Immanuel Knayer

Immanuel Knayer (born April 19, 1896 in Schöneberg / Enz ; † November 7, 1962 in Stuttgart ) was a German painter, etcher and wood cutter who is counted among the lost generation . Due to a painting ban imposed in 1941, he also turned to heraldry as well as advertising and commercial graphics .

Life

Immanuel Knayer was born as the son of the teacher Immanuel Knayer and Maria Knayer in Schöneberg, Württemberg, and attended the school there from 1902. Later he stayed with relatives in Ratingen , where he attended high school. Most recently Knayer attended boarding school in Korntal .

Infected by the enthusiasm for the war in August 1914, Knayer left school and volunteered for the war . He experienced the First World War on the western front . In 1918 the then 22-year-old Knayer returned home as a war disabled . Due to a severe wound, he remained weak and physically impaired throughout his life.

Against his parents' wishes, Knayer embarked on an artistic career. In 1919 he was admitted to the Stuttgart School of Applied Arts , which he left in 1921 in order to evade the tutelage of his parents by staying with relatives in Düsseldorf . In Düsseldorf Knayer made the final decision to become a painter.

After returning to Stuttgart, Knayer studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts from 1922 , where, in addition to the compulsory basic classes, he attended Arnold Waldschmidt's drawing class, Christian Landenberger's technical painting class, and Gottfried Graf's woodcut class from 1926 . In addition, he was accepted by Robert Breyer as a master student in his composing class in 1926 .

Together with Rudolf Müller he occupied a master class atelier in the Untere Anlagen in Stuttgart in 1928, later they moved into a joint studio on Kernerplatz until 1931. From then on Knayer earned his living as a freelance artist and had to adapt the working techniques and subject areas to the wishes of his customers.

In 1931 Immanuel Knayer joined the Stuttgart New Secession and belonged to it until it was forcibly dissolved in 1933.

In 1933 Knayer married Rudolf Müller's sister Helene.

In the years from 1929 to 1933 Knayer was in the focus of the Stuttgart art scene through several exhibition participations.

After the so-called seizure of power , his name disappeared from the exhibition directories, but Knayer continued to work as a painter. In 1941 Knayer submitted his 1935 oil painting Güterbahnhof im Schnee to the Great German Art Exhibition in the House of German Art in Munich . The jury, however, rejected his work as “unrealistic” and as “ degenerate ” in terms of the painterly and coloristic treatment . The consequences were grave for Knayer. The Reich Chamber of Culture in Berlin initiated measures against the Stuttgart painter, as a result of which Knayer was banned from painting. Although the Stuttgart office acted moderately orally, Knayer was unsettled by the ban. In future he would only paint in secret and then hide his works.

For existential reasons, Knayer began to work mainly in the field of heraldry . He painted family trees and city coats of arms in watercolors and was thus able to earn a living. As early as the 1930s, the artist was forced to improve his income situation through commissions from commercial graphics. This is how posters, advertising graphics and book covers were created, and occasionally he also designed bookplates , signets and book illustrations.

Shortly before the end of the war, his studio on Kernerplatz was destroyed in 1945. After 1945 Knayer tried to work again as an artist. His state of health and the long-term effects of the First World War hampered his artistic activity, so that from 1954 onwards he worked almost exclusively as a heraldist. His last painting, the oil painting Karrenschieber , painted in 1954 , was exhibited in 1955 at the Kunstwochen auf dem Killesberg , one of the first major art exhibitions in Württemberg after the war.

Immanuel Knayer died, largely forgotten by the art scene, in 1962 in Stuttgart.

plant

Immanuel Knayer is seen as an exemplary example of an artist who was born shortly before 1900 and whose freedom of development is limited to the time of the so-called Roaring Twenties . Due to the restrictions and restrictions on his artistic work during the Nazi era, he is counted among the lost generation.

His expressionist work is shaped by his experience at the front in World War I, and processes memories of trenches, horror, misery and death. Important for Knayer the training by Graf, from whom he learned, was classical stylistic device in a new relationship to create the visible reality. Knayer also gained significant experience through Graf's cubist image composition and color scheme as well as his expressionist image conception, but turned to the new objectivity from 1925 onwards .

