Max plaintiff

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Max Kläger (2015)

Max Kläger (born April 11, 1925 in Stuttgart ; † February 13, 2016 ) was a German art educator and artist.

Life

Max Kläger grew up in Carinthia in Austria and lived in Munich from 1939, where he graduated from the Wittelsbacher Gymnasium in 1943 . He received his artistic training from 1943 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (among others with Adolf Schinnerer ) and in 1950/51 as a scholarship holder at the art department of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis , where he also worked as an assistant. From 1946 to 1949 he studied art education and English at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and then taught as a teacher at Bavarian grammar schools. In 1956, Max Kläger received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota with a comparative study of the Preparation of Art Teachers for American and German Secondary Schools ( A Comparative Study of the Preparation of Art Teachers for American and German Secondary Schools ). In the 1960s he accepted various teaching positions at the University of Education in Munich , and later, as a seminar leader, he was responsible for the training of trainee teachers.

In 1971, Kläger was appointed professor for art education at the University of Education in Heidelberg , where he worked until his retirement in 1990.

His main research interests were the psychology and phenomenology of children's drawing as well as the art of mentally handicapped people. As early as the 1970s, he advocated a new, far-reaching pictorial meaning for works by the mentally handicapped as a “pre-logical” type of self-expression, the visual quality of which had long been ignored by science.

Max Kläger was one of the few German art educators who published bilingual (German / English). He was a regular speaker at international conferences and congresses (including in Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Coventry, Helsinki, New York). Kläger had been a member of the International Society for Education through Art (InSEA) since 1966 and served from 1969 to 1972 as a "World Council Member" of the organization.

Max Kläger became the father of a son and a daughter. He lived in Osnabrück .

Act

Artistic work

In addition to his scientific career, Max Kläger was also artistically active. His interest here lay in printmaking and typography . Plaintiff manufactured u. a. Relief etchings , which like a wooden section in the high pressure process were printed. He contrasted these relief etchings with the sheet made from the same plate in normal gravure printing . His etchings and drypoints dealt thematically with different motifs. Recurring motifs are the mandala , themes from nature such as B. the tree and its symbolism, fish, birds, hands, as well as typographical elements and various letter monuments . Plaintiffs were also interested in historical topics, and in some cases he also processed his own war experiences. His Kolomea series (1974–1985) dealt with the story of young Galician men in Carinthia around 1915.

Max Kläger was an honorary member of the Association for Original Etching Munich, which had existed since 1891 . His work has been shown in national and international exhibitions, including a. as a solo presentation at Stanford University , the University of Minnesota , the NSA Gallery in Durban (South Africa) as well as in Heidelberg, Munich and Klagenfurt, Austria. His works are represented in private and public collections in Europe and the USA.

As a graphic artist , Kläger designed screen prints , posters , calligraphy and information sheets and was also responsible for the design and production of “imaginative” coloring books for children. These New Coloring Books first appeared in 1971 and were published in small editions in collaboration with Faber-Castell . Instead of the conventional “coloring booklets”, Kläger's coloring books aim to promote children's creative powers by way of aesthetic visual stimuli, away from conventional clichés.

Research areas and scientific work

During his early research, Kläger first looked at typography as an important part of aesthetic education. Kläger's first monographic work Writing and Typography in Classes (1969) dealt with the art-pedagogical possibilities in dealing with typography and advocated an expansion of the traditional concept of typeface in teaching.

In the context of the scientific study of the visual expressions of children, Kläger spoke out in favor of expanding the traditionally narrow term “children's drawing” to the more comprehensive term “children's art”. With insights from brain research , ethnology and psychiatry , he demonstrated how an archaic pictorial thinking manifests itself in the various forms of children's art.

In 1974, during a visit to a workshop in Canada, Kläger discovered the drawings and tapestries by Jane Francis Cameron, who lived with Down's syndrome , by chance , which gave the impetus for decades of intensive engagement with the art of intellectually impaired people. There was an indirect first encounter with so-called " outsider art" as early as 1951, when the plaintiff, as a scholarship holder at the University of Minnesota, visited one of the first art therapy departments at all, the Anoka Psychiatric Institution near Minneapolis. Max Kläger's research into the art of the handicapped was not only based on the special educational approach, but also emphasized for the first time an artistic-art-psychological approach. “The works of art, so-called mentally handicapped, provide information about artistic activity and artistic thinking. Precisely because these people have intellectual weaknesses, certain aspects of pictorial thinking come out even more clearly and can thus be explored better than with people who have no disabilities. "

In this context, the plaintiff explicitly warned against the "therapy trap" when it comes to assessing the visual works of people with intellectual disabilities. He emphasized the importance of differentiating between the sculptures of the mentally ill (which Heinz Prinzhorn helped to achieve wide acceptance with his work, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (1923)) and the artistic work of the mentally handicapped, who are not artistically active as patients within a psychiatric therapy. In doing so, he directed the focus to a group of people whose high visual qualities and abilities had been largely ignored by scientific research due to the very strong art-therapeutic reference or viewed one-sidedly due to an incorrect group assignment.

