Jack Osterroth

Jakob Georg Osterroth (born December 23, 1902 in Hettenleidelheim , † August 17, 1981 in Darmstadt ) was a German painter who developed from late Expressionist beginnings to a cautious Surrealism . In the 1930s, he and his wife were involved in the social democratic resistance organization The Red Shock Troop.

In the absence of reliable sources, the latest historical research has doubts about the existence of Jack Osterroth, especially about his involvement in the German resistance.

life and work

Osterroth was the second of eight children of Nikolaus Osterroth (1875–1933) and Elisabetha geb. Humm (1877-1947). The father, a miner in clay pits in the Palatinate, turned to political work in trade unions and social democracy at an early age and ended his career as social director at Preussag . The older brother Franz Osterroth (1900–1986), youth socialist journalist and historian of the SPD, emigrated to Czechoslovakia and Sweden in 1933 and was involved in building up the Red Strike Troop. After the mobilization of his father (1915) and older brother (1918), Osterroth was responsible for the family, the years of hunger left health problems behind. After completing elementary school, he was trained as an orthopedic mechanic (bandagist), then went to the roller mill , worked for farmers and found employment in a Rhenish steel mill in 1921. From 1923 to 1925 he took part in two courses at the Academy for Labor in Frankfurt (Main) and was also a guest student at the University of Law , Economics and Sociology and later also enrolled at the Berlin School of Politics. During this time he met Hans Muhle in Berlin . Osterroth, who had to give up this educational path because he lacked the school leaving examination as a prerequisite for a degree, self-taught as a draftsman to gain access to the visual arts, although he grew up without artistic inclinations or support. From December 1926 Osterroth attended the painting school of Anton Kerschbaumer , Martin Bloch and Otto Herbig in Berlin ; Classmate was the painter Kurt Scheele . Joint painting trips to Switzerland and Italy followed.

Even before Herbig with around 24 pictures, like Bloch and Scheele, fell victim to the Nazis' art policy as " degenerate ", Osterroth had switched from depicting the modern city to portraits and flowers. This caution was all the more understandable as he and his wife Anna, geb. Raiser (1897–1981) engaged in the Red Assault Troop and was involved in a. Courier trips and the accommodation of politically and racially persecuted people. The Second World War brought him to Bad Saarow as a medical soldier , where he was employed in the hospital in the care of blind people and amputees. In 1943 the Berlin apartment was bombed out, the early work was not saved, a loss that Osterroth had to struggle with for a long time. From now on, the subjects that no longer depict the city as a big city but as a place of cultural tradition predominate: towers and walls, churches and town halls, which are depicted as large individuals on bright, pointillist painting grounds without a horizon.

The Berlin blockade in 1948 forced Osterroth to leave the city; from 1953 he lived in Darmstadt . Here he completed himself as a painter. He traveled to Switzerland , Italy , the Netherlands and repeatedly to Strasbourg and Israel . Natural objects attracted his interest: flowers and grasses in unusual types and large formats were created. The towers, Osterroth's central motif, now delimit an overreach space, which finds its final corruption in the figure of St. Francis, depicted in the 37-picture cycle “Old Legends and New Stories from St. Francis”. “What I do has nothing to do with religious painting. I'd rather categorize it as a kind of surrealism, ”he wrote at the end of his life.

Exhibitions

• "Jury-free art show Berlin 1929", involved with two pictures
• Darmstadt, Mathildenhöhe, Nov. 29 to Dec. 18, 1970. Catalog “Jack Osterroth, Looking Back”. Personal exhibition
• Essen, NRZ press building, Nov. 29 to Dec. 20, 1974. Personal exhibition
• Mölln, Augustinum, March 19 to April 8, 1984. Personal exhibition

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dennis Egginger-Gonzalez: The Red Assault Troop. An early left-wing socialist resistance group against National Socialism. Writings of the German Resistance Memorial Center, Series A: Analyzes and Representations, Volume 11, ed. v. Peter Steinbach u. Johannes Tuchel, Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2018, pp. 207f., 259, 354, 475, 476
2. ↑ His autobiography was published in 1920 under the title “Vom Beter zum Kämper” in Berlin's Vorwärts-Verlag
3. ↑ On the occasion of the application for the Grand State Prize in 1929, Osterroth describes this artistic awakening in a letter dated December 5, 1929 to the Prussian Academy of the Arts : “In August 1925 I am moving to Berlin. During the day I am a salesman in a small shop in East Berlin, and in the evening I am a listener at the University of Politics. (…) In 1926 I became aware of Adamson (by Oscar Jacobsson ). I am excited about it. My ambition becomes: to be able to draw Adamsons too. For days and weeks I practice around Adamson - although I haven't drawn a line by then; until I can do it in my sleep. Adamson awakens the desire in me to switch to the painting profession. "
4. ↑ Harry Fischer List
5. ↑ The picture "Olives", also "Olive Tree, called the Elephant" was created in 1927 and has been preserved. Osterroth remembered that it was "the first oil painting by my hand" and "was viewed by my teachers Anton Kerschbaumer and Martin Bloch as an astonishingly good work."
6. ↑ to Friederike Kerschbaumer, Darmstadt, June 17, 1978