Karl Kämpf (painter)

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Karl Kämpf (born February 17, 1902 in Heilbronn ; † March 2, 1987 in Fallingbostel ) was a German painter and graphic artist .

Life

Karl Kämpf was one of four children of the baker August Kämpf (1867-1908) and his wife Margarete (1871-1934). The parents had been running a bakery on Wolfganggasse in Heilbronn since 1898. From 1907, Karl attended the boys' middle school in the former Franciscan monastery . At the end of September 1908, Karl Kämpf lost his left arm as a result of an accident with a cart on Untere Neckarstrasse. On December 30th of the same year his father died, after which the mother continued the bakery on her own.

Karl completed an apprenticeship in Heilbronn from 1917 to 1922 at the Peter Bruckmann & Söhne silverware factory , where he then worked as a designer until 1927. At that time he was also involved in Heilbronn's art life and joined the Heilbronn Artists' Association in the mid-1920s . From 1927 he studied at the United State Schools for Free and Applied Art in Berlin-Charlottenburg under Professors Waldemar Raemisch , Ernst Boehm and Ernst Hadank, among others , commercial graphics and painting. At that time he was already winning his first awards, including a. a cash prize in the competition organized by the Reichsverband deutscher Automobilindustrie for the license plates of German automobiles. In 1932/33 he was awarded the ministerial medal of the university and was a member of the last freely elected student council as the first class supervisor of the student committee. In 1933 he joined the National Socialist German Student Union , in 1934 he became a master student with Böhm, where he exceeded his fellow students in artistic productivity.

After completing his studies, he worked as a freelance graphic designer in Berlin and in 1936 married the painter Elfriede Glaser Kämpf (1908–1978). The couple first moved into an apartment on Lietzensee , and later a house in Zehlendorf . At that time illustrations were created for the Herbert Stuffer publishing house , for business and for sporting events.

In 1937 Kämpf was appointed extraordinary teacher as the successor to his professor Ernst Böhm, who had been dismissed by the National Socialists . In 1940 he became a professor in the commercial graphics class at the now renamed University of Fine Arts . From April 1940 he belonged to the NSDAP (membership number 8156358). The work he and his students carried out also included propaganda posters. At the beginning of 1944 the university was partially outsourced, with Kämpf belonging to the Kursell working group in Primkenau , where mainly propaganda printed matter was produced. On January 22, 1945, the front had come so close that teaching was stopped. Kämpf left his belongings stored in Primkenau Castle and an inn and fled with his wife and son Christian, born in 1943, to Fallingbostel, where his wife's twin sister lived. The family lived in their house for a few months before they found their own apartment in June 1945, which the family initially rented and then bought with the rest of the house in the early 1950s.

In the immediate post-war period, Kämpf created in particular depictions of his hometown Heilbronn, which was destroyed in the war and which meanwhile have documentary value for Heilbronn urban history research. The city museums bought several dozen of these works. He traveled from Fallingbostel to southern Germany again and again, except to Heilbronn, especially to Abstatt , where relatives ran a bakery, but also to Hohenlohe and Zabergäu , where landscapes were created. In his new home, Fallingbostel, Kämpf was able to establish himself as an artist through numerous “Heidebilder”. Numerous exhibitions at home and abroad took place. Since Kämpf traveled extensively over time, his repertoire soon included many motifs from his travel destinations, especially those from the Mediterranean region, mostly from Elba, Crete and Sicily.

Since he was no longer employed at the university after the Second World War, Kämpf was dependent on the sale of his pictures through galleries and private clients. Private clients included a. the Bruckmann field service in Berlin and the Heilbronn company Schedler or its authorized signatory Julius Greiner and the collector Traudel Moser. For him, design orders from the economy for company logos, brochures and the like, as well as orders in the context of art in architecture, were of existential importance .

He was still intensively active as an artist until 1984, although his late work after the death of his wife in 1978 has a melancholy character. Karl Kämpf was buried in the family grave of his in-laws in Fallingbostel.

plant

Karl Kämpf's work spans almost seven decades, beginning with product designs for Bruckmann, through commercial graphics, posters and book illustrations from the early 1930s, propaganda work during the National Socialist era, rubble painting from the post-war period, right through to landscape paintings from northern and southern Germany and the Mediterranean region . In his free artistic work, Kämpf was inspired by the expressionist and Berlin professor Karl Hofer . In addition, Kämpf also carried out public contracts, especially in the context of art in architecture . This includes wall designs for authorities and industry in Hanover, Lüneburg, Munsterlager, Soltau and Rotenburg.

The city of Heilbronn bought many of his drawings and paintings. An exhibition with works by Karl Kämpf and Elfriede Glaser Kämpf was shown in 2007 in the town hall in Abstatt , and in 2010 an exhibition of his works took place in Heilbronn.

Literature and New Media

  • 30 years of the Heilbronn Artists' Association, summer exhibition 1979 , pp. 102/103.
  • Andreas Pfeiffer (Ed.): Heilbronn and the art of the 50s. City Museums Heilbronn, 1993, p. 159.
  • Norbert Jung, Horst Schwarz: Professor Karl Kämpf: sculptor - designer - graphic artist - painter. An overview of life and work , with a foreword by Rüdiger Brown. Jung, Heilbronn 2009, CD-ROM, ISBN 978-3-934096-21-9 .
  • Norbert Jung: Search for traces K - a contribution to the family and work history of Prof. Karl Kämpf . Heilbronn 2012, ISBN 978-3-934096-30-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Staatliche Museen zu Berlin  ( 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. (PDF; 2.2 MB)@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.smb.museum  
  2. ↑ Ingeborg AlLiH, Monika Hingst: The art has never been a man alone possessed - an exhibition of the Academy of Arts and College of Arts in 1996. Henschel Verlag, ISBN 978-3-89487-255-7
  3. ↑ Christine Fischer-Defoy: Art, power, politics: the Nazification of the art and music colleges in Berlin . Elefanten Press, 1988, p. 79
  4. ^ Stefanie Johnen: Art and Society. Graphic work from the Berlin Art School at the beginning of the “Third Reich” . City of Kaarst, 2008, p. 3.
  5. ↑ Christine Fischer-Defoy: Art, Power, Politics, p. 291
  6. ↑ bildindex.de Photo archive Marburg: swastika poster "This is the symbol of your struggle organization" in the Museum of Art and Commerce , Hamburg
  7. ↑ Christine Fischer-Defoy: Art, under construction a stone - The West Berlin art and music colleges in the field of tension in the post-war period . Berlin University of the Arts, 2001, p. 70
  8. ↑ Heilbronn Voice , April 8, 2010
personal data
SURNAME Fight, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Heilbronn
DATE OF DEATH March 2nd 1987
Place of death Fallingbostel