Margarete Depner
Margarete Depner , b. Margarete Scherg (* March 22, 1885 in Kronstadt ; † September 2, 1970 ibid) was a Transylvanian-Saxon sculptor , painter, draftsman and art collector as well as a patron, initially of Hungarian and then Romanian citizenship.
life and work
origin
Margarete Depner was born as a German-speaking Transylvanian Saxon on March 22, 1885 in Kronstadt in the part of the Habsburg Monarchy that was then part of Hungary , a multi-ethnic and multi-religious area. She was the eldest daughter of Wilhelm and Julie Scherg, nee Stenner. Together with her sister Marie (1890–1980) and brother Wilhelm (1888–1961) she grew up in a wealthy family. The father had taken over his parents' cloth business and transformed the company into the most important textile company in Transylvania and the second largest factory in Romania in the interwar period of the 20th century . At that time, the number of employees fluctuated between 1,400 and 1,900 people.
In 1907 Margarete Scherg married Wilhelm Depner. He had studied medicine in Vienna and was active as a regional politician in the 20s and 30s. Depner ran a successful private clinic for surgery, orthopedics and gynecology and built one of the first X-ray clinics in the country. In 1911 their daughter Thea was born, in 1914 just before the First World War their daughter Maja, and in 1919 after the end of the war their son Wilhelm was born. All three children received a good education. Thea studied medicine and continued his legacy as chief physician in her father's hospital during the communist era. Maja became a historian in Kronstadt and Wilhelm became an engineer. With the end of the war, the Habsburg monarchy fell apart. New borders were drawn in Europe - including in Southeastern Europe. Transylvania was separated from Austria immediately after the peace treaty in 1918, and from 1920 onwards it finally belonged to the Kingdom of Romania .
Margarete Depner perfected her artistic knowledge in the inter-war period through self-taught studies and emerged through her socio-political engagement. As head of the Evangelical Orphan and Child Protection Association and as the founder of a day care center for children, her activities became part of Kronstadt life. It was the first institution of its kind in Romania where the children - similar to an all-day school with afternoon care - received special support after class under the supervision of teaching staff. Also several children in need were always fed at the family lunch menu of the Depners.
In addition to her socio-political commitment and her patronage function, which is unique in the Transylvanian context , Margarete Depner developed into a recognized painter and sculptor in the interwar period. Her artistic breakthrough came in 1933 with an overview of her work in Kronstadt. While she became an integral part of the Transylvanian art scene and distinguished herself primarily as an independent sculptor, from 1933 onwards Hitler's rise in Germany also resulted in a shift in political power in Transylvania. While a large part of the German-speaking minority saw new hope in National Socialism and a “ return to the Reich ”, another part was convinced of the need for independence for Romanian Germans. In art, it came in a formal organization to DC circuit . Some artists, including Margarete Depner, also managed to maintain their independence in terms of content.
When the first comprehensive exhibition of German artists in Romania was presented in Kronstadt in 1937, this was noticed: “What is striking is the confusing variety of styles, sharp contrasts in intellectual attitude and expression.” The large participation of women in the was also striking Art , a third of Saxon artists were female. Margarete Depner's works were acknowledged as having: “a very rare nervousness and the highest personal culture.” This “personal culture” will be the basis for the fact that Nazi ideology can hardly influence them.
After the Second World War , social conditions changed fundamentally in Romania. In 1948 there were general expropriations of property and means of production . This affected the Scherg cloth factory as well as the Depner sanatorium. While the German-speaking Transylvanians were privileged during National Socialism, the German-speaking population was now classified as “fascist” and was subjected to repression. Wilhelm Depner was also arrested three times in the post-war period. However, he enjoyed a good reputation with the Soviet military authorities, as he was known as an anti-Hitlerist from 1933 onwards through his political activities. Many Transylvanian Germans were forcibly evacuated from Kronstadt. The Depner family decided to stay despite the adverse circumstances.
