Julius Bissier

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Julius Heinrich Bissier (born December 3, 1893 in Freiburg im Breisgau , † June 18, 1965 in Ascona ) was a German painter .

Life

education

Julius Bissier was the only child of the mechanic Heinrich Julius Bissier and his wife Crescentia Vögtle. The family on his father's side came from the area around Languedoquier de Toulouse. His mother came from a large family in the Black Forest. Bissier spent his childhood and school days in Freiburg. He received regular violin lessons. His father, prone to depression, died in 1907.

In 1913 he graduated from high school with a high school diploma. Despite his strong musical talent, he finally decided on art. After briefly studying art history at the University of Freiburg , Bissier began studying at the Art Academy in Karlsruhe in 1914 , which he had to break off after a few months because he was called up for military service at the Freiburg postal surveillance office. Here he met the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the painter Hans Adolf Bühler .

After the First World War

In 1919 Bissier met the sinologist Ernst Grosse , who introduced him to the art and spirituality of Asia and who soon became the young artist's fatherly friend. In 1920 he had his first solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Freiburg . Two years later he married the weaver Elisabeth Hofschneider, whose father Bissier supported with some commissioned work. In the second half of the 1920s there were more individual exhibitions and participation in exhibitions in Germany, which resulted in growing national recognition. The first ink drawings were made from 1926 onwards. In 1927 he began taking cello lessons after violin and viol. In 1928, Julius Bissier was honored for the first time with important prizes such as the painter's prize of the German Association of Artists in Hanover and the Düsseldorf Golden Medal.

In 1929 Bissier took on an unpaid teaching position at the University of Freiburg. Among other things, he taught life drawing and scientific drawing. The participants paid him listening fees for this. The university provided Bissier with two rooms, one of which he used as a studio for his own work. So could Bissier wife Lisbeth set up a textile workshop in his previous private studio. It developed into one of the most famous hand weaving mills in Germany. In 1930 Bissier met the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși on his trip to Paris . As a result, he began to experiment with non-representational ink works, which should soon be an integral part of his work.

The artist's studios were destroyed in a fire in the main university building (today Collegiate Building I) in 1934. Almost all of the works created in recent years were burned. Bissier then continued to offer drawing courses in a spare room in the Pharmacological Institute, but these were only partially completed. The Baden government did not grant his wish for a new room in the rebuilt university. In 1939, Bissier stopped working with the university. The position of an "Academic Drawing Teacher" was then completely removed from the curriculum.

The son of the Bissier couple, Uli, also died in 1934. Bissier reacted to the two strokes of fate this year by largely withdrawing from public life. He painted, mostly at night, small, sparingly designed ink formats. During this time he became acquainted with Oskar Schlemmer , which developed into a lifelong friendship. Bissier was able to deal with him in correspondence, but also during sparse visits, on artistic subjects.

In 1935 and 1937 the artist undertook two trips to Italy, during which he made short, abstract ink drawings of landscapes.

Inner emigration in Hagnau on Lake Constance

Information board about Bissier's time in Hagnau on Lake Constance

In 1939 the family moved to Hagnau on Lake Constance . She lived here on the income from his wife's weaving mill, while Bissier took care of correspondence and bookkeeping. His artistic work came almost completely to a standstill during the war. In 1942 he began writing his biography Weg und Umweg , which was not published. A year later his closest friend Oskar Schlemmer died. During the National Socialist period between 1933 and 1945, Bissier had no opportunity to exhibit his work.

International recognition

Because of his seclusion during the Nazi dictatorship, Julius Bissier was almost forgotten after the war. Although a number of smaller exhibitions were held in the post-war period, there were hardly any sales worth mentioning. In 1958 the friendship began with the art historian Werner Schmalenbach , who organized the first major exhibition after the end of the war in the Kestner Society in Hanover. It established Bissier's late and sudden international recognition. From then on, there were exhibition tours and honors at the documenta in Kassel, the biennials in Venice and São Paulo , which made the silent artist a kind of representative of German post-war art. His fame brought new encounters and friendships with it. Among them Erhart Kästner , Hans Arp , Mark Tobey and Ben Nicholson .

Retirement home in Switzerland

In 1961 the Bissier couple moved to Ascona . The artist became a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts . This was followed by exhibitions in New York, Brussels, Jerusalem, Boston, Chicago, to name just a few, most of which he could no longer experience himself. In 1965, Julius Bissier died of heart failure in Ascona.

plant

At the beginning of the 20th century, Julius Bissier followed the tradition of German Romanticism . For his ideas he looked for visual content in art history and in non-European art, and in the course of time he wanted to express a metaphysical worldview in his work . In his almost fifty years of work, he has gone through various phases. He himself classified them in three broad categories. To transfer the early years with reference to medieval panel painting and its contents into modern forms, an approach to the current tendencies of the art movements of his time and a return to mysticism via the tradition of East Asian ink painting , with the attempt not to look to nature, but like nature to work.

