Heiner Knaub

Heiner Knaub (* 1904 in Eberbach ; † 1975 there ) was a German painter . His work is mainly influenced by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky , whose courses Knaub attended after 1928 at the Bauhaus in Dessau . After the Second World War, in which a large part of his early work was destroyed, Knaub almost ceased to appear publicly as an artist. His work was only rediscovered posthumously . His hometown Eberbach named the hall of the New Kurhaus after him in 1985, and a path in Eberbach now also bears his name.

Life

Knaub came to the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1928 , where he underwent basic artistic training in the form of handicrafts from Josef Albers , abstract form theory and analytical drawing from Wassily Kandinsky , elementary design theory from Paul Klee , life drawing from Oskar Schlemmer and writing from Joost Schmidt , before going through one Went through the main course in construction theory. After completing his diploma in Dessau, Knaub studied another four semesters at the Munich Art Academy , after which he took over the artistic direction of the Drinneberg workshop for glass painting in Mannheim . During the Second World War , almost all of Knaub's early works were destroyed in the air raids on Mannheim. Knaub himself was taken prisoner by the Soviets , after which he returned to his hometown of Eberbach, where he worked as a trade teacher. In the period after the Second World War, he mostly only painted in his private sphere, but took on various commissions in the context of art in building , including murals in the Eberbach hospital, wall decorations in the Eberbach Hohenstaufen high school and facade designs in Oberdielbach, Reisenbach and Neckarelz. A first post-war exhibition of his paintings took place in Eberbach in 1972.

plant

Knaub's work as a painter was only rediscovered posthumously . In 1978 there was a larger exhibition at the United Offset Printing House in Heidelberg-Eppelheim. In 1985 the city of Eberbach organized an extensive retrospective with over 80 works and named the ballroom of the New Kurhaus after the painter Heiner-Knaub-Saal .

Knaub's early work, only fragmentarily preserved, shows the influences of Cubist painting and New Objectivity . The drawings and paintings he made during the Second World War, especially in Romania, document the exceptional situation in which the artist standing in the field found himself. His post-war work makes strong reference to Kandinsky's and Klee's formal language, which was influenced by Constructivism , and which translates the respective object into constructive tensions of line patterns and colored surfaces.

literature

• Egon Haßbecker: Heiner Knaub, a Bauhaus painter from Eberbach , Eberbach 1978
• Reiner Heun: Speech at the opening of the Heiner Knaub exhibition in Eberbach (Ms.), Eberbach 1985
• Barbara Riederer: The Eberbach painter Heiner Knaub (1904–1975) , in: Eberbacher Geschichtsblatt 85 , Eberbach 1986, pp. 157–167.