Max Kläger developed specific terms to record the typical design phenomena of the works of intellectually disabled people, which enable the comparison and analysis of the works with one another as well as the artistic expressions of other groups. In this context, Kläger also referred to the research results of the art and gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim .

In addition to his pioneering monographic work on the visual and linguistic works of Jane Francis Cameron (1978), Kläger has published further monographic long-term studies on artistically active, mentally handicapped people and dealt with the different organizational forms and objectives of art workshops in southern Germany and Austria. Since 1980 Kläger has accompanied the development of the art workshop of the Evangelical Foundation de La Tour in Treffen near Villach / Carinthia (Austria), one of the oldest studios in which people with disabilities work as professional artists, in scientific documentation. The publication of his two monographic long-term studies, which deal with the work of the artists Willibald Lassenberger (1992) and Christoph Eder (2002), who live with Down syndrome , contributed significantly to the awareness of the art workshop, whose exhibition and publication activities are now internationally recognized .

In the course of his study of Willibald Lassenberger (1992), Kläger discovered, among other things, that people can develop enormous bursts of creativity after their fortieth year, while previous research had claimed that human creativity falls extremely behind in this phase of life.

Since 1956, Max Kläger has published more than 80 scientific articles in German and international journals, edited volumes and his own books. In addition to the above-mentioned main research interests, he also dealt with the concept and criteria of artistic talent.

In 2008, Kläger donated the international collection of picture books he had built up over many years to the library of the Heidelberg University of Education, the focus of which is on the playful and artistic teaching of letters and numbers for toddlers.

honors and awards

  • 1990: Federal Cross of Merit on the ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
  • 1996: Edwin Ziegfeld Prize from the United States Society for Education through Art for his internationally significant achievements
  • 2000: Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, 1st class

Monographs

  • 1969: Writing and typography in class , Munich: Don Bosco.
  • 1972: The New Coloring Book I and II . Nuremberg: Faber Castell.
  • 1974: The image and the world of the child. A monographic report on the pictures of two children aged 2 to 14. Munich: moss.
  • 1975: Image and letters, font design in class, Ravensburg: Otto Maier; Letters Type and Pictures - Teaching Alphabets Through Art, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold 1975.
  • 1978: Jane C., symbolic thinking in images and language. The work of a girl with Down syndrome in Le Fil D'Ariane, Munich / Basel: Ernst Reinhardt.
  • 1990: The phenomenon of children's drawings. Manifestations of pictorial thought, Baltmannsweiler: Schneider.
  • 1992: Painting and drawing (“Kindertagesstätte” series), Munich: Don Bosco.
  • 1992: Krampus: The world of images of Willibald Lassenberger. A disabled artist in the Protestant foundation de La Tour. Baltmannsweiler: Tailor.
  • 1993: The variety of images. Works of art by people with developmental disabilities. (Ed.), Stuttgart: Wittwer.
  • 1997: Understanding of children's art: principles of order in visual action. Baltmannsweiler: Tailor.
  • 1999: Art and artists from workshops: characteristics, status, care ; Baltmannsweiler: Tailor.
  • 2002: The art of Christoph Eder in the Stiftung de La Tour , Baltmannsweiler: Schneider.
  • 2005: The drawings of Christoph Eder - examples of ornamental expressions , Baltmannsweiler: Schneider.
  • 2008: Texts and symbols - Jürgen Ceplak and Dieter Fercher - Art workshop de La Tour , Baltmannsweiler: Schneider.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Family obituary notice: Max Kläger , FAZ , February 17, 2016
  2. ^ Booklet accompanying the exhibition Max Kläger: Prints 1974–1985 in the Heidelberg Education Center, April 19 to May 24, 1985. In der Neckarhelle 120, Heidelberg-Ziegelhausen
  3. ↑ Max Kläger: The New Coloring Book I and II . Nuremberg: Faber Castell, 1971
  4. ↑ The following article is an example: Max Kläger: “Fascination of letters, wonder of writing”. In: Bildnerische Erbildung , 1, 9–12, 1967
  5. ^ Max Kläger: The phenomenon of children's drawings. Manifestations of pictorial thought , Baltmannsweiler: Schneider 1990
  6. ↑ Helmut G. Schütz: “Review and Outlook. Interview with Max Kläger ”. In: Put in the picture. Facets of art education . Edited by Walter Schiementz and Richard Beilharz. Deutscher Studienverlag: Weinheim 1995, p. 302
  7. ↑ Ibid., P. 303
  8. ↑ Max Kläger (Ed.): "Introduction". In: The variety of images. Works of art by development-related people . Stuttgart: Wittwer 1993, p. 5
  9. ^ Max Kläger: "Artistic activity and quality of life for mentally handicapped people". In: 2nd State Disabled Day Bavaria , LAG Selbsthilfe Bayern eV, Munich 1990, p. 101
  10. ↑ https://www.diakonie-delatour.at/wo/kaernten/treffen/atelier-de-la-tour/geschichte (accessed December 3, 2014)
personal data
SURNAME Plaintiff, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German art educator and artist
DATE OF BIRTH April 11, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 2016