Max Bohlen

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Max Böhlen (born April 14, 1902 in Bern , † August 23, 1971 in Basel ) was a Swiss painter.

Life

After primary and secondary school in Bern, Max Böhlen attended the Post and Transport School in Bern from 1918 to 1919, presumably due to his father's work (born in Riggisberg, but contract child ). Due to the general unemployment, he first worked as a laborer, then in an electrical company.

From 1920 he attended the trade school in Bern, where he took his first lessons in nude drawing from Ernst Linck , learned modeling from Wülffli and made friends with Ernst Braker . He decided to paint, and Braker found him a place in the painting school of Victor Surbek and Marguerite Frey-Surbek .

From 1926 to 1929 he received three federal federal grants. During this time he went on study trips to Tuscany (1926), Paris (1926 and 1927) and Corsica (1929 and 1930–32), where he lived and worked in Ajaccio . During this period he discovered oil paintings (1927) and watercolors (1928) as new forms of expression for him, which he had previously worked mainly in graphic form. In 1932 he was portrayed by his teacher Victor Surbek in the picture Round Table Harmony - a group of artists and art enthusiasts who met every Thursday in the Bern Café Harmonie - which, alongside him, included the painters Herold Howald, Paul Zehnder, the art historian Wilhelm Stein, shows the sculptor Max Fueter and Victor Surbek himself.

From 1932 to 1939 he lived and worked in Aurich, East Frisia . For study purposes he traveled to Berlin (1930, 1932, 1935), to the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum (1933), visited his uncle Gustav Schiefler in Hamburg (1930) and painted dune landscapes on Langeoog . In 1936 he was one of the last to visit Erich Heckel in Osterholz on the Flensburg Fjord and painted several watercolors with motifs from Schleswig and from the fjord.

In 1939 he and his family moved from East Friesland to the acquired hunter's house in Kandern - Egerten in the Black Forest . He left his family there for around ten years during and after the Second World War and lived and worked in Switzerland: the Engadine offered numerous motifs. He developed new approaches to using colors and began to draw with the reed pen.

In 1950 he returned permanently to his family in the Jägerhaus and took the landscapes of the Black Forest and Markgräflerland as a motif, but figures also gained in importance. From 1966 he traveled to Mallorca (1966, 1969, 1970), southern France (1970, 1971) and once again to East Frisia (1969).

Max Böhlen died surprisingly of a brain hemorrhage and was buried in the Wollbach cemetery. He was married to the German Elsa von Rose (* 1908) (September 2, 1930) and had seven children (born between 1931 and 1939).

In 1995 his youngest son opened the Max Böhlen Museum in the Jägerhaus in Egerten, where his landscapes, portraits, still lifes, drawings and watercolors can be seen.

On the basis of the list of his works he has kept since 1951, his work can be estimated at more than 1,373 oil paintings, 9 sculptures, 1149 watercolors, 1,488 landscape drawings and 457 portrait drawings. Around half of it is in his estate.

Publicly owned exhibitions and works

Exhibitions

Max Böhlen had exhibitions in

  • Basel, June 15, 1930, group exhibition with Victor Surbek, Herold Howald and Martin Lauterburg
  • Kunsthalle Bern , November 3 to December 1, 1935: Pictures of Abyssinian art: Max Böhlen, Fred Hopf , catalog (10 pages) by Cuno Amiet
  • Art Association in Bremen , 1933
  • Stadthalle Freiburg im Breisgau , July 21 to August 12, 1962: Painting, graphics, sculpture: Max Böhlen, Hans Reif, Alfred Sachs, Theodor Zeller , catalog published by the Freundeskreis Bildender Künstler "Palette" publisher with illustrations by Max Böhlen
  • London
  • Oldenburg
  • Paris
  • South Africa
  • Zurich

Publicly owned works

literature

  • Max Huggler : Max Bohlen. Huber, Frauenfeld 1973, ISBN 3-7193-0466-3 (with list of works).
  • Walter Kern: Young Swiss Art: Max Böhlen. In: Der kleine Bund (Supplement to the Bern daily newspaper Der Bund ), May 13, 1928.
  • Two graphics from the Furka are shown in: Beauties of the Alpine Roads: A selection of Swiss graphics , Schweizer Oberpostdirektion (Ed.), Volume 2, Bern 1928.
  • Two silver pen drawings are shown in Fritz Schmalenbach / Victor Surbek , Eine Monographie, NZN-Verlag, Zurich 1950, pp. 22 and 23

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Max Huggler: Excerpt from the book «Max Böhlen». Retrieved June 15, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Bohlen, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss painter
DATE OF BIRTH April 14, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Bern
DATE OF DEATH 23rd August 1971
Place of death Basel