Johann Schuster (painter)

Johann Schuster , called Hans Schuster (born November 22, 1900 in Ansbach , † November 23, 1966 in Oldenburg ) was a German painter .

Life

He was the son of the church painter Christof Schuster and his wife Sofia. After leaving school, he first trained in the fitter's trade. In his spare time, Schuster painted. He married Minna Kiefer, with whom he had a son and a daughter. In the 1920s he traveled to Wroclaw and studied at the local art academy. After his return to Ansbach, he drew caricatures on current political issues for the regional Fränkische Zeitung. He continued to devote himself to free painting.

From 1939 to 1945 he served in the Navy on a submarine . Because of an injury to his right arm, he trained to use his left hand. By relieving the strain on his right hand, he was able to use it again for painting after a while. In March 1945 his entire family was killed in a bomb attack. All of his work stored at home was destroyed.

The painter

In 1946 Hans Schuster moved north to Varel and Oldenburg. Here he continued to paint in the following years. He joined the Oldenburg Association of Visual Artists and was represented in their numerous exhibitions. Since 1953 he worked here with Emil Brose , among others . Schuster never painted his pictures in the great outdoors. Rather, he memorized the motifs of his landscape paintings and then painted them out of his imagination. Most of the time he was kneeling on the floor in the living room and had a hardboard or canvas in front of him. Many of his pictures were also created on wrapping paper, woodchip wallpaper, primed cleaning rags or hardboard.

He was often awakened at night by nightmares that reminded him of the war. Then he got up and began to paint. The result was caricatures of people with melancholy and threatening facial features, overdrawn in color. Almost all of this work is in private hands. Some of his floral still lifes are particularly popular. In 1963, for example, the City and Culture Committee of the City of Oldenburg bought the oil painting “ Anemonen ” from him for the marriage room of the registry office . His last exhibition took him to Bad Zwischenahn in July 1966 , where he and Karl Nagel and Ewald Westholm presented his work to a larger audience in the foyer. During the opening of the exhibition, he explained the importance of his work:

“I don't see nature and people as they appear, but as they are. It is the attempt to penetrate through things to the bottom. "

- from the biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Biographies of Oldenburg Artists, on Hans Schuster ( Memento of the original from May 5, 2016 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. Retrieved May 5, 2016