Leipzig School (visual arts)
The Leipzig School is a movement of modern painting from the 1970s to 1980s, which was founded and shaped by painters who predominantly lived and worked in Leipzig .
origin
The first origins of the so-called Leipzig School are rooted in the city's art scene in the 1960s. The preparers and teachers are Walter Arnold , Harald Hellmich , Gerhard Kurt Müller , Elisabeth Voigt , Ernst Hassebrauk , Max Schwimmer and Klaus Weber . Hans Mayer-Foreyt , Bernhard Heisig , Wolfgang Mattheuer and Werner Tübke are counted among the founders . All of them studied at the Leipzig Art Academy, today's University of Graphic and Book Art Leipzig (HGB), where they later worked as professors. Their unmistakable, idiosyncratic imagery made Leipzig a center of fine arts that was respected in the GDR and thus laid the foundation for the international reputation of the so-called New Leipzig School since 2004.
stylistics
The term “Leipzig School” does not describe any particular teaching method. On the contrary, the Leipzig School shows a coexistence of innumerable styles. But across styles and generations, it stands for high artistic standards, combined with conscious social analysis, presented with remarkable craftsmanship.
The art historian Lothar Lang differentiates between two main currents: the “expressive-passionate” and the “form-rigorous, precise, sober-factual (sometimes slightly hypothermic) perception of reality”. Bernhard Heisig is considered to be the main representative of the first group, whose works are characterized by passionate color treatment. Lang counts among others Hartwig Ebersbach , Gudrun Brüne , Sighard Gille and Frank Ruddigkeit , as well as the graphic artist Peter Schnürpel . The second, “factual” movement, for which the term “Leipzig School” was originally coined, is very inhomogeneous. While Wolfgang Mattheuer developed dialectical metaphors and allegories in his pictures , stylistically connected with the New Objectivity , but also with the German Romantics , the hallmark of Werner Tübke's work is his artistically highly cultivated painting style, trained on the great painters of the Renaissance . This second group includes painters such as Heinz Zander , Heinz Plank , Volker Stelzmann , Ulrich Hachulla , Arno Rink , Andreas Wachter , Petra Flemming , Erich Kissing and Wolfgang Peuker , but also the “Neo-Romanian urban landscape”, as Lang calls them: Kurt Dornis , Günter Thiele and the surreally alienating romantic Günter Richter .
The former students of Heisig, Mattheuer and Tübke, Sighard Gille and Arno Rink, who were lecturers at the HGB in Leipzig during the GDR, have achieved a new reputation since 2004 with the international success of a number of their students, including Neo Rauch . This new generation was significantly influenced by Gilles and Rink's style. They are subsumed under the term “ New Leipzig School ” and have been the new stars of the art market since their spectacular market successes, for example in New York.
See also
literature
- Catalog of the exhibition “made in Leipzig” April 5 - October 31, 2007 Hartenfels Castle, Torgau / Saxony (D). Curator: Hans-Werner Schmidt
- Claus Baumann, Once upon a time ... On the myth of the Leipzig School . Plöttner Verlag, Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3955371159 .
- Hans-Hendrik Grimmling, The reeducation of birds. A painter's life . mdv, hall 2008.
- Eduard Beaucamp, In the mirror of history. The Leipzig School of Painting . Wallstein, Göttingen 2017.