Kurt Badt

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Kurt Badt at his desk, (reproduction from Martin Gosebruch , Lorenz Dittmann : Argo. Festschrift for Kurt Badt on his 80th birthday , Cologne 1970)

Kurt Badt (born March 3, 1890 in Berlin ; † November 22, 1973 in Überlingen ) was a German art historian . He sparked a lively dispute about basic problems of the understanding of art and the methodology of art historical research, although he was an outsider of the art history academic guild.

Life

Family and education

Kurt Badt was born in Berlin in 1890 as the son of a wealthy banking family. His father Leopold Badt (1858–1929) gave him and his siblings a comprehensive cultural education and gave them every opportunity to deal with art.

Kurt Badt attends the Berlin-Charlottenburg Reform High School. From 1909 to 1914 he studied art history and philosophy in Berlin, Munich and Freiburg, where he received his doctorate from Wilhelm Vöge in 1913 with a dissertation on the Renaissance painter Andrea Solario . In 1914 he took part in the First World War. In 1913 he married Ella Charlotte, b. Wollheim, and had two children with her, Totta (* 1915) and Pia Maria Anna (* 1922).

Private scholar

Since 1924 he has lived permanently as a private scholar in Bodman-Ludwigshafen on Lake Constance and, as an artist and private scholar, dedicates himself primarily to the philosophy (including aesthetics ) of Hegel , Diltheys , Heidegger and Wittgenstein , with whom he was friends. In 1932, Badt acquired a fruit farm in Rompertsweiler near Salem , which he ran with his wife. When he moved to Munich in 1933, the couple had separated.

emigration

With the rise of the Nazi regime, Kurt Badt moved to Munich in 1937 in order to avoid the persecution of the Jews there in the anonymity . Although he is a Roman Catholic , he finally had to leave Germany when the Second World War broke out due to his Jewish roots and emigrated to London in 1939 , where he continued to work without a permanent position, mainly at the Warburg Institute , and collected the material for the publications that he made on his return will bring out in quick succession. In 1958 he married the sister of the art psychologist and film theorist Rudolf Arnheim , Helen ("Leni") Arnheim (1906–1973).

Return to Überlingen

In 1952 Badt returned to Lake Constance , to Überlingen . However , the restorative science system of the 1950s does not enable those who have not qualified as a university professor to become active at universities; meanwhile he is a member of the artists' association Der Kreis .

rehabilitation

It was not until 1968 that the literary scholars around Hans Robert Jauss invited him to the newly founded University of Konstanz to give guest lectures. Although his conception of art is in a challenging contrast to the research into effects ( reception aesthetics ) carried out there, the 80-year-old received an honorary professorship in 1970 . In 1973 Kurt Badt and his second wife committed suicide at the age of 83.

Act

Since Badt initially also worked as a painter and sculptor , he also concentrated in his art studies on the individual artist and his specific relationship to the world, which is visible in his works. Badt is mainly concerned with color , its meaning in terms of content and the specific appearance of rooms. It deals with Italian (e.g. Andrea Solario , Paolo Veronese ), contemporary (including Wilhelm Lehmbruck ), but also French art, e.g. B. Nicolas Poussin , Eugène Delacroix , Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh . He also works intensively with Jan Vermeer and John Constable . Badt hardly finds a relationship with contemporary art.

His main concern is to determine what is special about the artistic appropriation of reality and to accentuate it as irreplaceable in opposition to rational behavior. He also turns against the subordination of art research to the general history and cultural studies.

It was important to Badt to highlight the specifically artistic, i.e. fundamental knowledge about art: These are not time-bound, more effective values ​​that appear when looking at the things themselves in the works of art: “The work of art throws out the luminous glow of its truth from itself. It touches me, illuminates me ... Nobody who has not yet experienced this appearance, this enlightenment, can ever begin with an interpretation of a work of art. ”This already suggests that only the great masterpieces for Badt are art-scientific Were worth employment. He sees the work of art as a coherent whole made up of parts graded in terms of value and thus turns against the delimitation of artistic structures in contemporary art movements. According to Badt, the work of art brings a humanistic ethos to the fore through the choice and treatment of what is represented. ("Art celebrates its object by praising it"). In doing so, however, he blocks access to discursively questioning or even critical design methods.

