Karl Walther

This article deals with the painter Karl Walther. For other people with this name, see Karl Walther (disambiguation) .

Karl Walther in the garden in Seeshaupt (1968)

Karl Walther (born August 19, 1905 in Zeitz ; † June 9, 1981 in Seeshaupt ) was a German painter of German Late Impressionism . Walther was a representative of open-air painting ( plein air painting ). His works include portraits , still lifes , cityscapes and landscapes .

Life

Career and first exhibitions

Self-Portrait with a Goatee (1947)

After an apprenticeship in lithography , Walther first studied music (1920), then painting (1925) at the Leipzig University of Graphics and Book Art with Heinz Dörffel and Fritz Ernst Rentsch. Walther had his first studio in the Leipzig district of Leutzsch . In 1929 the company moved to Berlin . Via Max Liebermann and Ulrich Hübner , he was accepted as a master class student under Max Slevogt in 1932 , who, however, died shortly before Walther's arrival.

Walther had his first solo exhibition in September 1926 at the gallery owner Heinrich Barchfeld in Leipzig , followed by an exhibition at Victor Hartberg in Berlin that same year. This was followed by international exhibitions at the Carnegie Institute of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh from 1935, in 1928 in the Berlin Secession , and in 1938 at the Venice Biennale . Painting stays abroad took him to Lake Lugano in 1930 , to Paris in 1931 , where he met Oskar Kokoschka , and in 1932 to the Rembrandt exhibition in Amsterdam ; In 1933 Walther traveled to Florence for three months . In 1935 Walther married the pastor's daughter and librarian Gnade-Maria Knote.

The time of National Socialism

During the time of National Socialism , Walther showed his work in numerous solo exhibitions and since 1938 he has regularly participated in the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich . Walther exhibited a total of 29 pictures there until 1944, 13 of which were sold, including seven to Adolf Hitler . Despite participating in this exhibition, which was propagated as the most important cultural event in National Socialist Germany , Walther's works cannot be classified as part of National Socialist art in terms of form or content because they were not geared towards its political and ideological conception of art. Walther's art from that time was often characterized by a sadness that reflected the reality of his objects in an impressionistic way, but without any political coloring. In addition, Walther was a great admirer of Lovis Corinth and therefore influenced by his work, which was defamed as Degenerate Art in the Third Reich .

His talent for depicting cities in a more atmospheric way than any color photograph, but also his success at the Great German Art Exhibition, saved Walther from participating in World War II for a long time . So Walther was postponed from military service until mid-1944 after he had completed a series of views of Würzburg at the invitation of Heinrich Dikreiter (founder of the Städtische Galerie Würzburg) . a. with the order to paint the cities occupied in the east such as Danzig and Krakow as well as Marienburg, which had already belonged to the German Empire .

In 1940 Walther moved from Leipzig to Munich, and in 1943 to Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberg (Walther had to give up his Berlin studio due to bombing in 1942). On September 1, 1944, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and used in the German occupation of Northern Italy . There he was taken prisoner by the British, where he made friends with the Würzburg painter and graphic artist Josef Scheuplein in the Rimini POW camp .

The post-war years

Peterskirche and Löwenturm in Munich (1950)

Many pictures of the destroyed city of Munich were taken after the war. At the end of May 1946 and 1947 Karl Walther was back in Würzburg. In the summer of 1947 his paintings were exhibited in the Wenceslas Hall of the town hall. On this occasion, the artist painted other pictures that document the destroyed Würzburg. In 1950 Walther again took part in the International Carnegie Exhibition in Pittsburgh. By expanding the property in Seeshaupt, Walther initially limited himself almost exclusively to commissioned work. During this time several portraits of American military personnel and diplomats were created, including the consul general in Munich Sam E. Woods. In 1960 Walther painted for two months on Lake Garda and in South Tyrol . In 1962 he travels to Holland for the commemorative exhibition for Frans Hals' 300th birthday in Haarlem . His father, Karl Friedrich Walther, who lived in Leipzig, died in May 1964, and his mother, Bertha Walther, born in February 1968. Morally. From 1968 Walther painted in South Tyrol, there a. a. in Brixen and Meran and from 1970 in Salurn and on the Alpe di Siusi .

