Karl Bruchhäuser
Karl Bruchhäuser (born April 20, 1917 in Dudenhofen (Rodgau) , † October 13, 2005 in Dierdorf ) was a German portrait and landscape painter.
Life
Early years
Karl Bruchhäuser was born in 1917 as the son of Wilhelm Bruchhäuser , who later became the district administrator of the Neuwied district , and Katharina Heller in Dudenhofen, Hesse. He grew up with two sisters in Dausenau an der Lahn , his father's home. There he first attended elementary school and then switched to the upper secondary school in Bad Ems . After secondary school, he completed an apprenticeship as a painter and house painter. He sold his first picture at the age of 15. It was a view of Dausenau with the Lahn ferry that hung in the hairdressing salon in Dausenau and that a Dutch tourist liked so much that he bought the picture for 20 Reichsmarks . In the 1930s he created several views of Dausenau and the surrounding area, as well as portraits of family members. In 1934 he painted his first self-portrait.
Because of his special talent, Bruchhäuser received a scholarship at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1935 . One of his teachers was the co-founder of the Sonderbund Wilhelm Schmurr as well as Werner Heuser and Franz Kiederich .
War participation
Karl Bruchhäuser refused to join the National Socialist German Student Union and was drafted into the Reich Labor Service in 1937 . In 1938 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht . Bruchhäuser experienced the Second World War as a soldier from the beginning, first in France and from 1941 as a participant in the Russian campaign . Even during the war he drew incessantly. In his sketchbooks more than 200 pictures from the time of the Second World War have been preserved, mostly drawings, colored drawings and small-format watercolors. The focus is not on the events of the war, but rather on the common soldier, the people in Russia and, in view of contemporary history, the idyll of the Russian landscape. Bruchhäuser himself wrote in a handout for the exhibition in the Neuwied district museum from April 20 to June 8, 1997:
“In any case, under this principle of self-preservation, it did not occur to me to artistically make the destructive force of this war as an object. Later I realized that one can hardly depict war and violence with artistic means without succumbing to the danger of inevitably producing a caricature. Then everything becomes even more bleak. "
The pictures from that time were particularly valuable to him throughout his life.
In March 1945 Karl Bruchhäuser became a prisoner of war, first in American, then in British, and was interned in England (Ascot, Camp 7, near London and Mota-Camp near Carlisle in Northern England). Here he met Waldemar von Knoeringen , Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler , Erich Ollenhauer , Ludwig Rosenberg and Wolfgang Gans zu Putlitz . While in captivity, he designed an illustrated children's book that never went to print.
post war period
After returning home, Bruchhäuser got a job as a drawing teacher at the pedagogy in Bergnassau , later in Worms . Deeply influenced by the war experiences and imprisonment, dark drawings about the horrors of war and images with religious motifs that thematized death and the suffering of people were created in the post-war years.
Karl Bruchhäuser became a founding member of the Mittelrheinischen Künstlerverbandes, which later became part of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Bildender Künstler am Mittelrhein (AKM), and the State Professional Association of Visual Artists Rhineland-Palatinate (BBK). He took part in several exhibitions, moved to Neuwied and married the art teacher and illustrator Elisabeth Gerhards in 1951. Study trips to France , Yugoslavia , Venice , Sicily and a stay on Monte Verità near Ascona followed . A scholarship from the State of Rhineland-Palatinate opened up the possibility of participating in the International Summer Academy for Fine Arts in Salzburg . Bruchhausen became a pupil of Oskar Kokoschka there . Further trips to Ticino followed , where he met Hermann Hesse, to Normandy and, together with Hanns Altmeier , to southern France. In the 1950s he also created numerous portraits and he illustrated the volume of poetry published by his father in 1958 for Strüder-Verlag, Neuwied: You wear a light ...
In 1960 Karl Bruchhäuser met Uta Rohde, who would later become his second wife, and moved with her to Grundlsee in Styria . There he met Leo Delitz , Hanns Kobinger and Philipp von Kesselstatt , who supported him and became good friends. Kobinger made the acquaintance of Johannes Ude , whom he also portrayed. The family lived a few weeks on the "Ramgut" with Hermann Oppenheimer in Obertressen near Bad Aussee .