For Badt, the only reason that legitimizes efforts in art history is the understanding of works of art. In order to arrive at this understanding, however, he rejects any categorization according to style history, schools or the like and denies the legalities of art history. He also negates the work of art's references to its temporal and local origin in favor of a supra-historical archetype of all really great works of art.

In Badt's conception of art, the true understanding of art is only granted to a select minority who have the ability to divine . This pareligious glorification of the professor as a magician, who alone can give the correct interpretation, was unacceptable for all art historians who wanted to explore art history in an authoritarian and dialogical discourse . Badt's position and some of his works had a great influence on the art historians Gertrude Berthold , Martin Gosebruch , Max Imdahl and the Sedlmayr student Lorenz Dittmann , who also published two of his publications: attempts at art theory (1968) and Paolo Veronese (1981).

plant

During his lifetime

Posthumously

literature

  • Heike Frommer (Ed.): The true beauty of things. A life for art. Cultural Office Bodenseekreis, 2013

photos

  • o. J., o. T. (Kurt Badt's red house near Bodman )
  • 1925, undated (Ludwigshafen, See-Ende)
  • 1930, Kurt Badt, self-portrait , oil on canvas, Bodenseekreis collection

Quotes

Rudolf Arnheim about his brother-in-law Kurt Badt: “My eldest sister, Leni, married the German artist and art historian Kurt Badt, who had a decisive influence on my entire professional life. Even as a child he showed me works of art - his father owned Cézanne watercolors, a Delacroix magdalena and a Lehmbruck female torso - took me (with) to the museum and taught me the basic concepts of art that have never left me. He also played the piano very well, and we did chamber music together for a while. At the time of exile , he and my sister lived in London, where I was for about two years. We saw each other there a lot, and together we translated Dante's Purgatory into German prose . "

"... there is no work by Badt that does not bear the stamp of the most personal and unmistakable peculiarity ... He himself called loneliness as the 'condition for the development of spirit and soul'."

“ Basic research is one of the most urgent tasks of any science because it promotes it and at the same time goes beyond it. For research into the foundations of a science cannot be limited to asking whether the methods used in it are sufficient and sufficiently well founded; it is always also a test of the inquiring conscience, a moral concern in which the question is asked whether the conscience can still represent that further research is carried out, as has happened so far. "

"The fulfillment of being explains the tendency of art to myth and legend and its 'full identity' which dissolves history ..."

"That which is essentially for itself alone (the work of art in its isolation), that which is incoherent creates the connection, therefore the connection has the character of a leap!"

Exhibitions

  • April / July 2013, Rotes Haus - Bodenseekreis Gallery, Meersburg : The true beauty of things - Kurt Badt.

literature

  • Herbert von Eine : Obituary Kurt Badt. In: Kunstchronik 27 , 1974
  • Martin Gosebruch (Ed.): Festschrift Kurt Badt for the seventieth birthday. Contributions from art and intellectual history , Berlin 1961
    • Argo. Festschrift for Kurt Badt on his 80th birthday on March 3, 1970 , Cologne 1970
  • Metzler-Kunsthistoriker-Lexikon : 210 portraits of German-speaking authors from four centuries . Stuttgart 2007
  • Ulrike Wendland: Biographical handbook of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism. Part 1: A – K. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 21-24
  • Otto Karl Werckmeister : Review “A science of art history”. In: Kunstchronik 26 , 1973

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Badt, Kurt Ludwig. In: leo-bw.org. Baden-Württemberg State Archive, accessed on August 25, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Florian Weiland: A life for art. In: Südkurier , April 25, 2013
  3. ^ Exhibition in the Bodenseekreis gallery: "Kurt Badt - A life for art: The true beauty of things". Retrieved June 20, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Badt, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German art historian
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1973
Place of death Überlingen