Karli Sohn-Rethel

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Karli Sohn-Rethel portrayed by Werner Heuser , 1903
Karli Sohn-Rethel, fisherman with boat, around 1935
Art for everyone 1918/1919

Karli (Carl Ernst) Sohn-Rethel (born May 8, 1882 in Düsseldorf ; † April 7, 1966 there ) was a German painter of classical modernism .

Life

Sohn-Rethel was born as the third child of the portrait painter Carl Rudolf Sohn (1845–1908) and his wife, the artist Else Sohn-Rethel (1853–1933). His mother was the daughter of the painter Alfred Rethel (1816-1859). His older brothers were the painters Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1875–1958), father of the philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899–1990), and Otto Sohn-Rethel (1877–1948). His younger sister Mira (1884–1974) was married to the painter Werner Heuser (1880–1964).

Growing up in the Sohn-Rethel family of artists , Karli Sohn-Rethel decided to become a painter at the age of five. Due to the artistic talents of the older brothers, the father, Carl Rudolf Sohn, thought it necessary to employ Hugo Zieger as a drawing teacher. Karli took part in these lessons, which took place twice a week, at the age of three.

In April 1888 Karli started school in the lowest class of the pre-school of the Realgymnasium , today's Humboldt-Gymnasium Düsseldorf . He studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy , where he took exams in anatomy and perspective in 1903 . At Easter 1903 he went to the Royal Art Academy in Dresden . He was first in Carl Bantzer's painting room and from 1904 in Gotthardt Kuehl's studio . Karli spent the summer months 1903–1905 with Carl Bantzer in the Willingshausen painters' colony . He and his brother Otto had put together a collection of Japanese woodcuts for study purposes , which was exhibited in Constance in the summer of 1906 in the great hall of the council building . Here he met Frido Witte .

After completing his training, he went to Rome in 1906 , where he had a studio in the Villa Strohl-Fern and his brother Otto was waiting for him. The artists Werner Heuser , his brother-in-law, Karl Hofer , Hermann Haller and Maurice Sterne , a Baltic-American painter and sculptor whom he had met in Berlin around 1909, were among his friends in Rome. His stay in Rome lasted until 1912. In 1911 Karli Sohn-Rethel joined the Sonderbund in Düsseldorf and was represented in 1912 with the picture Italian Landscape at the international art exhibition of the Sonderbund of West German art lovers and artists in Cologne. In 1913 the Alfred Flechtheim gallery in Düsseldorf took over his artistic supervision.

During this time there was a trip from Rome to Tunis , a short stay in Düsseldorf, and from October 1912 to May 1914 Karli accompanied his friend Maurice Sterne on a long trip to Asia. This led via India with a longer stay in Benares , to Mandalay in Burma and Java , to Bali , where the two lived and painted from 1913 to 1914.

Back in Europe, he spent the First World War 1914–1918 in Munich . He became friends with the sculptor Fritz Claus (1885–1956), who made a stone bust of him. As a member of the Free Association of Düsseldorf Artists , he took part in the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. He was named as a member of the Free Secession in Berlin.

In 1919 Karli Sohn-Rethel was one of the members of the Young Rhineland , the modern artists' association founded on February 24, 1919 in Düsseldorf. He made frequent trips for studies and painting: in 1920 he stayed in the artists' village of Anticoli ; In 1921 and 1922 he painted in Positano and again in Anticoli in 1924. A trip to Tripoli followed in 1925, and another through Tunisia in 1927 .

In 1928 he became a member of the Rhenish Secession, in which he worked as an assessor and in the hanging committee from 1930. He traveled to Provence and Paris , where he was a frequent guest at the Café du Dôme . In 1929 he wandered through Abruzzo . In 1931 he met Paul Klee on the occasion of the exhibition at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf. This exhibition took place in conjunction with the Alfred Flechtheim Gallery.

The beginning of Nazi rule meant the end of his artistic career in Germany; Sohn-Rethel emigrated to Italy . In 1934 he spent with his friend and student Kurt Craemer in Positano. In 1938 Karli stayed with Kurt Craemer (1912–1961), Rudolf Levy , Eduard Bargheer , Werner Gilles and Max Peiffer Watenphul in the artists' colony on Ischia . Shortly before the outbreak of war, he rented with Craemer and Vincent Weber , a friend from the "Rhenish Secession" , a house in Forio . He saw the outbreak of war in 1939 with Kurt Craemer and Rudolf Levy on the island of Procida . At the end of 1939 Karli and his friend Kurt Craemer, who was twenty years his junior, went to Florence , where they lived in the guest house of their sister Bandini in Piazza Santo Spirito , as did Rudolf Levy in 1940.

Kurt Craemer fell ill with polio and was paralyzed from the waist down. He chose Positano as his permanent home. Karli followed him in 1941 and moved into a small house on the Marina not far from Craemer , where he lived until he returned to Düsseldorf. There he maintained contacts with the resident German and American artists u. a. with Irene Kowaliska , Michele Theile , Lisel Oppel , Peter Ruta and the writers Stefan Andres and Armin T. Wegner .