From around 1915 Bissier began to paint pictures of cosmic primeval landscapes and saints. Influenced by German mystics such as Meister Eckhart or Jakob Böhme , he created pictures in the first two decades of the 20th century that depict catastrophes, visions or Christian saints. Stylistically, he was based on old German painters such as Albrecht Altdorfer , Matthias Grünewald and Hans Multscher . Furthermore, still lifes , landscapes and portraits were created . In search of clear forms and simple means of expression, Bissier found orientation in painting by van Gogh , Henri Rousseau and Pittura metafisica . In this way he came within the context of the contemporary realistic movement, which was also known under the term New Objectivity . As before, he confessed to painting that traditionally served to convey content. "Anyone who gives testimony of life must have the courage to speak with the language of life, to show the images of life without make-up and, above all, to educate with the intensity of life." As a romantic at the beginning of the 20th century, Bissier was his immediate Lifeworld, but also enabled an individual, spiritual contemplation and a progressive approach to tradition.

However, the possibilities of figurative painting were exhausted for the artist in the period that followed. He feared that this would freeze his images. In Frankfurt Bissier met Willi Baumeister , who was then a professor at the Städel in Frankfurt. Baumeister showed Bissier his collection with pictures by Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque , Paul Klee , Fernand Léger and other artists of abstract painting . He encouraged Bissier to abandon the subject in his painting and create tension with simple basic forms. This impetus was deepened by the encounter with the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși in Paris in 1930, whose synthesis of nature and art form symbolized Bissier's worldview. Brâncuși's art showed Bissier that abstraction does not necessarily have to be a cold play of forms, but can enter into a connection with spirituality. The result is a strict simplification of the way he works. Colors and lines have been reduced, instead the concentration on the composition and the pure surface has been increased. His new way of working in connection with East Asian ideas, which his friend Oskar Schlemmer introduced to him, gave rise to the first calligraphic-looking ink works that soon developed into free brush setting. He was fascinated by the intellectual closeness of German mysticism to Japanese Zen philosophy. "With hasty greed I rushed through the open gate and began to transfer my youthful mysticism (Eckehart, Böhme) to the mystical world of Eastern works." Bissier's intention was not to add or combine different worldviews, but to search for spiritual commonalities . Through the artistic freedom thus gained in connection with Asian aesthetics, Bissier created quiet haunting masterpieces.

He kept talking about the importance of a certain state in which he had to be while he was creating his inks. This state is reminiscent of the meditation of the Buddhist monks and Bissier himself describes it as his "sacrament". The process of work is reminiscent of a retreat . The finding of a form took place in the constant repetition and variation of the one character until it contained the desired validity for Bissier. One of his main themes was the polar counterplay in the composition with male and female formal characters, with yin and yang , light and dark, heaven and earth. In particular, the legal and cultural historian Johann Jakob Bachofen should be mentioned, to whose writings Bissier's characters frequently referred from 1937/38. It is mainly symbols of generation and fertility, the egg etc. that found their way into his inks.

Wall mosaic (1955/56) in Freiburg im Breisgau

After years of reducing it to black and white, he achieved a new approach to color with the monotype . The indirect application of paint to glass or metal used in this technique and applied to paper by pressure or abrasion made new forms of expression possible for Bissier. Bissier only used the color cautiously in his woodcuts, which he began at the same time, around 1945. From the mid-1950s he began to make watercolors on paper and miniatures with egg oil tempera on irregularly cut pieces of linen or cotton. In a process that took many years, he finally got the paint where he was with his ink work. The delicate earthy and transparent colors, often combined with small gold elements, are reminiscent of medieval book illumination.

In addition to his work on the colored miniatures, Bissier developed the style of his inks. The representation of objects, symbols or signs gradually gave way to occupation with the energy of the act of painting, which manifested itself in a gesture . The expression of the individual brushstroke that wanted to be nothing other than brushstroke. This made Bissier a pioneer of the Informel .

The individual periods in Bissier's work are stylistically different from one another. Nevertheless, when you look at it together, you can see that alleged stylistic inconsistencies prove the consequences of the dispute. The struggle for the spiritualization of matter is reflected in the various work phases. Bissier's art points into another dimension, but remains in the here and now.

Exhibitions

In 1958 and 1960 Bissier exhibited at the Biennale di Venezia . In 1958 the Kestner Society in Hanover dedicated a solo exhibition to him. In 1959 he was a participant in documenta II ; also represented at documenta III in Kassel in 1964 . Many exhibitions at home and abroad followed. In 1963 a comprehensive retrospective exhibition was held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston . In 1964 alone, there were six exhibitions in American museums. On July 31, 1965, Edinburgh opened a Bissier- Morandi exhibition with 30 works by Bissier , which both artists no longer saw.