Margarete Depner managed to be recognized as an artist in the People's Republic of Romania . So, even though her house was expropriated, she was able to keep her own room and another as a studio. If she wanted to work as an artist, she had to join the union. When she applied for membership in the artists' association in 1951, she was granted this for the sculpture department . Now, in the communist era , the woman over sixty received a publicly recognized status for the first time in her life. It was only when she was retired that she had received a professional title for her lifelong calling. Although she saw art as a help against the difficulties in everyday life and ensured her psychological survival, she had lost the ease in her work.
She died on September 2, 1970 and was buried in the Kronstadt cemetery at the side of her husband under the sculpture she had created, the Crouching.
The patroness
The almost exclusively Protestant society of the Transylvanian Saxons was shaped more by Spartan puritanism than by generous art funding. Margarete Depner was an exception in this regard, both as a person and as a woman. Because of her origins she had economic potency, because of her studies she had good taste, as well as the right contacts and, first and foremost, funding ambitions. While it was rather undemanding in everyday life, it was downright lavish in relation to art. Over the years she had collected over a hundred pictures of her Transylvanian colleagues. But international works by well-known artists such as Käthe Kollwitz , Lovis Corinth , Richard Boege and Ernst Barlach were also part of their collection.
She owned not just one work by some artists, but many. A list shows five pictures by Arthur Coulin , twenty-three pictures by Friedrich Miess and fourteen works by Fritz Kimm . He had also received some commissioned work from the Scherg and Depner families. He portrayed the parents, Wilhelm and Juliane Scherg, the husband Wilhelm Depner in the operating room, the children Thea, Maja, Wilhelm and even his colleague Margarete Depner drawing. After her death in 1971, the oil painting by Wilhelm Scherg was sold to the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu / Hermannstadt. This owes this to the private collection of Margarete Depner's two oil works by Fritz Kimm. Friedrich Miess's pictures also found their way into the Brukenthal Museum. In the same way, at least two important works by Grete Csaki-Copy came into public possession. The painter, born in Kronstadt, left Transylvania with her husband and children in 1934 in favor of Stuttgart, from where she made a career through Berlin. In her home country, “The Roofs in the Snow”, in Hermannstadt / Sibiu, thanks to Margarete Depner's commitment to collecting, are now a central part of the permanent exhibition in the Brukenthal Museum. "The roofs in the snow" were together with eight other pictures in Margarete Depner's estate.
Even Hans Eder was supported by contracts. He painted Depner in the operating room and his sister-in-law Marie Depner with her knitted stocking. This portrait was sold to the Brukenthal Museum by Margarete Depner's daughter, Maja Philippi, in 1971. In the same way, his “Bosporus Landscape” came into museum possession. Margarete Depner owned at least nine pictures by Hans Eder in her private collection for the planned museum project. His "Wedding from the Canaan" was given as a present in 1983, on the 110th birthday of Wilhelm Depner, by the responsible heirs of the Black Church in Kronstadt. Through the generous gesture of the heirs, it can be viewed in public in the east of the north aisle, as it were as a silent legacy from Margarete Depner to those who were born later. Her previously underestimated, pioneering role as a patron is particularly underlined by the dedication by the Kronstadt composer Paul Richter . He provided the string quartet No. 2 in D minor with the following words: “Admirably dedicated to the artist and patron of the arts, Ms. Margarethe Depner, by the composer. Sibiu February 1, 1937. "
Her vision was to present her private art collection to the public in her own museum. This idea could not be realized in post-war Romania due to a lack of financial resources and the expropriation of her house, which she had to share with numerous flatmates.
Artistic career
The Transylvania region was directly connected to the pan-European art development until the time of National Socialism . The European trends were followed and reflected here and developed into independent art forms. However, educational opportunities for girls in Transylvania were extremely limited. Depner attended a girls' boarding school in Weimar between 1901 and 1902 . She soon began to draw and was even able to get her own training with Wilhelm Jordan in Berlin , the most important metropolis for contemporary art, in 1905 . The stay also seems to have been connected to the personal acquaintance of Käthe Kollwitz, whom she admired, whose biographical and artistic similarities are evident in her early works, charcoal drawings and lithographs .
