Landscapes with a red jacket
A large group of images in the painterly work of the humorous draftsman and poet Wilhelm Busch is referred to as landscapes with a red jacket or just a red jacket . Among the nearly 1,000 paintings and sketches, there are around 280 depicting people dressed in red jackets. It is named after a figure, usually seen from behind, dressed in muted colors but wearing a bright red jacket. Wilhelm Busch, who doubted his painting abilities for a lifetime and usually neither dated nor signed his pictures, very rarely gave his pictures titles. The titles that art historians have given the pictures often take up this jacket and have given pictures to Busch's titles such as red jacket under beech , red jacket in the door to the courtyard , red jacket with a cow in a rising landscape or red jacket on a meadow by a pond .
background
Wilhelm Busch's pictorial work often shows peasant people doing everyday activities. The everyday clothing of these people was mostly tailored from woven woolen cloth. The typical colors were blue or green. The male festive attire was not a colored costume, but usually a black suit. The red jacket, which appears so consistently in Wilhelm Busch's work, is therefore associated with a particularly formative experience that Busch had during his studies in Antwerp. Wilhelm Busch fell seriously ill with typhus there . During this life-threatening illness, he found self-sacrificing carers in his landlords, the artisan couple Jean Baptiste and Maria Timmermans. Halfway recovered, Wilhelm Busch decided to return to his parents' house in Wiedensahl . His hosts, who were by no means well off financially, gave him a warm red jacket and three oranges as a goodbye.
The repeated appearance of the red jacket in Wilhelm Busch's pictorial work therefore seems to result from a borderline experience, similar to that of Joseph Beuys . Beuys argued his lifelong struggles with fat and felt as the materials of his art with his shooting down as a fighter pilot over the Crimea in 1944. The seriously injured man was rescued by Tatars who rubbed him with fat and wrapped him in felt. Unlike Beuys, however, Wilhelm Busch said very little about his work and the motifs in his painting, so that the connection between the red jacket and Wilhelm Busch's severe typhoid disease must remain a guess. It is also conceivable that the red jacket appears in the pictures for purely formal reasons, as an accentuated complementary contrast within the pictures, which are mainly in shades of green.
supporting documents
literature
- Michaela Diers: Wilhelm Busch, life and work. dtv 2008, ISBN 978-3-423-34452-4
- Joseph Kraus: Wilhelm Busch. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1970 (16th edition 9/2004), ISBN 3-499-50163-5
- Gudrun Schury: I wish I were an Eskimo. The life of Wilhelm Busch. Biography . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-351-02653-0
- Gert Ueding : Wilhelm Busch. The 19th century in miniature. Insel, Frankfurt / M. 1977 (new edition 2007).
- Eva Weissweiler: Wilhelm Busch. The laughing pessimist. A biography . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-462-03930-6