Margarete Kühn (entrepreneur)

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Margarete "Grete" Kühn (* 1888 in Leipzig ; † 1977 in Laubach ) was a German artist , designer and entrepreneur .

Life

Margarete Kühn was born in 1888 as the daughter of the architect and later Dresden building officer Ernst Kühn . In 1906 she attended the private school of the siblings Gertrud , Fritz and Erich Kleinhempel in Dresden as a pre-school for the Dresden Academy of Applied Arts . There she met Margarete Wendt . Together they prepared for their studies. Margarete Wendt lived with the Kühn family during her student years.

Women were only allowed to study at the Dresden Academy from 1907 onwards. Margarete Kühn and Margarete Wendt were among the first women in the general student department of the "Royal School of Applied Arts" in Dresden. They studied from 1907 to 1911 a. a. with Erich Kleinhempel, Max Frey and Margarete Junge .

On October 1, 1915, Margarete Wendt and Margarete Kühn founded the Wendt & Kühn company . They sold from the start and were already represented at the Leipziger Messe a year later . While Margarete Wendt mainly devoted herself to figure making, Margarete Kühn was responsible for their artistic painting. Your toy figures shaped the style of the Erzgebirge folk art .

In April 1920 Margarete Kühn married the architect Arnold Lohrisch and left the company immediately. Under the law of the time, a married woman was not legally competent on her own. In order to protect the company from outside access, the two young women had made an agreement that if one of them were to get married, she would leave the company. The two women remained on friendly terms with each other for a lifetime and exchanged a lot of letters.

In 1920 Margarete Kühn opened the workshop for finely painted wooden tools and toys in Chemnitz . In addition to dolls' cradles and beds, the range also included everyday items such as sewing boxes, napkin rings and egg cups. The workshop was destroyed in the air raids on Chemnitz during the Second World War. After the war she rebuilt her art workshop in Augustusburg near Grünhainichen . She produced, among other things, smokers , chip boxes, wooden Easter eggs and richly painted angels.

His marriage to Arnold Lohrisch had three children, including the sculptor Hermann Lohrisch . After the death of her husband, Margarete Kühn sold her company and moved to live with her daughter in Laubach near Gießen , where she died in 1977.

literature

  • Cordula Bischoff, Igor Jenzen: 100 years of Wendt & Kühn. Dresden Modernism from the Ore Mountains . Chemnitzer Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3-944509-31-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cordula Bischoff: The first women's class of the Royal Saxon School of Applied Arts in Dresden . In: Marion Welsch and Jürgen Vietig (eds.): Margarete Junge. Artist and teacher on the move to the modern age . Sandstein Verlag, Dresden 2016, ISBN 978-3-95498-218-9 , pp. 84-103 .
  2. ↑ Kunstgewerbeblatt, Leipzig 1908, vol. 19, p. 201 ( digitized version )
  3. ↑ Cordula Bischoff, Igor Jenzen: Grete Kühn . In: 100 years of Wendt & Kühn. Dresden Modernism from the Ore Mountains . Chemnitzer Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3-944509-31-0 , p. 60 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bold, Margarete
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kühn, Grete (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German artist, designer and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH 1977
Place of death Laubach