As a result, she found her private tutors in Kronstadt, among others with Ernst Kühlbrandt (1857–1933). Most of the Transylvanian artists had passed through his docile hands. His drawing lessons were based on an exact study of nature. Arthur Coulin (1869–1912), who had received his stylistic training in Graz, Munich, Vienna and Rome and who was groundbreaking for modern painting in Transylvania through both his pictures and his published art historical considerations, also influenced her in her early years. Friendly advice also came from Friedrich Miess, Fritz Kimm and Hans Eder.
During the First World War , the family fled to Budapest . There Dengler succeeded in taking numerous drawing courses with István Réti (1872–1945). For the artist, this meant a surge in professionalism. Réti had studied in Munich, Paris and Turin and was one of the most important artists in Hungary. He was also a co-founder of the Nagybánya / Baia Mare artists ' colony, which was established in 1896 . Depner's first exhibition took place there in 1916, at which one of her oil paintings was awarded a prize.
After the First World War, the preoccupation with socially committed issues and the war-related experiences clearly emerged in her work. Margarete Depner had repeatedly cared for the wounded in her husband's hospital and placed her observations at the center of her work. The poor widow , mother and orphan and the orphans were obviously harrowing subjects of a time of crisis and an artist who was watching. How important these pacifist works were to her is also shown by the fact that they were reproduced as lithographs on postcards. She also worked on the subject of the orphans again in oil. In 1919 she published her work, such as that of a wounded man with head bandages - the stone drawing and that of the betrayed in a lithograph - in 1920 - both in the art magazine Das neue Ziel . This time of creation makes it clear that the ascribed similarity of some of her graphics to those by Käthe Kollwitz can hardly be coincidental.
Margarete Depner made the decision to paint in oil when she was almost forty . Here she set her new focus in the 1920s. Between 1925 and 1927 she took painting lessons in private art schools in Munich and in 1929 in Berlin. In 1930 a show should provide a general overview of the artistic scene in Kronstadt. Margarete Depner participated with numerous works of different genres. In addition to the two-dimensional work of graphics and painting, three-dimensional sculpture appeared in the mid to late twenties. In this genre, she becomes a pioneer in Transylvania, to whom the region owes the revival of plastic. Her new occupation with sculpture brought her to Germany in 1931 for more detailed study purposes. Her goal was the sculptor Josef Thorak from Vienna, who made a special career under the National Socialists with his monumental design. The stay in his studio was short-lived because she did not appreciate the gigantomania of her male colleague. In 1934 she received her last professional training in Marcel Gimond's private school in Paris.
Margarete Depner increasingly positioned herself as a sculptor in the 1930s and participated in numerous exhibitions. However, she was always represented with a selection of her works of the other two genres, graphics and oil painting - both at exhibitions in Kronstadt and at the annual spring and autumn presentations in Bucharest. In the twenties and thirties, most of her graphics and oil works and the most important sculptures were created.
It was not only a productive artistically, but also a successful one professionally, which brought her breakthrough to the public through numerous exhibitions. The first high point of their work culminated in the big presentation in 1933. Together with the sculptor Hans Guggenberger and the craftsman Rieke Morres , their work was presented to the public in Kronstadt in December of that year. Depner was represented with a cross-section of all of her previous work. Twelve sculptures and forty pictures showed her as a diverse artist. Her show included works from the past ten years. According to her colleague Friedrich Miess, it was the most beautiful show that Kronstadt had ever seen. Margarete Depner's central sculptures were the sinking , the mourning and the crouching , life-size female marble statues. The latter were grave figures in Sibiu and Kronstadt. As far as is known, Margarete Depner was the first to create a life-size sculpture in Transylvania.
