Worpswede artists' colony

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The Barkenhoff became the center of the Worpswede artist movement.
The coffee Worpswede established itself as a meeting place for artists Worpswede.

The Worpswede Artists' Colony is a living and working community of artists in the Worpswede municipality in Lower Saxony . It was created at the end of the 19th century in the Teufelsmoor , around 20 kilometers northeast of Bremen . The place thus became home to important artists of Art Nouveau , Impressionism and Expressionism . In addition to their interest in light, the rural motifs or the striking landscapes, romantic longings for rural idyll and a simple, natural life led to the artists' “ urban escape ” .

Nowadays exhibitions, galleries and workshops can be visited.

history

Before the First World War

The first acquaintance of the village in art-interested circles in German-speaking countries is attributed to the Bremen travel writer Johann Georg Kohl . In 1863 Kohl toured the Teufelsmoor ; his “Northwest German Sketches” appeared a year later. In it Kohl describes the life of the bog colonists:

“Their“ huttens ”, those raw peat bog“ Sennhütten ”are sometimes not at all unpaintingly distributed on the edges, peaks and foothills, gorges and cracks that have arisen from the processing of the bog. I do not understand why our painters have made the life and goings on in such strange raised bog harbors and peat factories, which are everywhere on the eroded edges of our high bogs, the subject of studies. (Footnote: The Bavarian “Moose” near Munich have been exploited far better by picturesque poets). And yet they would not only gain highly peculiar images there, but also be able to depict scenes that occur a thousand and a thousand times in our north-western Germany, are already familiar to the inhabitants of the interior and therefore have a patriotic significance. (...) We still lack a fine, generally receptive and multi-faceted sense on our travels and usually we only strive for what shines and shines in Italy or in the Alpine valleys, and what fama in the mouths of people's people brought. "

- 1864: Northwest German sketches; Bremen

Fritz Mackensen got to know the niece of his landlady, Emilie ("Mimi") Stolte, while studying at the Düsseldorf Academy . He met the daughter of the businessman and then mayor Carl Otto Ferdinand Stolte in 1884 in the house of her aunt, who was living in Düsseldorf. Mimi Stolte enthusiastically raved about the heather and moor landscapes, the moor meadows, the “cloud theater” and the glowing sunsets of her home in Teufelsmoor to the then 18-year-old art student. She invited Mackensen to the then artistically insignificant and remote place, and he accepted the invitation on September 13, 1884. At the mission festival in the summer of 1884 in neighboring Schlussdorf , Mackensen found the motif for his monumental painting (almost 3 × 5 m) outdoor worship (on display in the Landesmuseum Hannover ), which shows Schlußdorfer absorbed in prayer.

Painting Spring , 1897, by Heinrich Vogeler

In 1889 the artists Fritz Mackensen, Hans am Ende and Otto Modersohn decided to settle permanently in Worpswede. This year is commonly seen as the year the artists' colony was founded. Modersohn and at the end of Mackensen's college friends were enthusiastic about the possibilities that the Moordorf offered with the wide horizon, the extraordinary lighting conditions, the rough, picturesque landscape and the open-air painting . The friends had turned away from the subject of studio painting, the usual way of working at the time, and were interested in the new artistic method known from France directly in nature.

The artists Fritz Overbeck followed in 1893 and Heinrich Vogeler in 1894 ; Carl Vinnen from Beverstedt loosely joined the group. At the annual Munich exhibition of artists of all nations in the Munich Glass Palace , Ende, Mackensen, Overbeck and Vogeler showed works from Worpswede, with Mackensen's painting from the outdoor service being awarded the gold medal 1st class and establishing the popularity of the artist colony. Paula Becker , who married Otto Modersohn in 1901, joined the group in 1898 to take painting lessons from Mackensen.

In 1895 Heinrich Vogeler acquired the Barkenhoff , which he rebuilt in the Art Nouveau style . The Barkenhoff became the center of the Worpswede artist movement. The simple life in the country and the north German landscape also inspired writers like Rainer Maria Rilke , as well as his future wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff , and Manfred Hausmann .

From 1900 onwards, the Cologne chocolate producer Ludwig Stollwerck engaged artists from Worpswede, among others, to design Stollwerck pictures , collector's albums and advertisements. These included Otto Modersohn, Fritz Overbeck, Carl Vinnen and Heinrich Vogeler.

After the First World War

With the generation of artists , Expressionism found its way into the Worpswede art scene. Georg Tappert founded a painting school in Worpswede as early as 1906 - he later worked in Berlin from 1910 Neue Secession . But also in the fine arts of expressionist sculpture , architecture and handicrafts , new accents were set by Bernhard Hoetger in the early twenties.

