Jakob Wilhelm Fehrle

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Altes Theater Heilbronn, mermaids (design by JWFehrle)
Altes Theater Heilbronn, Harpies (design by JWFehrle)
Altes Theater Heilbronn, front window (design JWFehrle)
St. Florian von Fehrle in Heilbronn
Girl , cast bronze 1952, Paths to Art

Jakob Wilhelm Fehrle (born November 27, 1884 in Schwäbisch Gmünd ; † February 4, 1974 there ) was a German painter, draftsman and sculptor.

Life

First Fehrle, who came from a gardening family, did an apprenticeship as a chaser in the Erhard & Söhne company from 1899 to 1903 . He then studied from 1903 to 1905 at the Berlin Art Academy under Paul Meyerheim and worked in the workshop of the sculptor Wilhelm Widemann . He then studied with Balthasar Schmitt at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich . Soon he was doing his first commissioned work and had his first exhibition in Berlin . In 1909/1910 he stayed in Rome for study purposes . In 1910/1911 he learned the art of etching together with Reinhold Nägele in Munich .

From 1911 to 1914 Fehrle had a studio in Paris on Montparnasse. This time was decisive for his later work. Here Fehrle not only got to know artists like Karl Albiker , Georg Kolbe , Wilhelm Lehmbruck , Aristide Maillol , Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee , but here he found his own design language “with open senses for the new” , so Fehrle looking back.

From 1914 to 1918 Fehrle took part in the First World War as a soldier . His early work was lost in the chaos of war. Immediately after the war, he moved back to his hometown Schwäbisch Gmünd in 1918 and since then he has run his own studio there until his death.

In 1922 Fehrle had an exhibition together with his wife Klara Fehrle-Menrad (1884–1954) and Reinhold Nägele at the Kunsthaus Schaller in Stuttgart . From 1923 he participated in several exhibitions of the Stuttgart Secession . In the years 1927 to 1929 he had a teaching position at the state higher technical school Schwäbisch Gmünd and was appointed professor in 1928. From 1939 to 1944 he was allowed to present his works at the Nazi propaganda show "Great German Art Exhibition" in Munich. Fehrle had been a simple member of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts since 1933 , but was otherwise not active in the NSDAP or individual party organizations, which is why he was classified in the group of those not affected by the competent court on November 14, 1946.

In 1954, on the occasion of his 70th birthday , he received the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany from the hands of his friend, Federal President Theodor Heuss .

plant

Fehrle was regarded by his contemporaries as a “master of sensitive spirituality” . He was influenced by the sculptures of the sculptors Aristide Maillol and Wilhelm Lehmbruck and dealt with Gothic and Indian sculpture. Almost without exception, Fehrle depicted the female body as a single figure in a uniform modeling and created slim, lively, elongated figures. At first there were nude models with narrow fabric draperies like the Gothic Eva (1910) or Louise (Parisian) (1912) as well as Aphrodite (1913) and Claudia (1914). Around 1913 the sculptures of the female mythical creatures mermaids , harpies etc., designed and made by him, were created on the windows of the Old Theater in Heilbronn . The preserved female bronze figures in the foyer of the Old Theater also come from his hand. The bronze figures by Fehrle from the foyer of the old theater were shown in the Historisches Museum Heilbronn in 1974 as part of the exhibition "Bloom and Fall of the Old Theater" . Later he created slender, lively, elongated figures with partly gothic robes like the Madonna (1921) or the Annunciation (1922).

The figures show the “movement of the resting body, from the restrained melody of bending and bending to capricious, richly intertwined turns of body and garment. The facial expression is restrained and intimate. ”The“ mask-like features ”were replaced in the 1920s by a“ picturesque baroque attitude towards life ”. Fehrle mostly showed female nudes “standing upright as a torso or as a 'moving column' (Bühner, 1971) in a completely worldly, physical and sensual immediacy. They retain their grace, are reproduced individually and have an all-round view without the main viewing side. "

He created clearly built figures in bronze and stone, bronze busts, many monuments and fountains, especially for Swabian cities and communities. Fehrle participated in 1928 (together with Hans Herkommer and August Babberger ) in the redesign of the market square in Schwenningen with a market fountain and the bronze sculpture Der Junge Neckar . At the annual exhibition of the German Association of Artists in 1929 in the State House in Cologne , he showed the bronze figure of a seated girl. Fehrle's conception of art did not correspond to the National Socialist ideas; from 1933 his works were removed from the public collections. On the other hand, he received major public contracts from the Nazi rulers in the 1930s. For example, the war memorial in Gmünd for those who fell in World War I, a nine-meter-high bronze column modeled on the Trajan column with a surrounding relief of soldiers going out, fighting and falling, crowned by a swastika and imperial eagle, erected in 1935. In 2017, one he created and signed in 1938 was erected Relief portrait of Adolf Hitler recovered from the Rhine in Basel; it has been in the Historical Museum since then .

