölzel's so-called Expressionist Hall she was represented with a work in the context of the art exhibition organized by the Association of Art Friends in the States on the Rhine in Stuttgart in 1914. In 1916 she exhibited together with Willi Baumeister , Oskar Schlemmer and Johannes Itten in the exhibition "Hölzel und seine Kreis" in Freiburg .

From 1920 to 1923 Ida Kerkovius spent the winter semesters at the Bauhaus in Weimar, attended the preliminary course with Johannes Itten and Georg Muche , the art lessons of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee and learned the art of weaving in Gunta Stölzl's class . She then returned to her Stuttgart studio and developed a new artistic independence from Hölzel, with whom she continued to be friends. In 1930 she had her first major solo exhibition at the Württemberg Art Association .

Abstract still life by Ida Kerkovius (around 1935) from the holdings of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
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The National Socialists defamed their works as degenerate art , and so their work was restricted from 1933. In the period from 1934 to the Second World War , she traveled abroad for a long time in the summer, visiting Norway and Bulgaria and visiting her siblings in Riga. The trips inspired her to paint landscapes. In 1939 her family of German descent was relocated to Poland in the so-called Warthegau due to the provisions of the German-Soviet border and friendship treaty. Many works by Kerkovius were lost in the process. She worked withdrawn as a painter and earned her living by teaching and tapestry weaving.

Her Stuttgart studio burned down completely in a bomb attack in March 1944. Many of her pictures and works were destroyed forever, so that her oeuvre before 1945 has only partially survived. In Stuttgart she stayed with friends.

After 1945 she continued her rich artistic work. She made numerous trips and had representative and successful exhibitions at home and abroad. In 1954 she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit by Federal President Theodor Heuss . In 1955 Ida Kerkovius received the first prize in the exhibition “Ischia in the Picture of German Painters”. In 1958 she was awarded the title of professor by the state of Baden-Württemberg.

Couple in the garden of Ida Kerkovius (not dated) from the holdings of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
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In the fifties she expanded her artistic work to include designing and designing glass windows. Among other things, the stained glass windows for the Stuttgart City Hall and in 1958 those in the prayer room of the University Clinic in Tübingen were made. In addition to numerous oil paintings, pastels and drawings, a number of important knotted carpets were created in this and subsequent years.

Despite declining strength and health in the 1960s, her artistic work lasted into her old age. The artist died after a long and serious illness at the age of 91. Her last oil painting, Bel Vue , was left unfinished. Ida Kerkovius' final resting place is in the forest cemetery in Stuttgart .

Honors

Exhibitions - a selection

literature

  • Kurt Leonhard : The painter Ida Kerkovius. Stuttgart 1954.
  • Eduard Roditi: Kerkovius. simon u. Koch, Constance 1961, DNB 452383331
  • Kurt Leonhard: Ida Kerkovius life and work. Cologne 1967.
  • Ernst Schremmer : Ida Kerkovius landscapes. Esslingen 1975.
  • Franz Menges:  Kerkovius, Ida. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 11, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-428-00192-3 , p. 513 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • artists of the bauhaus: work by 26 masters and students from the period 1919 to 1983. with an introduction by peter hahn , berlin . Kunstverein Weingarten, Weingarten 1983, ISBN 3-921617-79-0 , p. 15, ill. P. 37 and 38.
  • Iris Cramer: Ida Kerkovius, The tapestries. Master thesis. Frankfurt am Main 1989.
  • Maja Riepl-Schmidt : Ida Kerkovius. "It is all art" . In: Maja Riepl-Schmidt (Hrsg.): Against the overcooked and ironed out life. Women's emancipation in Stuttgart since 1800 . Silberburg, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-925344-64-0 , p. 229-235 .
  • Katharina Hadding: Ida Kerkovius, The watercolors. Master thesis. Marburg 1993.
  • Gerhard Leistner : Ida Kerkovius - Retrospective. Exhibition catalog. Riga / Regensburg 2001.
  • Hannelore Cyrius: It is all art, Ida Kerkovius 1879–1970. Norderstedt 2010.
  • Ingrid Mössinger (ed.) Gesa Jürss, "My world is color", exhibition catalog, Chemnitz 2014.
  • Tom Beege, Andrea Fromm (Ed.): “It is all art”. Ida Kerkovius. A Bauhaus artist . Art Association Apolda Avantgarde eV, Apolda 2019, ISBN 978-3-9817420-6-0 .
  • Dietrich Heißenbüttel: color and shape after Hölzel, before Itten. Ida Kerkovius and her glass windows in Stuttgart and Tübingen . State Office for Monument Preservation in the Stuttgart Regional Council, Esslingen am Neckar 2019, ISBN 978-3-9817420-6-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Exhibition catalog Art Exhibition Stuttgart 1914 , Kgl. Art building, Schloßplatz, May to October, ed. from the Association of Friends of Art in the States on the Rhine, Stuttgart 1914, p. 48, cat. 417 (“Composition”, oil painting).
  2. ↑ a b Gabriele Katz: Stuttgart's strong women . Theiss, Darmstadt 2015, p. 128 .
  3. ↑ kuenstlerbund.de: Board members of the German Association of Artists since 1951 ( Memento of the original from December 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed September 7, 2015). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kuenstlerbund.de
  4. ↑ XII. Ostdeutsche Kulturtage 1965. Siebenbürgische Zeitung , November 15, 1965, accessed on November 9, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Search for Kerkovius on Google Maps. Google , accessed January 16, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Notice on the exhibition , accessed on July 30, 2014.
  7. ↑ Brita Sachs: "The color is innate to me" , in: FAZ from May 11, 2017.
  8. ↑ Encounter with the sorceress of colors in FAZ of October 14, 2017, page 49.
  9. ^ Adrienne Braun: Funny points in the swimming pool. Das kleine Engen shows a large exhibition by Ida Kerkovius, who was part of the Stuttgart art scene . In: Stuttgarter Zeitung . May 8, 2017, p. 11 .
  10. ↑ Kai Agthe: Your world is the colors . In: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung . March 1, 2019, p. 21 .
  11. ↑ Ida Kerkovius - The whole world is color. Exhibition May 12 to September 13, 2020. In: State Gallery Stuttgart. Retrieved June 6, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Kerkovius, Ida
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and tapestry weaver
DATE OF BIRTH August 31, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1970
Place of death Stuttgart