Karl von Freyburg

Marsden Hartley : Portrait of a German Officer (1914), Metropolitan Museum of Art

Karl Ferdinand von Freyburg , also Carl von Freyburg (born July 15, 1889 in Flensburg , † October 7 , 1914 in Gommecourt , Department Pas-de-Calais ) was a German officer and friend of Marsden Hartley .

Life

Karl von Freyburg came from the Mecklenburg noble family (Schlottmann) von Freyburg , which had provided officers in the Prussian service for generations. His father Paul von Freyburg (1845–1919) made it up to major in the Prussian army , his mother Helene Luise Olivia, nee. Horn (1856–1936) came from West Prussia . At the time of his birth his father was serving in the infantry regiment "Herzog von Holstein" (Holsteinisches) No. 85 and was a district officer in the Landwehr district of Flensburg. Karl was the second of five children and the only son.

Karl von Freyburg was accepted into the Prussian main cadet institute in Berlin-Lichterfelde and served in the page corps at the Prussian court; In 1908 he was the personal page of Princess Louise Sophie of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg , the wife of Friedrich Leopold of Prussia . After graduating from the cadet school, he entered the 4th Guards Regiment on foot . With seniority from June 19, 1908, he was appointed lieutenant.

Marsden Hartley : Painting No. 48 (Berlin, 1913), Brooklyn Museum

In 1912 he visited his cousin, the sculptor Arnold Rönnebeck in Paris , where he was among the artists around Gertrude Stein . Here he met the American painter Marsden Hartley . After a brief return visit to Berlin in January 1913, Hartley decided to come to Berlin longer. He stayed here (with interruptions) from May 1913 to December 1915. A deep friendship and possibly love affair with von Freyburg or a triangular relationship between Hartley, Rönnebeck and Freyburg developed. Hartley turned away from his previously cultivated style of landscape and still life painting, he established contacts with the German avant-garde and maintained a particularly intensive exchange with Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc , whose artistic work, along with Cubism and Orphism , became decisive for Hartley's work. The result was a series of paintings that were first shown by Hartley's sponsor Alfred Stieglitz in his New York gallery 291 and are now considered icons of the American avant-garde . In them Hartley painted both figurative ( The Warriors. 1913) and increasingly abstract depictions of the Prussian military, which he deeply admired as an expression of powerful masculinity. Georgia O'Keeffe, on the other hand, thought the pictures were far too loud in composition and colors, like a brass band in a small closet .

Neuville-Saint-Vaast German military cemetery

At the beginning of the First World War , von Freyburg, who had evidently left the military as a lieutenant in the reserve, was reactivated. With his regiment he marched into Belgium on August 12, 1914 and France on August 26, 1914 . As a platoon commander of a machine gun - train he survived the Battle of the Marne (1914) and was awarded the Iron Cross awarded, however, fell on October 7 at the Battle of Arras in the race to the sea . Karl von Freyburg was buried in the German military cemetery in Neuville-Saint-Vaast.

Aftermath

Marsden Hartley processed the war death of Freyburgs, which affected him very much, in a series of twelve symbolic paintings, the War Motif series. These paintings, including Portrait of a German Officer , which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City as a donation from Alfred Stieglitz , are now considered to be the best of all of his artistic oeuvre. In them he stylizes the fallen friend into a modern martyr with an iconic but abstract composition .

In a letter to the art collector and patron Duncan Phillips (1886–1966), the founder of the Phillips Collection , years later, probably in 1944, Rönnebeck provided information on how to understand the symbols used, such as the Iron Cross and the numbers that were repeatedly used for decoding were and will be. However, more recent research points to the conditional nature of this interpretation and the possibilities of multiple readings with different results. Hartley himself insisted in the text accompanying the exhibition in Galerie 291. 1916 that there was no symbolism or intention in his German paintings and that they were purely pictorial - which has already met with irritation from contemporary critics and in more recent research as a conscious protective claim given the growing anti-German sentiment in the US and the hidden homosexual connotation of the paintings.

On October 7, 1989, 75 years after Freyburg's death, Robert Indiana began working on the first of a total of 18 canvases for his Hartley Elegies . It is titled KvF I and is a hard-edge paraphrase of Hartley's portrait in the Metropolitan Museum.

literature

• Jonathan Weinberg: Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avante-garde. (= Yale publications in the history of art). Yale University Press, New Haven 1993, ISBN 0-300-06254-0 , esp. Pp. 141-162.
• Patricia McDonnell: "Portrait of Berlin": Marsden Hartley and Urban Modernity in Expressionist Berlin. In: Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser: Marsden Hartley. Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2002, ISBN 0-300-09767-0 , pp. 39-68.

Web links

• Portrait of a German Officer , description at the Metropolitan Museum

Individual evidence

1. ^ After Wolf Lüdeke von Weltzien: Families from Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania, genealogies of extinct and living generations. Volume 1 1989, p. 103.
2. ↑ Handbook on the Royal Prussian Court and State for the year 1908. P. 35.
3. ↑ Ranking list of the active service status of the royal Prussian army ... Berlin: Mittler 1913, p. 153.
4. ↑ On Arnold Rönnebeck cf. in the English Wikipedia
5. ↑ Karin von Maur (ed.): Magic of the number in the art of the 20th century . Verlag Gerd Hatje, (on the occasion of the exhibition Magic of Numbers in 20th Century Art in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart from February 1 to May 19, 1997), p. 30.
6. ↑ See in detail Weinberg (lit.), pp. 142ff.
7. ↑ Beth Venn, Adam D. Weinberg, Kennedy Fraser: Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art, 1900–1950: Works from the Whitney Museum of American Art. University of California Press, Berkeley 1999, ISBN 0-520-21887-6 , P. 211.
8. ↑ See Weinberg (Lit.), pp. 147f and Donna Cassidy: Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, And Nation. University Press of New England, Lebanon, NH 2005, ISBN 1-58465-446-5 , p. 229.
9. ↑ It was like a brass band in a small closet. Quoted from Roxana Robinson: Georgia O'Keeffe. A life. Harper & Row, New York 1989, p. 136.
10. ↑ Block 3 Grave 1000, after online grave search by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge , for the cemetery see Neuville-St Vaast German war cemetery in the English language Wikipedia
11. ↑ McDonnell (Lit.), p. 39.
12. ↑ Weinberg (lit.) p. 151, based on a letter from Hartley to Stieglitz, see ibid., Pp. 152–153.
13. ^ So Weinberg (Lit.), p. 152, and Jonathan Weinberg: Marsden Hartley: Writing on Painting. In: Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser: Marsden Hartley. Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2002, ISBN 0-300-09767-0 , pp. 121-137, here p. 130. The Rönnebeck interpretation also contains factual errors such as the assignment of the Bavarian colors to Von Freyburg's (ancestral) home - Apart from the poorly documented ancestor who is said to have come to Mecklenburg from the Black Forest, the post-aristocratic family of Freyburg comes from Northern Germany. However, in 1913 Karl von Freyburg had dealt with the genealogy of his family, as can be seen from an advertisement in the Swiss Archivum Heraldicum : Request for more information about the family of the Bucelini and Kindler v. Knobloch mentioned Nicolaus v. Freiburg, provost of Wislikofen in Thurgau. v. Freyburg, lieutenant in the 4th Guards Regiment on foot, Berlin NW. 52. In: Archivum Heraldicum. 27/28 (1913), pp. 108.165.237
14. ↑ Quoted from Weinberg (Lit.), p. 156.
15. ^ Weinberg (lit.), p. 157.