Kurt Craemer

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Kurt Craemer (born March 2, 1912 in Saarbrücken , † October 1, 1961 in the province of Salerno ) was a German painter , designer and illustrator .

Life

Craemer, whose family moved from Saarbrücken to Düsseldorf in 1919 , was initially a pupil of Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann at the Cologne Werkschule from 1928 , with whom he took a trip to a large Henri Matisse exhibition in Paris. In 1930 Werner Heuser brought the eighteen-year-old to the Düsseldorf Art Academy , where he was a student of Paul Klee until 1933 .

His first trip to Italy was in 1932 and there he found the affinity for the Latin-Italian world, which the diverse works of Craemer attest. Then, when his teacher Paul Klee 1933 the academy, due to the DC circuit by the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts created, had to leave and a rude Verkehrston and NS -Sitten were introduced in the Academy, Craemer went into exile. For most of them there was no freedom without exile and there was no free art under the swastika in Germany; no more free artists were tolerated. Craemer went to Ascona , Siena and Ischia and in 1934 he spent with his friend and teacher Karli Sohn-Rethel in Positano. The visits to Düsseldorf were getting shorter and shorter. A scheduled exhibition in Düsseldorf was banned as unwelcome and degenerate , and the pictures were to be confiscated. Craemer's old father still fought them free.

In 1938 he buried his father in Düsseldorf and immediately returned to Ischia. There he stayed with Karli Sohn-Rethel, Rudolf Levy , Eduard Bargheer , Werner Gilles and Max Peiffer Watenphul in the artists' colony, renting a house with Sohn-Rethel and Vincent Weber , a friend from the "Rhenish Secession", shortly before the outbreak of war in Forio . In 1939 Craemer brought his mother to Italy and lost the last roots to his country of origin. He saw the outbreak of war in 1939 with his son Rethel and Levy on the island of Procida .

In the same year Kurt Craemer fell ill with polio , came to Naples, and was paralyzed up to the waist after a long sick bed. The new beginning at the end of 1939, now sitting in a wheelchair, was to take place in Florence . With his friend Karli, who was twenty years older than him, he moved to the pension of his sister Bandini in the Piazza Santo Spirito , as did Rudolf Levy in 1940. The escape from the war brought him back to Positano, his choice as permanent domicile, and in 1940 moved into a small one Haus an der Marina , Karli follow him in 1941. There he maintained contacts with the German and American artists resident there. a. Irene Kowaliska , Michele Theile , Lisel Oppel , Peter Ruta and the writers Stefan Andres and Armin T. Wegner .

Kurt Craemer, who had been living in Positano since 1934 and now since 1941, had been a young painter who until then had loved to travel. Apart from close friends and direct neighbors, there was only sparse contact in the German language and German picture buyers hardly ever for many years. English, Americans, Australians, South Africans came for this. Limited by the external handicap, he remained connected to the wide world with humor and self-irony, humanity and sociable temperament. There was always wine on the stone table on the terrace, and a wonderful conviviality gathered around Kurt Craemer, the man in a wheelchair who had long since become familiar with all the major languages. He formulated funny, told amusing stories and anecdotes and was the secret focus. At the end of the 1950s it became quieter on the terrace. Friends and neighbors left Positano. Wilhelmine and Arnold Keyserling went to India, the ceramicist Irene Kovaliska and her husband, Armin T. Wegner, moved to Rome. Friends died or had an accident, like Heinrich von Bayern, who had been a friend of Craemer and his mother since 1935, showed up in Positano almost every year. Gustaf Gründgens went to Sorrento , but came to visit or go out together every day. The aged Gilles, marked by near death, visited him a few more times, and Hans Werner Henze, who lived in Naples .

In 1952 and 1958 Craemer took part in the Biennale di Venezia . In 1953, an exhibition initiated by Wolfgang Cordan took place in the Hella Nebelung gallery in Düsseldorf . In the spring of 1961 he had an exhibition in the United States. After his death, an exhibition took place at the Düsseldorf Art Association for Rhineland and Westphalia from February 18 to 24, 1963.

He lived in Positano until his death on October 1st, 1961. He died in a car accident on the Cilento coast between Paestum and Battipaglia in the province of Salerno on the way home from a friend's visit in Buxentum . Of the six injured, Craemer, who was sitting next to an Italian rental chauffeur, was hit hardest. He died on the way to the hospital.

Craemer's work, most of which was produced in Positano in the 1940s and 1950s, represents an important chapter in the history of the art of the province of Salerno. In 2012 the city of Positano celebrated Kurt Craemer, an artist with a love for Positano, with a centenary. who spent most of his life there. In the exhibition “Il Sud Antico di Kurt Craemer”, thirty selected works from the entire period in Positano were donated to the province of Salerno by Craemer's nephew, Cristian Stegen.

literature

  • Kurt Craemer: Mein Panoptikum , afterword by Rudolf Hagelstange, Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg, 1965
  • Kurt Craemer 1912-1961 . Dedicated to memory by his friends with reproduction of his pictures and drawings, Ernst Hauswedell & Co, 1963
  • Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Kurt Craemer (Illustrator), Edgar Johnson (Introduction): The Last Days of Pompeii , Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1979

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Photo from the 1950s: model in pose; the painters Kurt Craemer, Peter Ruta, Karli's son Rethel. On a terrace on via Fornillo
  2. ^ Gallery Hella Knebelung: Chronology of the exhibitions
  3. ^ Positano - My Life , accessed May 16, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Craemer, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, designer and illustrator
DATE OF BIRTH March 2, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Saarbrücken
DATE OF DEATH October 1, 1961
Place of death Salerno Province