His work shows phases of stylistic, aesthetic, political and economic upheaval, shaped by historicism and art nouveau , expressionism and cubism , the German Empire , the Weimar Republic and two world wars, national socialism and post-war democracy.

His studio in Schwäbisch Gmünd, where he worked until a few days before his death, has remained unchanged since then and is a listed building .

Goldner Adler, pub sign in Pforzheim

literature

  • Hermann Erhard: Jakob Wilhelm Fehrle . In: Walter Klein: Gmünder Kunst der Gegenwart, Stuttgart: greiner & Pfeiffer 1924 (Gmünder Kunst; 4), pp. 1–22.
  • Eugen Schopf: The sculptor Jakob Wilhelm Feherle In: Württemberg. Monthly in the service of the people and homeland. 1932, pp. 169-176.
  • Eugen Schopf: Jakob Wilhelm Fehrle. The sculptor's work in a selection of 56 partly multicolored illustrations. Publisher Fink, Stuttgart 1947.
  • Hermann Baumhauer: Werkmann to the end. Obituary for Professor JW Fehrle. In: ostalb einhorn No. 1. Quarterly books for home and culture in the Ostalb district. Schwäbisch Gmünd, March 1974
  • Hermann Baumhauer: Jakob Wilhelm Fehrle. 1884-1974. In: einhorn yearbook 1974. Schwäbisch Gmünd 1974.
  • Victor Alexander Carus : Fehrle, Wilhelm . In: Ulrich Thieme (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists from Antiquity to the Present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 11 : Erman-Fiorenzo . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1915, p. 347 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  • Fehrle, Jakob Wilhelm . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 2 : E-J . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1955, p. 84 .
  • Edith Neumann: Fehrle, Jakob Wilhelm . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 37, Saur, Munich a. a. 2003, ISBN 3-598-22777-9 , p. 501.
  • Franz Menges:  Nägele, Reinhold. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 698 f. ( Digitized version ). (Secondary entry)
  • Cornelia Fehrle-Choms: A master of timeless sculpture: the Gmünder artist Jakob Wilhelm Fehrle. In: einhorn yearbook Schwäbisch Gmünd. 41, 2014, ISBN 978-3-95747-006-5 , p. 263 ff.

Web links

Commons : Jakob Wilhelm Fehrle  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Gmünder town and club chronicle. In: unicorn. Illustrated magazine for cultivating the idea of ​​home in the city and district of Schwäbisch Gmünd. No. 8, Schwäbisch Gmünd, December 1954.
  2. ↑ Jakob Wilhelm Fehrle. The Great German Art Exhibitions 1937-1944 / 45, accessed on October 16, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Cf. Fehrle's self-disclosure from 1946, handed down in the Ludwigsburg State Archives, EL 901/7 Bü 8.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Edith Neumann: Fehrle, Jakob Wilhelm . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 37, Saur, Munich a. a. 2003, ISBN 3-598-22777-9 , p. 501.
  5. ^ Hugo Licht: Das Stadttheater in Heilbronn (special print o. Volume of the journal for architecture and building Der Profanbau ) Verlag JJ Arnd, Leipzig 1913; Robert Bauer: The building history. Neckar-Zeitung (special edition for the inauguration of the Heilbronn City Theater) from September 30, 1913.
  6. ↑ Weekly supplement to the Heilbronner Voice of February 23, 1974, No. 8, p. 1 by Jachim Schweller: Auf Heilbronner boards - on the exhibition “Bloom and Fall of the Old Theater”.
  7. ↑ villingen-schwenningen.de: Städt. Findbuch, p. 385 (PDF; 1.9 MB; accessed on April 18, 2017).
  8. ↑ villingen-schwenningen.de: The Schwenningen town hall by Hans Herkommer , Fig. Marktbrunnen p. 3 (accessed on April 18, 2017).
  9. ^ Catalog of the Deutscher Künstlerbund Cologne 1929. May – September 1929 in the State House. M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1929. (p. 17: Fehrle, JW, Schwäbisch Gmünd. Cat. No. 75, Sitting Girl (Br.) ).
  10. ^ Fehrle, Jakob Wilhelm . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 2 : E-J . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1955, p. 84 .
personal data
SURNAME Fehrle, Jakob Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, draftsman and sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH November 27, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Schwäbisch Gmünd
DATE OF DEATH 4th February 1974
Place of death Schwäbisch Gmünd