Johannes Koehler

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Johannes Köhler , later also Joannès Koehler (born February 22, 1896 in Küstrin , † February 24, 1976 in Bernartice , Czechoslovakia ) was a German painter .

Life

Johannes Köhler was the son of the teacher Ernst Köhler and his wife Emma nee Hoffmann. After he dropped out of school in 1910, he received private lessons and from 1918 first attended the Grand Ducal Saxon University of Fine Arts in Weimar , then the State Bauhaus . He studied first with Theodor Hagen , later with Lyonel Feininger , but remained connected to landscape painting and French realism ( School of Barbizon ) throughout his life . On April 27, 1920 he married Marcella Müller, who also studied under Feininger at the Bauhaus. Their daughter Rachel was born in 1925.

Köhler and his family toured Europe and North Africa, painting in the late 1920s and early 1930s. After 1933 they left Germany for good and first moved to the French-speaking part of Switzerland and later to France . A painting by Koehler is said to be hanging in the town hall of Bern .

After the German occupation of France in 1940, they went to Lyon in the " unoccupied zone ". They were later arrested there, initially held in the Les Milles internment camp in Aix-en-Provence, and finally deported to Lithuania . They escaped from there by bribing them with Köhler's paintings. They hid with a farmer until the end of the war. In 1945 they joined a refugee transport and in 1946 came via Poland and the border town of Královec to Czechoslovakia , which the family saw only as a transit station. There they lived in the small town of Žacléř , in neighboring Prkenný Důl and finally in Vrchová near Bernartice. The family's applications to emigrate to Israel and Switzerland were rejected.

The family, who spoke French among themselves, lived until their end without any official income or social security as “ self-sufficient ” in poor conditions, as the government agencies did not recognize Köhler's academic training and he was therefore prohibited from selling his paintings. Nevertheless, the family offered his works in restaurants and snack bars. Köhler also sold pictures, which he now had to adapt to the tastes of the public, to private collectors and used them to pay unpaid bills. In this way some of the pictures seem to have come into public possession. The Bernartice municipal office owns a painting as payment for an open electricity bill. Pictures can also be found in local museums.

Johannes Köhler died in 1976, his wife Marcella in 1986. The daughter who lived with her parents for the rest of her life and who also painted, died in 1988 under unexplained circumstances. The family was buried in an anonymous grave. In May 2006, a Johannes Koehler memorial plaque was unveiled in the Bernartice cemetery.

Literature and Sources

  • Exhibition by the painter Joannes Koehler. In: Veselý výlet (summer 2006), p. 22f. ( PDF )
  • Jitka Lukášková: Výstava o malíři Joannesi Koehlerovi. In: Sborníček Muzeum Podkrkonoší v Trutnově 5 (2006), pp. 6–7 (Czech)
  • Daniel Mach: O krajinomalbě a malíři Joannesi Koehlerovi. In: Krkonoše 8 (2006) (Czech)
  • Daniel Mach, Eva Heidenreichová: Joannes Koehler 1896-1976. Městské muzeum Žacléř, 2006 (exhibition catalog, Czech)
  • Luboš Zelený: Malíř Joannes Koehler pod Špičákem. In: Krkonoše. měsíčník o přírodě a lidech 35: 2 (2002), pp. 32–33 (Czech)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Address book for the city of Cüstrin 1913 , p. 37
  2. ↑ Köhler later claimed to come from a Jewish family, but both parents were Protestant. (according to Daniel Mach on Johannes Koehler ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / johannes-koehler.com
  3. ^ A b Daniel Mach: O krajinomalbě a malíři Joannesi Koehlerovi. In: Krkonoše 8 (2006) (Czech).
  4. ↑ a b c d e exhibition by the painter Joannes Koehler. In: Veselý výlet (summer 2006), p. 22f.
  5. ↑ Thuringian Main State Archives . Holdings: State Bauhaus Weimar. No. 143: Student at the Grand Ducal Saxon University of Fine Arts and at the State Bauhaus Weimar. 1907-1922 (documents about Johannes "Hans" Köhler [1910, 1917-1921] and Marcella Köhler-Müller [1920] including marriage announcement).
  6. ↑ a b Miloš Rosi: Ze života akademického malíře Joannese Koehlera (2005, Czech).
personal data
SURNAME Koehler, Johannes
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Koehler, Joannès
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Küstrin
DATE OF DEATH February 24, 1976
Place of death Bernartice u Trutnova (Bernsdorf), now the Czech Republic