  • 1983: Julius Bissier, works on paper . Galerie Roswitha Haftmann Modern Art, Zurich
  • June 1 to October 4, 2015: Julius and Lisbeth Bissier. The Hagnau period 1939–1961 . Hagnauer Museum in Hagnau on Lake Constance.

Bissier in museums

Awards

Quotes from Bissier

  • "A picture should be like a sign; concise, simple, true, hard as nature, happy as nature and sad as it.
  • "The secret attraction in nature is probably that which emanates from its unpredictability, its fickleness, its 'formal' incompleteness." (May 12, 1949)
  • "In three strokes that someone makes with a brush, everything has to be included: he himself with constitution plus temperament, etc., his time and in general: my position on life. If the" three strokes "don't contain everything, so it is in a whole painting - triptych - not, (...) " (Diary entry from February 23, 1943)
  • “(...) This is where the real 'sense' of my inks lies. As essential stenograms of my person, they want to be understood absolutely absolutely through the senses - in no other way. The content (philosophy and the like) is secondary (...) " (Diary entry from October 27, 1943)

Literature (selection)

  • Julius Bissier. Ink and monotypes, exhibition catalog Vlg. Dieter Keller, Stuttgart 1948
  • Julius Bissier. Kestner Society , Hanover; Exhibition catalog with an introduction by Werner Schmalenbach . 1958
  • Julius Bissier, works 1948–1965. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart - graphic collection and Ernst Klett publishers, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-608-76224-8 .
  • Julius Bissier . Ed .: Werner Schmalenbach , DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1974–1986, ISBN 3-7701-1926-6
  • Julius Bissier - Oskar Schlemmer. Correspondence. Ed .: Matthias Bärmann, Erker-Verlag, St. Gallen 1988, ISBN 3-905545-82-9 .
  • Julius Bissier. With a dedication to Julius Bissier for his hundredth birthday , exhibition catalog for the exhibition from December 3, 1993 to February 6, 1994, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Verlag Gerd Hatje, Ostfildern-Ruit near Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-926154-19-5 (museum edition ), ISBN 3-7757-0483-3 (book trade edition); 152 pp.
  • Julius Bissier: from the beginning of the pictures 1915–1939 . Städtische Museen Freiburg, Museum für Neue Kunst, March 26 to June 19, 1994. Waldkirch: Waldkircher Verlag, 1994, ISBN 3-87885-277-0 .
  • "Julius Bissier, Johann Drobek, Willi Baumeister - My teachers" by Prof. Peter Grau. Description of the life and work of Peter Grau's three teachers. Editor Salzer Werbeagentur, Waiblingen and Prof. Peter Grau, Leinfelden, 1998; 104 pp.
  • Julius Bissier - The Metaphysical Painter | Pittore Del Metafisico. Ed .: Marco Franciolli (Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano ), Hans Günter Golinski ( Kunstmuseum Bochum ), Roland Scotti (Kunstmuseum Liner, Appenzell ), exhibition catalog in two languages ​​(German / Italian) on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name in Bochum, Appenzell and Lugano, Verlag Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2008, ISBN 978-3-7757-2246-9 ; 220 pp.

Web links

Commons : Julius Bissier  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Frank Zimmermann: The painter Julius Bissier lost his studio during the KG-I fire. Badische Zeitung, August 31, 2018, accessed on September 2, 2018 .
  2. ^ Website J. Bissier
  3. ^ Julius Bissier - Works in the Museum of New Art, Freiburg
  4. ^ Hans Günter Golinski in Julius Bissier - The Metaphysical Painter , p. 41.
  5. ↑ quoted from: Thomas M. Messer, in Julius Bissier Werke 1937–1965 , exhib. Cat. Art Association for the Rhineland, Düsseldorf, 1970.
  6. ^ Hans Günter Golinski in Julius Bissier - The Metaphysical Painter , pp. 40/41
  7. ↑ quoted from: Julius Bissier. From the beginning of the pictures 1915–1939 , exh. Cat. Museum of New Art, Freiburg / Br., 1994, p. 116.
  8. ↑ Julius Bissier - Works in the Museum of New Art
  9. ^ Hans Günter Golinski in: Julius Bissier - The Metaphysical Painter. P. 45.
  10. ↑ From Bissier's biography in the Hagnauer Museum.
  11. ↑ Ludmila Vachtova . Roswitha Haftmann . P. 96
  12. ^ Exhibition preview on the website of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
personal data
SURNAME Bissier, Julius
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bissier, Julius Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH December 3, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Freiburg in Breisgau
DATE OF DEATH June 18, 1965
Place of death Ascona