Josef Alfons Wirth

Josef Alfons Wirth (born October 31, 1887 in Mühlheim an der Donau ; died September 3, 1916 near Beaumont-Hamel ) was a German painter and draftsman .

life and work

Josef Alfons Wirth was born as the third of four children of the watchmaker Anton Wirth and his wife Maria Wilhelmine, née Wieser, in Mühlheim an der Donau . After attending elementary school, Wirth switched to the commercial advanced training school in Tuttlingen for a year , where Wirth's teachers became aware of the boy's talent for drawing and suggested that the parents choose an appropriate career. The 15-year-old began an apprenticeship as a lithographer in Stuttgart in autumn 1902 .

In 1905, at the end of his apprenticeship, Wirth decided against the job of securing a living and successfully applied to the Stuttgart Art Academy . There he first attended the compulsory drawing class of Robert Poetzelberger and from 1907 the painting class of Christian Landenberger , who recognized and encouraged his talent. In Landenberger's class, Wirth met a number of ambitious art students - Oskar Schlemmer , Gottfried Graf , Otto Meyer-Amden, and Hermann Stenner - with whom he became friends and whose acquaintance had a visible effect on his artistic development.

Wirth's paintings from this period show the technical handling of color to capture light and atmosphere in the spirit of Landenberger's late impressionism. Unlike his college friends, who moved to Adolf Hölzel's composition class and his coveted master's studio in Stuttgart's Schlossgarten, Wirth left the academy and set out for Berlin in 1910 to look for new ideas and a livelihood as an artist. Wirth's talent for drawing had been tested early on with animal motifs, and so he evidently hoped to be able to develop his talent for understanding the psychology of animals into an artistic trademark. But after just a few months his difficult material situation forced him back to Stuttgart. Wirth now tried in vain for a scholarship to continue his academic studies, so that he was forced to accept a job as a church painter in Kirchheim unter Teck.

In late 1911, Wirth had the opportunity to go on a longer trip to Italy with Gottfried Graf and to forget his predicament for a few months. Graf reports on "studies in the galleries and museums in Florence, Rome and Naples" and emphasizes Wirth's concentration on Egyptian, early Greek and early Christian art, which would have encouraged him "in his striving for simplicity and rigor of expression".

On his return to Stuttgart, Wirth once again joined the circle around Meyer-Amden and Schlemmer, who had felt an eminent spirit of optimism in the wake of the first manifestations of abstract art. A new formal language should help express the inner world of imagination, as Kandinsky had demanded in 1912 in his famous manifesto "On the Spiritual in Art", which was enthusiastically received by the Stuttgart art students of the Hölzelkreis. Meyer-Amden in particular, whose influence on Wirth became more and more evident during this period, demanded a special inner disposition to art, an "aesthetics of existence", a mixture of ascetic lifestyle and mysticistic artistic practice.

Wirth did not record his own ideas and concepts, but his work from this time clearly shows a complete reorientation. In terms of motif and style, they differ significantly from what Wirth was concerned with before. Interest in depictions of animals disappears, and Wirth consistently turns to humans, the figurative configuration, as a topic. "The whole delicacy of his lyrical-mystical disposition was awakened and found expression in the sheets with strange visionary shapes," writes his friend Graf about this time.

After Meyer-Amden left the academy and turned his back on Stuttgart, Wirth's work shows a closer connection to the constructivist work of Schlemmer, who founded his “New Art Salon at Neckartor ” in May 1913 , which only existed for a year, but In addition to the works of the Hölzel students, he presented pictures by Juan Gris , Georges Braque , Oskar Kokoschka , Franz Marc , Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee for the first time in Stuttgart .

Violent arguments accompanied these manifestations of avant-garde art in Stuttgart. As an academy teacher, Hölzel also came under fire because, in the opinion of his more conservative colleagues, he did not want to keep his self-confident students properly under control. Wirth, who took a "lively part in these revolutionary activities", has visibly suffered from the constant feuds and quarrels and found a retreat from the turbulence in Stuttgart in Zavelstein near Calw. Gottfried Graf, who at that time shared one of the Hölzel studios with Johannes Itten, who came to Stuttgart in 1913 , remembers that Wirth took the decisive step in his artistic development in this phase.

Graf's biographical sketch also indicates, however, that Wirth could not achieve the progress he had hoped for: "in extremely strict self-criticism" he destroyed most of his studies, "which should have served him as the basis for larger implementation". Once again, material hardship forced him back to Stuttgart, where he had to find a job. The planned return to the Black Forest prevented the outbreak of the First World War.

In August 1914, Wirth was drafted as a substitute reservist for the Grenadier Regiment "Queen Olga" , in which Oskar Schlemmer and Hermann Stenner also served. Wirth's units were continuously deployed on the western front in France. After a long hospital stay, he was transferred to the 119 Reserve Infantry Regiment. During an attack by the British 117th Infantry Brigade on the German positions near Beaumont-Hamel , Josef Alfons Wirth was shot in the head on September 3, 1916 and buried in a mass grave.

The museum in the Vorderen Schloss in Mühlheim an der Donau today preserves the largest part of his artistic estate.

literature

• Karl Konrad Düssel, Karl Konrad: Josef Alfons Wirth. Württembergischer Kunstverein , in: Stuttgarter neue Tageblatt , No. 267, May 30, 1918, morning edition, p. 2.
• Graf, Gottfried: Josef Alfons Wirth , in: The Rhineland. Quarterly publication of the Association of Art Friends in the States on the Rhine 28 (1918) Issue 3/4, pp. 41–52 ( digital )
• Thieme / Becker: General Lexicon of Fine Arts from Antiquity to the Present , Vol. 36, 1947, p. 102
• Josef Alfons Wirth - paintings, drawings, watercolors . Exhib. Cat. Städtisches Museum im Vorderen Schloss, Mühlheim an der Donau 1993 (with a catalog raisonné comprising 112 catalog numbers, edited by Angelika Müller-Scherf)

Web links

• Angelika Müller-Scherf: Josef Alfons Wirth - Life and Works (Project archive of the Realschule Mühlheim)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Graf, Gottfried: Josef Alfons Wirth , in: Die Rheinlande 28 (1918), p. 43.
2. ↑ Graf 1918, p. 44.
3. ^ Graf 1918, p. 43
4. ↑ Graf 1918, p. 44