Martha Schrag

Martha Schrag (* 29. August 1870 in Borna , † 10. February 1957 in Karl-Marx-Stadt ; Complete name: Juliane Martha Schrag ) was a German painter and graphic artist .

portrait

Life

Martha Schrag was born in Borna as the second daughter of a lawyer and spent her childhood in Dresden . In 1884 the family moved to Chemnitz because of their father's transfer . She did not experience any promotion of her talent from her parents.

In 1898 she succeeded in studying at the painting school for women in Dresden. Her teachers there were Robert Sterl , Wilhelm Georg Ritter , Anton Pepino and Wilhelm Claudius . After completing her studies in 1904, she gained recognition through her first exhibitions in Chemnitz. The influential Chemnitz doctor, art collector and reviewer Dr. AE Thiele discovered her great talent and promoted her from then on. In this way he also gave her access to a Chemnitz foundry and machine factory. The impressions felt there influenced Martha Schrag's further style and content of her works.

In 1907 she joined the artist group Chemnitz and exhibited with its members in various German cities. In 1908 Martha Schrag briefly went to Munich to look for artistic inspiration at Albert Weisgerber's painting school . There she also encountered works by Vincent van Gogh , Paul Cézanne and Käthe Kollwitz , which had an impact on her work. In the period up to the First World War, she perfected her forms of expression. The motifs were often the working people in the industrial city and the landscape that he had changed. During the war, the expressionist form of expression came to the fore. Her graphics show comforting women and the horrors of war. The most expressive work of her graphic work was the portfolio "Stürme" from 1920, in which she showed horrors of war in an expressionist style.

She also had regular exhibitions, for example in the Chemnitzer Kunsthütte . However, their awareness remained regionally limited. She could hardly pay a living by selling her pictures, so she still ran a painting school. Between 1933 and 1945 Martha Schrag rarely exhibited in public. 23 works from public collections were confiscated from her as “ degenerate art ”. During the bombing raid on Chemnitz in March 1945, her house on the Chemnitz Kaßberg and with it a large part of her work was destroyed.

Despite her severely deteriorating eyesight, she continued to paint after the war. She was now receiving more public interest and she exhibited frequently in Saxony . On the occasion of her 80th birthday, she received the honorary citizenship of Chemnitz in 1950 . Almost blind, Martha Schrag kept drawing sketches with the charcoal pencil until her death on February 10, 1957 . She found her final resting place in the Nikolai cemetery in Chemnitz.

Martha Schrag was a member of the German Association of Artists .

literature

• Gerhard Hahn: Life and work of the graphic artist Martha Schrag (1870–1957). District Art Center Karl-Marx-Stadt, 1982.
• Ralf W. Müller: artist group Chemnitz. Verlag Heimatland Sachsen, 2003, ISBN 3-910186-45-9 .
• Ralf W. Müller: Painted Longing. Martha Schrag, a description of the life and work of Martha Schrag and the catalog raisonné of her oil paintings. Verlag Heimatland Sachsen, 2007, ISBN 978-3-910186-65-1 .
• Georg Brühl: Martha Schrag: painter and graphic artist , in: Tilo Richter (ed.): Der Kaßberg. A Chemnitz reading and picture book. Passage-Verlag, Leipzig 1996, pp. 285-292, ISBN 3-9805299-0-8

Individual evidence

1. ↑ kuenstlerbund.de: Full members of the Deutscher Künstlerbund since it was founded in 1903 / Schrag, Martha ( 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 January 30, 2016) 

Web links

Commons : Martha Schrag  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Martha Schrag in the catalog of the German National Library