The time after the Second World War was a time of material deprivation for everyone, including those who had fled to Positano. Karli Sohn-Rethel parted with some inherited or acquired pieces from his collection. Obtaining painting supplies was difficult. He often painted on wrapping paper and used both sides to be thrifty. He received paints as gifts from painters when they left Positano, or he used paint . In 1947 he visited Marfried Hettner (1907–1985), the divorced wife of Roland Hettner , the son of his uncle Otto Hettner , on Ischia and celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday there. His friends and family supported him. Maurice Sterne first sent him and Kurt Craemer food parcels, then paints and from 1948 a few dollars a month from New York . In return, Sohn-Rethel sent fifteen sheets of drawings, which, however, could only be sold at low prices. Walther Benser , the husband of his niece Ursula Benser , brought him an heirloom that he could sell. Karli Sohn-Rethel, slowly becoming deaf himself, was worried about his brother Otto in Anacapri, who had a heart condition, and visited him several times before his death in 1949.

In 1959 Karli Sohn-Rethel returned to Düsseldorf due to old age illnesses, where he died in 1966.

plant

Karli Sohn-Rethel, Benares, 1913

In his early works, Sohn-Rethel was inspired by Cezanne and Matisse , but then found his own expressionist style of painting, which in his landscape studies was also strongly dominated by the abstract human figure. "He is characterized by a preference for back figures [...] They usually squat, individually or in groups [...] The trimmed figures that always turn towards the center of the picture in multi-figure compositions are also typical for him." In doing so, he dispenses with individualizations, including typifications of the people shown, the faces are often abstract ovals. During his most important creative period, the time in Positano, local scenes (fishermen on the beach, groups of locals, almost always men) are his main subjects.

Museums with works by Sohn-Rethel

Exhibitions (selection)

Exhibition catalogs (selection)

  • 1948: Art collections of the city of Düsseldorf
  • 1953: Big 1953 Christmas exhibition of the visual artists of Rhineland Westphalia
  • 1956: Winter exhibition 1956 of the visual artists of Rhineland Westphalia
  • 1959: Winter exhibition 1959 of the visual artists of Rhineland and Westphalia in the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf Ehrenhof
  • 1960: 10th winter exhibition of the visual artists of Rhineland and Westphalia in the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf Ehrenhof
  • 1961: Great Düsseldorf art exhibition 1961
  • 1961: XI. Winter exhibition of the visual artists of Rhineland and Westphalia in the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf Ehrenhof
  • 1988: Sinclair house, Bad Homburg, Karli Sohn-Rethel. 1882-1966. Paintings - gouaches - drawings , Marzik, Iris & Maria Busch-Müller, publisher: Altans Industrie-Aktien und Anlagen AG

literature

  • Kurt Craemer: My Panopticon . Edited by Rudolf Hagelstange , Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1965, 121ff.
  • Karli Sohn-Rethel 1882–1966. Paintings, gouaches, drawings . Sinclair House, Bad Homburg 1988
  • Klaus Voigt: Refuge on Revocation. Exile in Italy 1933-1945 . Stuttgart, 1989, Vol. I, pp. 456, 459, 594; Vol. II, pp. 452, 457, 463ff
  • Dieter Richter , Matilde Romito, Michail Talalay: In fuga dalla storia. Esuli dai totalitarismi del Novecento sulla Costa d'Amalfi . Salerno. 2005, p. 102f
  • Matilde Romito: La pittura di Positano nel'900 . Salerno, 2011, p. 46ff

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Exhibition catalog Galerie Flechtheim, "Werner Heuser", Düsseldorf from January 25 to February 14, 1920, page 2.
  2. ^ Catalog of the exhibition of the Sonderbund of West German Art Friends and Artists , Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 1911, mentioning Karli Sohn-Rethel.
  3. ^ Fritz Claus, portrait bust made of stone by Karli Sohn-Rethel, 1918 ( Memento from January 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ List of artists who took part in the exhibitions of the Young Rhineland, the Rhine Group and the Rhenish Secession between 1919 and 1933
  5. ^ Exhibition catalog "Rheinische Sezession", Kunsthalle Düsseldorf from May 4 to June 30, 1929; Exhibition catalog "Rheinische Sezession", Kunsthalle Düsseldorf from May to June 1930
  6. ↑ Paul Klee: Letter to his wife Lily of November 21, 1931 , Letters to the Family, 1893–1940, ed. by Felix Klee, 2 vol., Cologne 1979, vol. 2, page 1166
  7. ^ German painter in exile
  8. ↑ Photo from the 1950s: model in pose ; the painters Kurt Craemer, Peter Ruta, Karli's son Rethel
  9. ↑ Iris Marzik: An introduction to the life and work of Karli Sohn-Rethel . In: Karli Sohn-Rethel 1882–1966. Paintings, gouaches, drawings. Sinclair-Haus, Bad Homburg 1988, p. 22
  10. ↑ International art exhibition of the Sonderbund Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler zu Cöln, 1912
  11. ^ Art for everyone: painting, sculpture, graphics, architecture, Issue 34, 1918–1919 https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kfa1918_1919/0071
  12. ^ Evaluation of a unique collection of exhibition catalogs from 1925 to 1970 with more than 13,000 artist names. Archived copy ( memento of the original dated February 22, 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / kultur.t-online.de
personal data
SURNAME Son-Rethel, Karli
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sohn-Rethel, Carl Ernst (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH May 8, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1966
Place of death Dusseldorf