Karl Bruchhäuser's painting style became more energetic, with expressive colors and powerful contours. The dynamic painting style, reduced to the bare essentials, which Bruchhäuser appropriated in the 1960s, particularly shapes the landscapes he painted in Austria.
Until the 1970s, Karl Bruchhäuser occasionally experimented with abstract painting , mostly monotypes . However, he soon found out that this was not his job and he returned to his favorite subjects: people and the landscape. In 1964, his father bought the "Bruchhäuser Hof" for his grandchildren in the small Westerwald community of Woldert, where Bruchhäuser lived until he died. He portrayed Countess Beatrix von Schönburg-Glauchau with her daughter Gloria ( Gloria von Thurn und Taxis ) and the sculptor Arno Breker . Together with the Neuenkirchen painter and sculptor Erich Feld , he visited Documenta V in Kassel in 1972 , where he distributed a leaflet with food for thought to the public. On the occasion of the Paul Citroen exhibition in The Hague , Citroen and Bruchhäuser portray each other.
Later years
Bruchhäuser was a founding member of the Green Action Future and the Greens founded by Herbert Gruhl . But together with Gruhl he left the party a short time later and became a member of the ÖDP (ecological democratic party). From 1983 assessor on the board of the regional association Rhineland-Palatinate of the ÖDP, Bruchhäuser left active politics in 1984.
Questions of environmental protection, careful handling of the landscape and the preservation of historically grown structures were always important to Karl Bruchhäuser and are also reflected in his landscapes. These developed in an energetic creative process in the landscape itself. The meticulous composition in the studio based on photos or previously made sketches was rather alien to him. His wife Uta Rohde-Bruchhäuser described this in a newspaper interview:
“It was like a steam boiler, everything had to come out at once. He had mentally finished the pictures long ago and then brought them onto the canvas in an explosive manner. "
In addition, he created expressive portraits, often commissioned work, carried out purposefully with determined brushstrokes, and repeatedly self-portraits. Karl Bruchhäuser participated in numerous exhibitions and was the recipient of several cultural awards. His views of the Rhine are very much appreciated by the beholder . In 1990 he received the Neuwied City Art Prize. In 1994 he separated from his second wife Uta.
In his later years Karl Bruchhäuser concentrated on the quiet Westerwald landscape, motifs from the Neuwied district (for example the Rommersdorf Abbey ), the idyll of nature on the doorstep, garden scenes from Woldert and flower pictures. The painting style became more mature and finer, more detailed, the colors more subtle and the pictures more similar to those from the 1950s than works from the middle creative period. They are to be assigned to "expressive realism".
On the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1997, the district and town of Neuwied organized a comprehensive exhibition in the Roentgen Museum Neuwied and a retrospective in the municipal Mennonite Church gallery . After a long illness, Karl Bruchhäuser died on October 13, 2005 in Dierdorf Hospital.
plant
The artistic development of Karl Bruchhäuser is, as ultimately with many artists living in the 20th century, shaped by the rapid upheaval in social and political conditions, which naturally also influence art or are influenced by it in a forward-looking manner. Growing up in Dausenau, a small town on the Lahn, his first works were characterized by a picturesque setting that offered everything that the artistic way of seeing taught in Germany at that time. It was above all the painters Wilhelm Leibl , Wilhelm Trübner and Heinrich von Zügel who gave the budding painter the basis on which to orientate himself. This did not change after he began to study at the Academy in Düsseldorf, as the teaching methods, despite some upheavals in European art, were still completely committed to the craft tradition of the academic training of the time, which, however, like Bruchhäuser also found in retrospect, was an important basis for his later painterly development. Unfortunately, he was not allowed to complete his training, as Bruchhäuser was (and remained) a down-to-earth thinker and was drafted into the Reich Labor Service because of his refusal to join the National Socialist Student Union. After the outbreak of war there followed military service, military service and English imprisonment. Nevertheless, he was able to develop his artistic abilities even during the war, because like many artists he had material available to carry out their work as advanced observers. He found his motifs during the rest periods, during and between the missions at the front, in the surroundings of what is now Belarus, Poland and the Ukraine. The works, portraits of the people and the landscape, are in extreme alternation, on the one hand primarily in an idyllic nature, certainly also as an antipode to