Many of his typical motifs “industrial landscape” and “workers' world” were created in 1925/26 during his study stay in Düsseldorf, where he said goodbye to the abstract-cubist and relied on direct descriptions of the milieu with expressive design means. His work at that time is compared with the work of Gustav Wunderwald .

From 1926 there was an increased focus on Impressionist means of design, influenced by the lessons with Robert Breyer. Nevertheless, Knayer's expressionist intentions remain recognizable.

In the woodcut, Kneyer started with representational expressive realism.

In addition to the industrial and working world, motifs from the First World War shape his work. His painting Im Schützengraben , created around 1930, and his pencil and charcoal drawing Granate (1930) are among the most important works. In addition, the area around Stuttgart Central Station fascinated Knayer. Railway motifs found their way into his work repeatedly.

His last works were the woodcut Resignation (1952) and the oil painting Karrenschieber (1954). The motif theme worker , with which he began his artistic work, also formed his conclusion.

Exhibitions

• 1927: Participation in the exhibitions of Gottfried Graf's class
• 1929: Participation in the 6th exhibition of the Stuttgart Secession
• 1931: Participation in the 2nd exhibition of the Stuttgart New Secession
• 1932: Participation in the 3rd exhibition of the Stuttgart New Secession
• 1932: Participation in the 3rd exhibition of the Stuttgart jury-free
• 1933: Participation in the Württemberg art show in Stuttgart
• 1955: Participation in the art weeks on the Stuttgart Killesberg
• 1987: Exhibition "Immanuel Knayer" in the municipal "galerie contact" in Böblingen from March 25 to May 2, 1987
• 2012: “Images of Man - The Representation of Man in Classical Modernism” in the Opherdicke house in Holzwickede from September 2 to November 25, 2012; with pictures by Knayer from the Brabant collection

heraldry

Knayer became known in heraldry mainly through his work in the context of the municipal coat of arms after 1945. Several coats of arms in Baden-Württemberg were redesigned by him, such as B. the coat of arms of the city of Fellbach , for which he created four designs for the large district town , or the coat of arms of the communities of Herlikofen or Oberkirchberg at that time . In some cases, he also adapted the design of existing coats of arms, as he did for example. B. made on the coat of arms of the city of Schwäbisch Gmünd .

From the coat of arms of Baden-Württemberg , Knayer created a humorous proposal. Shield holders were an Easter bunny and an “ Easter griffin ”, instead of lions, three black bunnies formed the coat of arms , while the coat of arms of the historical countries were depicted in the form of eggs.

Knayer worked as a graphic artist in the coat of arms books of the Baden-Württemberg districts published by the state archives from the 1950s and was responsible for numerous coats of arms.

Examples of Knayer's communal heraldry

• 

  Oberkirchberg (1954)

• 

  Fellbach (1956)

• 

  Herlikofen (1957)

Web links

Commons : Emblem of Immanuel Knayer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Immanuel Knayer in the catalog of the German National Library

literature

• Galerie Schlichtenmaier and Helene Knayer (eds.): Immanuel Knayer 1896–1962. Paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints . Catalog for the exhibition Immanuel Knayer in the city of Böblingen 1987. Galerie Schlichtenmaier, Grafenau 1987, ISBN 3-89298-001-2

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bernd Berke: Marked by the hard life: "Mannsbilder" from the Brabant collection on revierpassagen.de from September 1, 2012
2. ↑ Anca Borho: "25 years under a false flag". Wolfsangel or Wolfsanker: Fellbach's city coat of arms is wrong ( memento of the original from April 29, 2011 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. , April 1981 
3. ↑ History of the coat of arms on the 30th anniversary of the merger of the communities of Ober- and Unterkirchberg, on April 1, 1972
4. ↑ Eugen Banholzer: The "White Unicorn in a Red Field". From the coat of arms of the city of Schwäbisch Gmünd , in einhorn-Jahrbuch Schwäbisch Gmünd 1975, Einhorn-Verlag Eduard Dietenberger KG, Schwäbisch Gmünd, 1975, pp. 169-189
5. ^ Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg: preliminary drafts for the state coat of arms of Baden-Württemberg (digitized version)