This exhibition marked her artistic breakthrough and showed her as a representative of portrait art. She maintains the balance between form and character, as she demands of herself - the artist - as she says, the freedom to explore the film of universal legality in the image.
Romania entered the war on the side of the German Reich in 1941 . The Transylvanian minority should regain majority consciousness through the mental integration into the German Reich and present themselves on the basis of their artists at a propaganda show in National Socialist Germany. As early as 1942, 120 works by 23 painters, graphic artists and sculptors from the German-speaking settlement areas of Romania were shown in Berlin. In 1944 a second major traveling exhibition of German artists from Romania took place, at which even 28 artists, over a quarter of whom were women, were represented with over 300 works. The Künstlerhaus in Vienna acted as the first stop of the traveling exhibition.
Depner was represented with five sculptures, four of which had no explicit National Socialist connotations, such as the sinking woman and the male head . With the girl's hair tied up, the sculpture Saxon Peasant Girl could easily be used in the sense of a National Socialist women's ideology. The press, which was brought into line, primarily highlighted the works of Depner positively in the reviews, and so one read of the "special position of the wonderful sculptures whose inspired human design, virtuoso mastery of the technical and characterful work-through are impressed on the memory."
The exhibition was planned as a sales show. In a short time, four fifths of the works had found their new owners. The sinking woman also impressed the mayor of Stuttgart, who decided to purchase her for the “City of Germans Abroad”. For a long time after the Second World War, the sculpture was installed in the Institute for Foreign Relations in Stuttgart. It is now on permanent loan from the Gallery of the City of Stuttgart in the Transylvania Institute in Gundelsheim. Much of the work did not reach its destination in Berlin as a result of the bombing and was lost. For Depner this meant the loss of some of her most important works.
After the Second World War, it was forgotten in terms of art history. The way to international exhibitions was also blocked by the " iron curtain ".
However, art served her as a lifeline and helped her create strategies of psychological survival. Margarete Depner continued to work in spite of the limited space. It was difficult for the German minority to assert themselves in Romania's art scene. The art shows, which are regularly organized twice a year in Bucharest, were attended by the latter, but their works received little attention there.
Graphics and oil painting had now resigned in Depner's work in favor of sculpture. Undeterred by the external style specifications of Socialist Realism , she kept her handwriting and only realized her own artistic ideas until her death in 1970. Her artistic activity helped her over physical and mental weaknesses. In 1968 she noted: "The thought of a more comprehensive special exhibition in my hometown gives me a little courage to work and would be my wish, but not my hope."
After her death, her artistic legacy remained hidden in the attic for more than 30 years until it came to light again by chance. A monograph was published in Vienna about her work in 2011 and its significance in the international context of classical modernism was described.
meaning
Margarete Depner was not only an artist, she was also a socially committed benefactor, art collector and patron. As a woman, she broke through the role framework assigned to her and made a name for herself as an artist. Nevertheless, it has so far not been able to achieve an international position within art history, primarily due to the political framework conditions in its sphere of activity. In Nazi Germany, especially in 1944, when she took part in an extensive work and sales exhibition, she received recognition from the public opinion that was brought into line. Forgotten in the history of art, it was only the rediscovery and processing of her artistic legacy in 2011 that made it possible to properly classify it in modern art.
She was born an Austrian in Kronstadt in 1885 and died there in 1970 as a Romanian citizen. Her life reflects the radical political cuts that her place of birth, place of work and death - Kronstadt - experienced between the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Monarchy over two world wars to Romanian communism. The so-called classical modernism finds a special expression in Transylvania due to the multi-ethnic milieu and is characterized by stylistic pluralism . Both during the historical affiliation to the Habsburg Monarchy and later as part of Romania, first Hermannstadt / Sibiu and then Kronstadt / Braşov were important art centers in Transylvania. Here the European trends were followed and reflected upon and developed into their own art forms.