The time of National Socialism also had an impact on the Worpswede artists' colony. In the Reichstag election in March 1933 , 66 percent of the votes in Worpswede went to the NSDAP and the black-white-red battle front (comparative value for the entire German Reich: 52 percent). The Social Democrats and Communists , on the other hand, received only 16 percent (comparative value: 31 percent). Many artists, especially Fritz Mackensen and Carl Emil Uphoff , also paid homage to the Volkish idea . Fritz Mackensen was appointed local shop steward of the Reich Chamber of Culture (RKK) in the 1930s , while leftists like Heinrich Vogeler and Gustav Regulator , who had married Vogeler's daughter Marie, were forced to emigrate. This development was based on the homeland and nature cult of the Worpswede artists. Ultimately, it went back to “the great conservative national trend in German intellectual history”, “at the beginning of which Herder and the Romantics stand”, as the Low German linguist Claus Schuppenhauer writes. It was not far until the “perversion of unconditional belief in race, blood and soil ”, according to Strohmeyer / Artinger / Krogmann in their study from the year 2000.

After the Second World War

Friedrich Netzel (1854–1931) a master bookbinder gave the Worpswede artists space to exhibit and sell their works early on. His son, Friedrich Netzel (II), set up his own house in "Bergstrasse" as a gallery in 1919 to exhibit contemporary art. In addition to the art trade, an art collection was created .

Heinrich Vogeler , painting The Summer Evening , commemorative stamp “100 Years of the Artist Village Worpswede” of the German Federal Post Office from 1989

After the gallery owner's death in 1945, his wife continued the business in the difficult post-war years and finally handed it over to his son Friedrich Netzel (III). In addition to its own family collection from three generations, it also showed special exhibitions that gave Worpswede supraregional importance. In the exhibitions in 1972, 1973 and 1989, for example, Heinrich Vogeler's complete oeuvre was presented to the public with the works from his Soviet era that were shown for the first time. As a result, the place was first known nationwide as a painter's colony.

But also the first major exhibition in Worpswede on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Paula Modersohn-Becker in 1976, as well as an exhibition for the 100th anniversary of the artist village in 1989 are important.

Between the years 2007 to 2012, the museums , which until then had been acting independently , formed a network. The existing museum buildings were modernized and expanded through an EU funding program , but the four central museums also merged to form the “Worpsweder Museumsverbund”. A common content concept was developed that brought together the originally four Worpsweder Museum Barkenhoff , Large Art Show , Haus im Schluh and Worpsweder Kunsthalle .

Personalities

Painting Spring in Worpswede , 1900, by Hans am Ende
Worpsweder landscape, around 1900, by Paula Modersohn-Becker
Worpswede: Bonze des Humors by Bernhard Hoetger, made in 1914 as a copy of a small sculpture (1912)

Old Worpswede artist

Second generation of artists

Contemporary artist

reception

The artist colony and its personalities have recently received both media attention and processing in artistic works:

  • Tankred Dorst : artist - play that traces the life of Heinrich Vogeler; First performance in 2008.
  • Moritz Rinke: The man who fell through the century . Novel from 2010, which ironically deals with the Nazi past of the artist colony and how it is dealt with today.
  • Myth and Modernity. 125 years of the Worpswede artists' colony . Exhibition in the Barkenhoff, in the Haus im Schluh; Large art show, art gallery: May 11 to September 14, 2014. [1] , [2]
  • With the novel by Klaus Modick "Concert without a poet" (2015), the author creates a panorama of the Worpswede artist group around 1900 based on the genesis of the painting "The concert or summer evening on the Barkenhoff" by Heinrich Vogeler and tells the difficult relationship between Vogeler and Rainer Maria Rilke.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Stolte department store (today “The Pantry”) in “Findorffstraße 10” has a tradition going back almost 200 years.
  2. ↑ Stolte department store. Official website, kaufhaus-stolte.de [1]
  3. ↑ History Worpswede: From farming village to artists' colony. In: worpswede-gewo.de , accessed on December 26, 2012.
  4. ↑ a b station: [3] Fritz Mackensen "Outdoor worship". In: museum.de. Retrieved on August 18, 2020 (illustration of a study by Mackensen on the monumental painting with audio commentary). On: Audioguide: Museum tour of the Museum at the Modersohn House in Worpswede. In: museum.de. Retrieved August 18, 2020 .
  5. ↑ The artist village Worpswede is celebrating its 125th birthday! In: worpswede-museen.de , accessed on August 19, 2014.
  6. ^ Maria Goldoni: A Stollwerck series by Heinrich Vogeler and Franz Eichert. In: Esslingen Conference Proceedings 2002. Working Group Image, Print & Paper.
  7. ↑ see also Berlin Secession Conflicts and Splits
  8. ↑ All information in this paragraph from: Arn Strohmeyer, Kai Artinger, Ferdinand Krogmann: Landscape, Light and Low German Myth. The Worpswede art and the National Socialism. Weimar 2000, ISBN 3-89739-126-0 .
  9. ^ Company history of the Netzel bookstore [2]
  10. ^ Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon , Mannheim 1979, Volume 25, Page 505
  11. ↑ Official website of the Worpsweder Museum Association [3]
  12. ↑ Monika Breustedt: Monika Breustedt - Biography. Retrieved September 21, 2016 .
  13. ↑ Interview with Moritz Rinke  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the blue sofa at the Leipzig Book Fair on March 18, 2010.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.zdf.de  

Coordinates: 53 ° 12 ′ 56 "  N , 8 ° 55 ′ 56"  E