Marie stone tendril

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Marie Stein-Ranke (born June 13, 1873 in Oldenburg ; † July 9, 1964 in Nussloch near Heidelberg ) was a German painter and etcher .

Life

Marie Stein-Ranke: Self-Portrait with Book, 1899

Marie Stein was the second daughter of the grammar school director Heinrich Marcus Stein (1828-1917) and his wife Rosine Louise nee. Bülcke (1842–1924) born in Oldenburg. Her older brother Johannes Stein (1866–1941) was later Oldenburg Minister of Finance. She was sent to school at the age of five and quickly proved to be a match for her older classmates. She attended the Cäcilienschule Oldenburg . Her hidden artistic talent only became visible after finishing school. She started drawing. Her father recognized the talent and encouraged it and made it possible for his daughter to study in Düsseldorf from 1890 onwards .

The Düsseldorf Art Academy was one addition to the academies in Berlin , Munich and Dresden among the most important in the German Empire . However, women were only allowed to officially enroll at German art academies after the end of the German Empire and with the introduction of women's suffrage in 1919. For the time being, it was left to ambitious female artists to choose teachers or, if possible, to attend a women's painting school. As a teacher she chose the portrait and fashion painter Walter Petersen (1862–1950), who had studied painting for seven years at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. In the three years from 1890 to 1893 she presented studies and drawings to her teacher several times a week for critical assessment and learned the graphic technique of etching under Walter Petersen. A few years later, she made his portrait in profile in memory of her first teacher.

As Marie Stein discovered, the training at Petersen in Düsseldorf was hardly enough, and so her father financed her another year at Friedrich Fehr's private school for women in Munich . There, too, she worked all day from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. and from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. But the “sweetish-sensual” manner of the teacher gave her nothing. She very much regretted that for financial reasons she could not go to the Swiss graphic artist Karl Stauffer-Bern in Berlin to etch or to Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede to paint .

After completing her training at Friedrich Fehr's painting school, she switched to Paul Nauen , also in Munich. An artistically productive period followed there. In the winter of 1896, Marie Stein moved to the art metropolis Paris for a longer period of study . Here she lived at 6 rue Mezieres between Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Jardin du Luxembourg with the widow of a painter, where she had a studio. Among these options for etchings, a number of them emerged with extremely good technique. With one of these works, the drypoint “Male Portrait”, Stein-Ranke won first prize in an etching competition organized by the Leipzig art publisher EA Seemann . The work was then published in the Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst (issue 10, 1898, p. 297). In 1903 she took part in the competition again and won third prize with her work "Female Portrait".

In March 1898 Marie Stein left Paris and went to Oldenburg to celebrate her brother's wedding. She then went back to Munich to take part in the exhibition in the Munich Glass Palace , for which she also worked on a few portraits. After her return to Düsseldorf, she became a teacher in the studio of her former teacher, but apparently also made a good living from the sale of her work, with which, as she later wrote, she achieved up to 2000 marks. Marie Stein had made a name for herself as a society painter in Düsseldorf and received lucrative commissions from the upper class. Maria Stein was one of the few women to be found in the membership directory of the German Association of Artists as early as 1906 .

Marie Stein and Hermann Ranke

Wedding of Hermann Ranke and Marie Stein-Ranke-1906

A college friend of Hermann Ranke invited him to Oldenburg to be engaged. Coincidentally, Marie's sister Frieda Stein was sitting next to Hermann Ranke at this party. Soon afterwards Frieda visited her sister Marie in Berlin, where she worked under Leo von König , and took the bus past the Egyptian Museum , where Hermann Ranke worked as an Egyptologist . When Hermann Ranke noticed her by chance on the bus, Frieda and Hermann arranged to meet in Grunewald. Hermann brought his younger brother Friedrich and Frieda her older sister Marie with him. The following year Marie Stein and Hermann Ranke married in Oldenburg. The couple later had three children. Six years later Frieda Stein and Friedrich Ranke also married. The wedding had been delayed for so long because her fiancé wanted to finish his German studies and his habilitation in Strasbourg.

After his time at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, the Egyptologist Hermann Ranke went to the University of Heidelberg , where he set up the Egyptian Institute. In the winter of 1912/1913 Hermann Ranke took part in the third excavation campaign of the German Orient Society near El Amarna, during which, among other things, the later famous queen bust of Nefertiti was found.

With the outbreak of World War I and her husband's four-year conscription to the Western Front , a difficult phase of life began for Marie Stein-Ranke. Her daughter Hannah, who was born in Berlin, contracted a meningitis epidemic in Heidelberg and died in 1927 at the age of almost 20 in a sanatorium in Switzerland. Her sons Andreas and Albrecht studied law and economics . Shortly after the National Socialists came to power in autumn 1933, Albrecht committed suicide near Berlin. Although Stein's father had converted to the Protestant faith in 1853, she was considered a " half-Jewish " and thus the children were of Jewish descent. When Albrecht died, his parents were in America, as Hermann Ranke had received a visiting professorship in Madison / Wisconsin in 1932. After receiving the news, they immediately returned to Germany. The National Socialists had abolished the chair for Egyptology in Heidelberg under a pretext and Hermann Ranke initially took leave and retired on December 1, 1937 . In the fall of 1939, Hermann Ranke received a call as a " Visiting Professor " at the University of Philadelphia, where he was able to resume teaching and research in the USA from October 1, starting the new academic year.