However, many of the artists in Transylvania left the area to gain fame abroad. Margarete Depner was one of the very few who worked in Kronstadt until her death in 1970, which made her one of the “missing” in art history. She developed her own style throughout her life, although she dealt with the styles of the turn of the century and the trends of the interwar period, but did not want to be clearly assigned to any of the distinct forms of design.
According to the Hermannstadt art historian Gudrun Liane Ittu (2011), Margarete Depner was “an extremely multifaceted artist. As a graphic artist, painter and sculptor, she is one of the most important representatives of classic modern Transylvania. "In the European context, the Viennese art historian Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber (2011) comments:" The result was an extremely differentiated and appealing expressive realism within the Transylvanian realism Art reached an extraordinary level and in Central Europe a high, qualitative level. "
Apart from the still lifes and landscape paintings, her visible life's work consists primarily of portraits or busts and sculptures of men, women and children. Coming from graphics, she later focused on oil painting and then on sculpture.
literature
- Fischer, Lisa: Rediscovered: Margarete Depner (1885–1970) Master of the portrait of Transylvanian Classical Modernism . Vienna 2011, pp. 9–74, ISBN 978-3-205-78618-4 .
- Ittu, Gudrun Liane: Margarete Depner (1885–1970) - a portrait artist par excellence. In: Rediscovered Margarete Depner (1885–1970) Master of the Portrait of Transylvanian Classic Modernism, Vienna 2011, pp. 75–104. ISBN 978-3-205-78618-4 .
- Plakolm-Forsthuber, Sabine: Margarete Depner - A rediscovered modern painter. In: Rediscovered Margarete Depner (1885–1970) Master of the Portrait of Transylvanian Classical Modernism, Vienna 2011, pp. 105–131, ISBN 978-3-205-78618-4 .
- Udrescu, Doina: German art from Transylvania in the collections of the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu (1800–1959), Hermannstadt 2003, ISBN 973-0-029008 .
- Philippi, Maja: 200 years of the Scherg family in Kronstadt. From the wool puller Michael Schürge to the cloth factory Wilhelm Scherg. In: Transylvanian Archives, Transylvanian Families in Social Change, ed. von Balduin Herter, Vienna 1993, pp. 5–152.
- Myss, Walter: Art in Siebenbürgen, Thaur near Innsbruck 1991, ISBN 3-85373-127-9 .
- Richter, O .: Thoughts on the 100th birthday of Margarete Depner, in: Südostdeutsche Vierteljahresblätter, 34th vol. 3, Munich 1985.
- Wittstock-Reich, Rohtraut: Sublime beauty in representational form. The sculptor Margarete Depner was born a hundred years ago, in: Neuer Weg, March 23, 1985.
- Restrospectivǎ Margarete Depner, Kronstadt 1975.
- Weiss, Helfried: A busy life, Margarete Depner in memory, in: Neuer Weg September 15, 1970.
- The sculptor Margarete Depner, poem. In: Meschendörfer, Adolf, Gedichte, Bucharest 1967, p. 75.
- Scharffader, Joachim: Meaningful beauty. Reflections on the sculptural work of Margarete Depner. In: Neuer Weg, November 12, 1966.
- Depner, Margarete. “Nothing new” - about art and artists ... In: From Kronstädter Gardens, Kronstadt 1930, ed. by Adolf Meschendörfer, pp. 184–187.
Web links
- Margarete Depner - A Kronstadt personality . In: Democratic Forum of Germans in Kronstadt
- Margarete Depner's “Sinkende” in the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in: Siebenbürgische Zeitung Online, July 2, 2020
Individual evidence
- ↑ Walter Myss: Art in Transylvania . Thaur near Innsbruck, 1991.
- ↑ Eder was friends with the Austrian Franz Blei and together with Felix Harta he had opened a painting school in Vienna in 1912.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Depner, Margarete |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Scherg, Margarete (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Transylvanian sculptor, painter and draftsman |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 22, 1885 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kronstadt |
| DATE OF DEATH | 2nd September 1970 |
| Place of death | Kronstadt |