In 1974 Walther traveled again with Berlin painter friends to Venice , where a series of bright, intensely colored cityscapes were created, and in 1976 to Spandau . Karl Walther was a long-time member and Vice President of the Munich Artists' Cooperative and took part in their annual exhibitions. From 1974 to 1976 Walther traveled to his hometown Leipzig and especially painted views of the Leipzig Brühl. His last paintings were made in Berlin in 1976.

In the spring of 1978 Walther suffered a stroke. This forced him to stop painting, which is why the artist intensively occupied himself with music in the last years of his life.

Artistic influence

Walther's painting is based on the art of the French and German impressionists , on the enthusiasm for Liebermann, Corinth and Slevogt, as well as for their predecessors Hals, Velázquez and Constable . Early on, Walther orientated himself on the holdings of German impressionists in the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts , whose works by Max Slevogt, Lovis Corinth and Max Liebermann, as well as Walter Leistikow , Wilhelm Leibl , Karl Hagemeister and Carl Schuch had a decisive influence on him. He also owes important suggestions to Adolph Menzel , Gustave Courbet and the Leibl Circle . In 1974 Walther reminded of the great importance that Lovis Corinth's book, The Learning of Painting, first published in 1908, played for him. “I got to know this textbook”, he wrote, “as early as 1922, when I finally decided [...] to devote myself entirely to the visual representation of reality on the surface. Since I initially didn't take any classes at an academy or private school, Corinth's textbook was my only guide to self-study in painting people, animals, landscapes and architecture ”.

plant

Portraits

Lady with a Black Beret (1947)

Sculptor Prof. Hartmann (1934)

Like his role models, Walther also dealt with his own physiognomy . From the early days of his work, there are bold self-portraits that show him impartially, confidently and unshakably. Here it is the coarse, sometimes a little rude and at the same time highly sensitive man from simple circles that he appears as in the memories of contemporary witnesses. In the later works one sees an artist personality who examines himself, but with the awareness of skill, has a face and dispenses with classic attributes such as brushes and palettes. In his portraits, Walther repeatedly approached the characteristics of his counterpart with preparatory pencil drawings . With gentle strokes that break off again and again, the artist captures the shape and becomes more energetic and dense when it comes to defining the brightness and the dark. When transferring to the canvas, the composition specified in the drawing is retained and the color is added. There are seldom “speaking” attributes like in the portrait of a doctor posing in his white work clothes; mostly the characteristic features of the paintings are sufficient, standing or sitting uninhibited and self-confident, resting in themselves or with a rhetorical gesture appropriate to their status . The personalities portrayed by Walther include: a. the opera singer Fanny Cleve and the mountaineer Luis Trenker .

Still life

In his still lifes, Walther focuses on keen observation, the quick grasp of an everyday situation that often only appears banal at first glance. Walther is able to derive a painterly charm from these things, he can elevate the profane to a work of art through his representation without taking off on a symbolic level. Like Vincent van Gogh, Karl Walther painted old shoes, but such pictures are not a social charge. Édouard Manet's still lifes, which Walther had seen in Berlin, captivate with their unspectacular. Like the French, Walther was deliberately not very demanding when it came to choosing his subjects : the garden provided the flowers of spring, summer and autumn, as did the fruit and vegetables. A hare, or pheasant, or a bright red lobster were portrayed as they appear to have just entered the house. The composition of the colors is the essential thing at Walther, it dominates the material of the subjects.

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  Kitchen Still Life (1928)

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  Still life with a mirror (1932)

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  Still life with peonies (1967)

City images

Winter in the Suburbs (1929)

Architectural and urban images comprise the largest part of Walther's painting. Many of the works painted before the destruction of World War II became documents of German urban planning . With just a few lines, Walther was able to capture the urban situation, assess the relationships between the architectures and fix the different dimensions. The artist returned to his location two or three times to take a picture, each time to find the same incidence of light.

