Olga Oppenheimer

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Olga Friederike Oppenheimer , married Worringer , ( June 9, 1886 Cologne - July 4, 1941, Majdanek concentration camp ( Lublin ), Poland) was a German expressionist painter and graphic artist . In 1911 she was a co-founder of the avant-garde Gereon Club in Cologne. Persecuted as a Jew during the Nazi era , she was murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp in 1941.

Live and act

Olga Oppenheimer: Portrait of Bertha Oppenheim (grandmother), 1907
Olga Oppenheimer's painting and drawing school. Advertisement in the catalog of the International Art Exhibition of the Sonderbund of West German Art Friends and Artists 1912

Olga was the oldest of six children of the Jewish cloth wholesaler Max Samuel Oppenheimer and his wife Emilie Wilhelmine, nee. Oppenheim. From 1907 she studied together with her friend Emmy Worringer (Emilie) (1878–1961) in Dachau with Adolf Hölzel and at the Academy in Munich . In 1909 she became a student of Paul Sérusier in Paris and then set up a joint studio and a painting and drawing school in Cologne's Gereonshaus, built in 1910 at Gereonstraße 18-32, with Worringer . Here they founded the Gereonsklub together with Franz M. Jansen in 1911 , which held a jour fixe in the studio and organized exhibitions of modern art. The Cologne artistic avant-garde met here under the leadership of August Macke .

On May 24, 1912, the Sonderbund exhibition opened in Cologne , which gave an overview of the latest trends in European painting. Oppenheimer was among the few women who exhibited there. Her painting Still Life , shown in room 21 , which she exhibited together with the work of her colleagues from the Rhenish Expressionists , has been lost.

In 1913, Oppenheimer was the only German woman to appear on the Armory Show in New York , Boston, and Chicago , where six of her woodcuts were shown. In July 1913 she took part in the exhibition of Rhenish Expressionists in Bonn with two still lifes .

In the same year she married her friend's brother, restaurateur Adolf Worringer (1882–1960). After the birth of two sons, she gave up painting; possibly due to depression . The events during the First World War worsened the illness, and from 1918 her family took her to the sanatorium in Waldbreitbach . During the National Socialist era , Adolf Worringer divorced his Jewish wife Olga in accordance with the Nuremberg Laws in 1936 . In 1941 she was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp and murdered there.

Olga Oppenheimer was the sister-in-law of the art historian Wilhelm Worringer and his wife, the painter Marta Worringer (1881–1965).

Remembrance / commemoration

The artist is almost forgotten. In 2012, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote critically that Olga Oppenheimer in the reconstruction of the Sonderbund exhibition from 2012, which was entitled “1912 - Mission Moderne. The show of the century of the Sonderbund ”was shown in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne , only mentioned in the catalog, the story of the artist is missing in the exhibition.

On the occasion of the masculinity exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the artist Bea Schlingelhoff developed a font in honor of Olga Oppenheimer that can be downloaded, used and distributed free of charge.

Works / exhibitions

As of 2013, there is no catalog raisonné by Oppenheimer .

literature

  • Association August Macke Haus eV (Ed.): The Gereonsklub - Europe's avant-garde in the Rhineland. (= Publication series Verein August Macke Haus Bonn, No. 9) Bonn 1993, ISBN 3-929607-08-5 .
  • Anke Münster: Rhenish Expressionists. Trude Brück, Lisa Hartlieb-Rilke, Fifi Kreutzer, Marie von Malachowski, Olga Oppenheimer, Lotte B Prechner, Marta Worringer. with texts by Margarethe Jochimsen and Hildegard Reinhardt, Association August-Macke-Haus, Bonn 1993, ISBN 3-929607-09-3 .
  • Hildegard Reinhardt : Olga Oppenheimer (1886–1941) - a Cologne painter and graphic artist. In: Cologne Museum Bulletin. Reports and research from the museums of the city of Cologne. Cologne 1991, issue 1/1991, pp. 19–32.
  • Hildegard Reinhardt: Olga Oppenheimer and the Cologne Secession. In: Ludger Heid, Julius H. Schoeps (eds.): Guide through the Jewish Rhineland. Nicolai Verlag, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-87584-385-1 .
  • Hildegard Reinhardt: Olga Oppenheimer, painter, graphic artist. In: Jutta Dick, Marina Sassenberg (ed.): Jewish women in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lexicon on life and work. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, ISBN 3-499-16344-6 .
  • Hildegard Reinhardt: Olga Oppenheimer. German Painter and Graphic Artist, 1886–1941. In: Delia Gaze (Ed.): Dictionary of Women Artists , Volume 2, London and Chicago 1997.
  • Hildegard Reinhardt: Olga Oppenheimer (1886–1941). In: Britta Jürgs (ed.): Like a Nile bride thrown into the waves. Portraits of expressionist artists and writers. Aviva, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-932338-04-9 , pp. 216-229.
  • Hildegard Reinhardt: Olga Oppenheimer - A missing artist from the Cologne “Gereons Club”. In: Magdalena M. Moeller (Ed.): August Macke and the Rheinische Expressionisten. Works from the Kunstmuseum Bonn and other collections. Munich 2002.

Web links and sources

Commons : Olga Oppenheimer  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Women's Memorial Days, fembio.org, accessed on November 9, 2012.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Irene Kleinschmidt-Altpeter: Olga Oppenheimer , short biography, in: Stephan Berg (Hrsg.): Ein Expressionistischer Sommer, Bonn 1913 , catalog of the exhibition. Hirmer, Munich 2013, p. 92
  3. ↑ Bild der Woche , museenkoeln.de, accessed on February 3, 2016.
  4. ^ Armory. Gallery G: English, Irish and German Paintings and Drawings , xroads.virginia.edu, accessed November 9, 2012.
  5. ↑ Swantje Karich: Art canon with blind spots , faz.net, October 3, 2012, accessed on November 9, 2012.
  6. ↑ Download: https://www.koelnischerkunstverein.de/olga-oppenheimer/
  7. ↑ Material accompanying the exhibition
  8. ↑ Irene Kleinschmidt-Altpeter: Olga Oppenheimer , 2013, p. 142
personal data
SURNAME Oppenheimer, Olga
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Oppenheimer, Olga Friederike (full name); Worringer, Olga (married name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and graphic artist of Expressionism
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 1941
Place of death Majdanek concentration camp