the catastrophe around them, on the other hand in the absolute sympathy for the suffering of people - regardless of who it was, comrade, opponent or prisoner , it has always been the person suffering from war, the person and his human dignity, in all their fragility. He reflected all of this in his captivity and incorporated this into his allegorical anti-war drawings. Bruchhäuser has drawn human dignity in its inviolability and vulnerability in war. Possibly owed to these living conditions, they remained so throughout their lives, in addition to dealing with philosophical, spiritual and religious topics and their implementation. What all the themes that inspired him have in common is the search for stability and timelessness. For this reason, his visual language did not change as much as the processes in art in the post-war period required. Although he worked abstractly, as it were to demonstrate that he was capable of this, he left it with a few works - which are now in the possession of the Bruchhäuser Foundation - because they did not satisfy him. As a protest against this conception of art, he even published the “Manifesto to the Artists” on the occasion of the documenta in Kassel at the time. During the post-war period he resumed his quasi-abandoned studies. B. copied pictures by Adolph Menzel and John Constable and made numerous study trips to Europe. His wish to become a student of Otto Dix failed when he was appointed to the Dresden Art Academy, but shows Bruchhauser's urge to expand his acting possibilities. Under the influence of Kokoschka, Bruchhäuser developed a personal form of expressionism on the basis of his great talent, which would set the trend for his painting over the next few decades. His whole being could manifest itself in this painterly form of expression, caught up in 19th century painting and based on his thirst for freedom and his already expressive nature, to artistically implement everything that moved him. These were the landscapes, initially often mountain scenes due to a stay of several years in Austria, a motif that greatly encouraged the new painting style, and later, after returning to Germany, pictures of the Rhine and the surrounding low mountain ranges. The second focus is the portraits, a topic early on due to his ability to sensitively grasp the psyche of people, which is now fully developed through the newly discovered painting. He made use of the entire pictorial palette, drawing, watercolor, tempera and oil painting. In the artist's late work, a very unique form of painting developed. From a kind of recollection of the painting of his youth, his works have now become more restrained, more contemplative and more reserved in color, while at the same time maintaining the expressive painting style from the heyday of his work.
family
Karl Bruchhäuser has four sons who are also creative:
- Thomas Bruchhäuser , comedian, comedy acrobat, clown and director
- Karl Bruchhäuser, actor and comedian
- Andreas Bruchhäuser , painter
- Mario Bruchhäuser († October 15, 2015)
Exhibitions
- 1947–1994 Participation in the annual art exhibition of the Roentgen Museum Neuwied (formerly District Museum)
- 1954 - as in later years - "form and color", exhibition of the working group of visual artists, Koblenz
- 1954 Gurlitt Gallery , Munich; his picture "Winter on the outskirts" received positive reviews in the Münchner Merkur
- 1956–1958 Höllrigl and Welz Galleries , Salzburg
- 1957 - and in the following years - Galerie Boissere in Cologne
- 1962 Menton , exhibition at the Residence du Louvre.
- 1962 Metternich House , Koblenz; Exhibition for the 50th birthday
- 1970 Participation in exhibitions including in the Dahms Gallery in Wiesbaden with the Neuwied artist Josef Antonius Klein and in the Mouffe Gallery in Paris .
museum
At the end of 2005, the Bruchhäuser Foundation was initially set up as a dependent foundation and in 2008 it became a legal foundation . In Steimel in the Westerwald, the neighboring town of his last place of residence, the Bruchhäuser Foundation, together with the community, has set up a permanent exhibition with a selection of his works from all creative periods in the historic "Haus Neitzert".
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Laudation from Horst Schilling, editor-in-chief of the Rhein-Zeitung , on the occasion of the exhibition opening on May 3, 1997 in Neuwied
- ↑ a b Peter Seel: He loved to paint the wild mountains of the Alps. Article in the Rhein-Zeitung of September 28, 2002, page 15
- ↑ L. Sauer-Kaulbach in the Rhein-Zeitung of December 23, 1998
- ^ Karl Bruchhäuser - Encounters, published by the district of Neuwied, Neuwied Verlagsgesellschaft 1998, p. 109
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bruchhäuser, Karl |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German portrait and landscape painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 20, 1917 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Dudenhofen (Rodgau) |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 13, 2005 |
| Place of death | Dierdorf |