Since her youngest son Andreas Ranke was recruited to the Eastern Front and Ranke's teaching assignment did not end until May 31, 1940, Marie traveled back to Germany alone by ship to say goodbye to her son in Berlin. At the end of July 1941, Marie received news of the death of her son, who had fallen in an unknown location in Russia . In addition to the grief over her three tragically lost children, she has had financial hardships since her return. In November 1939, the Karlsruhe tax authorities unceremoniously stopped paying the dismissed professor's pension and transfers from the USA were not permitted. The artist did not want to go to her relatives in Oldenburg or Hamburg , as she had to reckon with harassment due to her Jewish descent.

Marie Stein-Ranke lived secluded in the small village of Bollschweil near Freiburg at the castle of Baron Holzing- Berstett . The baron's daughter, the writer Marie Luise Kaschnitz , who was married to the archaeologist Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg , had probably put her there. The 70-year-old survived the Nazi era here unmolested and without any contact with her relatives . Her husband managed to return to Germany via Stockholm in the summer of 1942 . In 1946 Hermann Ranke was rehabilitated "by way of reparation", but he was refused a teaching position, as it was said, for reasons of age. Ranke was still full of research, published specialist articles and again accepted a call as a visiting professor in the USA ( University of Pennsylvania ) and went, always accompanied by his wife, as a visiting professor at Faruq University in Alexandria . After Hermann Ranke's death on April 22, 1953, his widow sold her husband's extensive library to the newly founded University of Saarbrücken . During a visit to Heidelberg, the 83-year-old suffered a serious accident and spent months in a clinic. Afterwards she was forced to live in an old people's home in Nussloch near Heidelberg. She died there in 1964.

Oldenburg art life

After her years of apprenticeship in Düsseldorf and Munich, Marie Stein took an active part in the cultural life of her hometown and from 1896 sent the annual exhibitions of the Oldenburger Kunstverein in the Augusteum . From 1898 Marie Stein received a number of portrait commissions from the Grand Ducal Family, for example from Duchess Sophie Charlotte and Grand Duke Friedrich August in 1897. The Princes of Waldeck also gave her commissions. In 1906 Marie Stein was approached by Emperor Wilhelm II , who was residing opposite in the Berlin Palace , while copying a picture on Museum Island . Obviously enthusiastic about her talent, Wilhelm II ordered a portrait of his daughter Viktoria Luise from Marie Stein.

Artist friends

Marie Stein-Ranke portrait by Georg Müller vom Siel, 1903

Marie Stein had a friendship with the landscape painter Georg Müller vom Siel from Butjadingen , which was expressed in two portrait etchings from 1902 and 1903. Both portraits characterize the north German landscape painter, as they show the two diametrically opposed poles of his personality: the landscape painter who lives in seclusion far from the metropolis with a casual flat cap and that of a dandy who enjoys appearing elegantly dressed. Georg Müller vom Siel ran a very hospitable house in the Dötlingen artists' colony . Many artists came here from near and far. It can be assumed that Marie Stein visited here regularly, also to exchange ideas with other artists. Marie Stein also maintained good relationships with the local painter and art dealer Ludwig Fischbeck , who was responsible for the sale of her etchings in Oldenburg. Thanks to her husband's good relationships, Marie Stein-Ranke succeeded in establishing contact with famous art historians and art critics in Berlin and persuaded them to give lectures in Oldenburg. Since the Oldenburger Kunstverein paid only small fees, the artist offered to make portrait etchings as compensation for expenses. So the Kunsthalle directors Alfred Lichtwark from Hamburg, Gustav Pauli from Bremen , Fritz Wichert , the Berlin architecture theorist Hermann Muthesius , the art historians Heinrich Wölfflin , Carl Neumann , Hugo Prinz and Hans Mackowsky came to give lectures in Oldenburg. Rainer Maria Rilke spoke about the sculptor Auguste Rodin and Emil Waldmann about his biography about Édouard Manet .

Marie Stein founded, together with Willa Thorade and Wilhelm von Busch, the “Verein Oldenburger Kunstfreunde”, which had a more open approach to contemporary art than the Oldenburger Kunstverein (OKV). In 1904 Marie Stein was one of the founding members of the Oldenburger Künstlerbund (OKB). In the first directory of the members of the OKB 1908, 10 painters out of 31 artists are listed. a. Emy Rogge from Butjadingen, Paula Schiff and Anna Schulman-Salomon from Berlin, Else Müller-Kaempff from Ahrenshoop , Clara Westhoff- Jordan from Munich and from Oldenburg Anna List , Emma Ritter , Martha Lohse and Hermine Schmidt. In 1905 she received the Oldenburg State Medal.

Although Marie Stein had settled in Berlin after her wedding with Hermann Ranke, she joined the Association of Northwest German Artists founded in 1906 in the Bremen Kunsthalle, among others by Paul Müller-Kaempff . However, her engagement in cultural affairs in north-west Germany declined because she was too stressed by the birth of her three children and the move to Heidelberg.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ s. List of members in the catalog of the 3rd German Artists Association , Weimar 1906. P. 37: Stein, Marie, Malerin, Oldenburg online (accessed on March 27, 2016)
  2. ↑ See disciplinary files 1937/38 in the General State Archives in Karlsruhe
personal data
SURNAME Stein-tendril, Marie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stein, Marie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and etcher
DATE OF BIRTH June 13, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Oldenburg
DATE OF DEATH July 9, 1964
Place of death Nussloch near Heidelberg