Maria Langer-Schöller

Maria Langer-Schöller (born August 14, 1878 in Dachau ; † April 20, 1969 there ) was a German painter who began her artistic career with oil paintings, but later devoted herself increasingly to watercolors.

Life and artistic work

Grave of the painter in the "old cemetery" Dachau

Maria Schöller was the only child of the district administrator Emil Schöller and his wife, the pianist Maria, geb. Pitzner. Soon after their birth, the young family moved to Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm. Since the head of the family was killed in a railway accident in 1889, the widow and her daughter returned to Dachau.

The single mother promoted the artistic talent of the daughter, who was allowed to attend Adolf Hölzel's private painting school as a young girl . Maria Schöller also took lessons from Lovis Corinth , who was staying in the city at the time. To round off her training, she went to Ludwig Schmid-Reutte , who taught at the Academy in Karlsruhe. It was there that Maria Schöller met Otto Richard Langer (1878–1920). The two married in 1903. Langer-Schöller's only known early work from this period has survived: a charcoal portrait drawing by Langer.

The couple settled in Dachau, where they built a house with two studios with the help of the painter's family. The sister of Langer-Schöller's mother, who married a brewery owner in Dachau, made the building plot available.

The only child was born here in 1905, daughter Ester (who in later years had to be cared for outside of the home because of her disability). In Dachau, Maria Langer-Schöller belonged to Ida Kerkovius , Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Paula Wimmer , to name but a few, to the so-called “ Malweibern ”, and also to the founding members of the “Dachau Artists Group” (founded in 1919).

Otto Richard Langer could never really settle in Dachau. He was drawn to Paris again and again, where he finally took up permanent residence in 1906, while his wife stayed in her native city. This situation weighed heavily on the marriage. Langer-Schöller visited her husband several times in Paris after he moved there.

In 1909, on one of these visits, she took lessons with Langer at the Academy of Henri Matisse . A document from the family estate attests to this: “Maria visits him often in Paris, she too was impressed by this city and its artists. She was also in Matisse's studio. "

The artist marriage ultimately broke up due to the alienation, the geographical distance and the competition among each other. In 1912 the couple divorced. Maria Langer-Schöller was now the main breadwinner for the rest of the family. Among other things, she designed the covers for stories by Theodor Storm for Einhorn Verlag , which were then hand-colored. She also provided illustrations for Adalbert Stifter's story Der Hochwald .

As a graphic designer she worked for the Fliegende Blätter and the Dachau edition of the Merkur newspaper as well as for a number of other publications. In Leipzig she exhibited in 1914 at the exhibition for book graphics and she illustrated children's books for the Cassirer publishing house in Berlin. In addition, she created works as a freelance artist. Her preferred technique was watercolor . The easy, fast work suited her talent and perhaps also her dual role as artist and single mother. Her daughter Esther was one of her favorite subjects, there are also still life arrangements and the cats that lived in the house.

Although hardly any early works have survived that could testify to an immediate reaction to what was seen in Paris, later works suggest the influence of the French Fauvist Matisse. This is particularly true of the image design and the arrangement of the colors. Another reference to Langer-Schöller's visit to the Académie Matisse comes from the memories of the painter Otto Fuchs, who is known to her. While he was making a portrait of her in 1966, she told him about her impressions from her time at the Paris academy. Fuchs: "She often mentioned that no shapes or lines should come out of the corners of a picture, Henri Matisse would have said that again and again when she was a student with him, in those golden times before the First World War ."

She was a member of various artists' associations, including the German Association of Artists , the Munich Artists' Association , GEDOK and the Dachau Artists' Association. In 1919 she was one of the co-founders of the Dachau artist group, which organized the first exhibition of the Dachau-based artists.

Langer-Schöller created a large part of her later pictures in the house of her cousin Elisabeth Olbertz in Pfaffenhofen , where she was a frequent guest. In addition to her work as a visual artist, she wrote poems and stories that she published in daily newspapers, often supplemented with paper cutouts and drawings .

Maria Langer-Schöller spent the last years of her life in the Caritas nursing home in Dachau. She died at the age of 91. She found her final resting place in the old cemetery of Dachau, in the grave of the respected Ziegler family, to whom the deceased was related. The Langer-Schöller-Weg commemorates her in the artist's birthplace and home town. Some of her works can be seen in the "Dachau Painting Gallery".

Maria Langer-Schöller is one of the top artists among Dachau artists. Your pictures are now highly traded. You can read about her artistic work: “She preferred the light, shining watercolors, especially for the sake of their transparency, only in her first beginnings did she deal with oil painting. Sometimes your work just seems to be playing with color ... And your motifs? A little landscape, a little portrait, on the other hand a lot of flowers and still life, this very special kind ... Everything she paints is bright, colored, happy, light, problem-free, often playful, but rounded off with a cultivated taste. It remained completely unaffected by styles of time, neither Expressionism nor New Objectivity have changed it in any way or thrown it off track ”.

Works (selection)

• Dachau
• Bunch of flowers
• Dachau children in traditional costume
• Woman with child
• Vase and cat
• Dachau after the spring rain
• Flower branches with toy horse
• Rest after harvest

literature

• O. Thiemann-Stoedter: Dachau painter. The artist's place Dachau from 1801-1946. Dachau 1981, pp. 133-136.
• C. Thiemann: Memories of a Dachau Painter. Dachau no year
• Horst Heres: Dachau Picture Gallery. Dachau 1985.
• Ina Ewers-Schultz: “A game with color”. The artist Maria Langer Schöller. In: The great inspiration. German artists in the Académie Matisse. Part III, Cat.Ahlen 2004.
• Katja Behling, Anke Manigold: The painting women. Intrepid female artists around 1900. Elisabeth Sandmann, Munich 2009, p. 92f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Maria Langer-Schöller in the catalog of the German National Library
• dachauer-galerien-museen.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ingeborg Stöhr, typewritten manuscript n.d., cited above. after Ina Ewers-Schultz
2. ↑ Quoted from Ewers-Schultz, p. 135.
3. ↑ kuenstlerbund.de: Full members of the Deutscher Künstlerbund since it was founded in 1903 / Langer-Schöller, Maria ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on October 3, 2015) 
4. ↑ Thiemann-Stoedter, 1981, p. 136.