Unlike many of his predecessors, Walther did not depict his cities in an idealized form, in a timeless state: he was too committed to reality, as some cloudy cityscapes or the pictures of the destroyed Munich show. For him, reality didn't mean painting everything down to the last detail. Clearly decipherable inscriptions, iconographically identifiable house figures and passers-by who can be named are all in vain. Walther by no means focuses on topographical accuracy, but rather on the impressionistic overall impression of his cityscapes.

Landscapes

Forest idyll at Frechensee (1956)

Walther's enthusiasm for the great outdoors motivates the artist to capture the play of light and color in every season of the year and to reproduce its changing moods in his pictures. Pure, absolutely untouched landscapes hardly occur with Walther; almost always one encounters traces of human activity, occasionally the person themselves. Often the gaze wanders out of a village into the surroundings, conversely one sees villages in the background. A wooden hut, a fence, a bridge can be integrated into the landscape as “ accessories ”, and even the forests with their paths indirectly show the presence of humans. Snowy landscapes show the gloomy mood of the cold season under a gray, cloudy sky. In the spring, lime green, almost yellow-green tones of the fresh leaves and the budding flowers break through, the summer shines in rich, often blond colors . While autumn with its play of colors offers the opportunity to show all the nuances of the palette, in late autumn there is only a few brown leaves on dry branches, and the first snow of the new winter is already heralding in the sky. Walther devoted himself to a special discipline of landscape painting with particular passion, namely the representation of forest interiors . They make up almost a quarter of his entire oeuvre. Time and again, at any time of the year or day, whatever the weather, the artist was drawn out into nature. Here z. Sometimes very large-format paintings without aiming at the romantic exaggeration of the 19th century . At first it was the alluvial forests in the Leipzig area ( above all the Leutzsch alluvial forest) that inspired him to paint, then the Spreewald in Berlin; After moving to Lake Starnberg, the artist had almost inexhaustible opportunities to search for motifs in the immediate vicinity and in the nearby Bernried Park.

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  Boats on the Beach at Carlshagen (1928)

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  Winter landscape near Berchtesgaden (1953)

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  Sailboats in the port of Malcesine (1960)

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  White Peonies on Red (1970)

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  Berth at the Rialto Bridge (1975)

Exhibitions (selection)

• 1946 special exhibition by Karl Walther , art dealer Blum, Munich
• 1995 retrospective for the 90th birthday , Leipzig City History Museum
• 2005 Karl Walther (1905–1981): A late impressionist retrospective , BayernLB Gallery, Munich
• 2008 Architecture and Landscape , Galerie Wimmer , Munich

Museums

The works of Walther are now in many private collections and galleries such as the Municipal Gallery Munich , the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz , the city's museums Leipzig ( Grassi Museum , Museum of Fine Arts ), the Kunsthalle Mannheim or the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart . The museum in Würzburg's Kulturspeicher has the largest collection in public hands with 19 paintings.

Honors

In 1932 Karl Walther received the Albrecht Dürer Prize and in 1942 the Veit Stoss Prize from the city of Nuremberg.

literature

• Richard Braungart : Karl Walther, Work and Becoming an Impressionist. Munich 1947.
• Josef Kern: Karl Walther, life and work. With oevre directory of the oil paintings. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 1995.

Web links

Commons : Karl Walther  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Karl Walther's website
• Website of the cultural group Seeshaupt

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See http://www.karl-walther.com/bibliographie.html
2. ↑ See www.gdk-research.de
3. ↑ See http://www.dhm.de/lemo/kapitel/ns-regime/kunst-und-kultur.html
4. ↑ See for example the work “Der Viktualienmarkt in München” (1943) in Karl Walther, Leben und Werk , WV 2029, plate 41
5. ↑ old.wuerzburgerleben.de ( Memento of the original from December 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ See Karl Walther, Leben und Werk , p. 25
7. ↑ Dto, pp. 15-16
8. ↑ A portrait of the soprano Fanny Cleve ( Memento of the original from January 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
9. ↑ Karl Walther (1905–1981): A Late Impressionist - Retrospective  ( 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.  
10. ↑ Roland Flade: The idyll before the storm . In: Main-Post , January 8, 2010
11. ↑ Kulturspeicher Würzburg website