Oskar Nerlinger

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Nerlinger (center) in 1955

Oskar Nerlinger (born March 23, 1893 in Schwann near Pforzheim; † April 25, 1969 in East Berlin ) was a German painter, draftsman and graphic artist who later worked in the GDR. He also worked under the pen name Nilgreen .

Life

He studied at the Strasbourg School of Applied Arts from 1908 to 1912. From 1912 to 1915 he was a student of Emil Orlik and Emil Rudolf Weiß at the teaching institution of the Berlin Museum of Applied Arts . In 1921 he joined Herwarth Walden's Sturm-Galerie . From 1925 he was the head of the group The Abstracts , which was later called The Times and joined the Asso in 1932 . Nerlinger became a member of the Communist Party of Germany in 1928 . After the Nazis came to power in 1933, exhibition opportunities for non-compliant artists were limited. Nonetheless, around a third of all artists affected by the seizure and persecution of the National Socialists were able to continue exhibiting, more than half of them even after 1937. These included communist artists such as Fritz Cremer , Alfred Frank , Otto Nagel and Oskar Nerlinger. Nerlinger was even represented with works (mainly watercolors) at the Great German Art Exhibition from 1939 to 1941. After the war ended in 1945, he worked as a professor at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg until 1951 . With Karl Hofer , he brought out the visual arts magazine from 1947 to 1949 .

Oskar Nerlinger had close ties to communist colleagues in the GDR and had made enemies in the West through his criticism of capitalism and his support for peace campaigns. After taking part in some exhibitions in the GDR, he was attacked as a "red professor" and lost his job at the University of Fine Arts. In 1951 he emigrated to the GDR in a publicly effective way.

From 1952 he worked for some time in Stalinstadt . In 1955 he was a professor at the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art , where he worked until 1958. In 1963 he received the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver.

Since 1918 he was married to the artist Alice Lex-Nerlinger (nee Pfeffer), who worked on his photograms and films.

He found his final resting place in the Pankow III cemetery .

activity

Nerlinger worked mainly in Berlin from 1912 and created industrial landscapes in the 1920s. From the 1930s onwards, Nerlinger made light-colored landscape watercolors under the influence of East Asian painting. He represented socialist realism , which was declared GDR statecraft in 1949 on the basis of Soviet cultural policy .

After moving to the GDR, Nerlinger himself described his initial artistic attitude as "uncertain". In order to develop his “pessimism” in view of the fact that as an abstract artist he was now turning to the aesthetics of socialist realism, and in order to acquire “optimism” like the workers, he decided to live in a new socialist city. He received the order for a mural from the factory management of the Eisenhüttenkombinat Ost and became a factory employee with “all rights and duties of a worker”. He himself was determined to get to know the reality of life and visited workers in their homes, during their leisure activities and also in the company. He studied technical literature and tried to paint the ironworkers at the blast furnace.

His first drafts were criticized by the workers as too gloomy and ugly, they “could also have been created in the capitalist company von Flick.” After this criticism, he painted the factory as a bright, cheerful place with happy and optimistic-looking workers. His works were then well received and hung as prints in the workers' apartments. In November 1952 Nerlinger himself boasted at the very first art exhibition in Stalinstadt, in which his sketches, studies and projects were shown, that his style had changed. He also exhibited some of his pre-war work under the motto “It couldn't go on like this”. A contemporary GDR art critic described these as ice cold, melancholy and gloomy; one would recognize in it the tragic situation of an artist who would have been in a hopeless situation. Fortunately, this got lost in the rhythm of the ironworks combine and now “utopian dreams have moved into tangible realities”.

In the visitor book of the exhibition there was much praise for the change of Nerlinger also from socialist “ brother countries ” in Polish, Hungarian and Czech. Nerlinger also went to the factory and asked the workers for constructive criticism. There was a tendency here again to receive a lot of praise only with the request to paint brighter and more natural.

Like Max Lingner, Oskar Nerlinger had adapted to the zeitgeist and consciously underwent “re-education” in order to better fit into his surroundings.

Works

  • 1930 Get to work
  • 1930 Berlin tram
  • 1947 The factories are taken over

Group exhibition

literature

  • Kurt Liebmann: The painter and graphic artist Oskar Nerlinger, a contribution to contemporary art. Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1956 DNB 453043941 .
  • Alice Lex and Oskar Nerlinger. In: Lothar Lang : Encounters in the studio. Henschelverlag, Berlin, 1975, pp. 23-29
  • Heidrun Schröder-Kehler: Oskar Nerlinger 1893–1969. Catalog. Akademie der Künste Berlin May 15 - June 12, 1994. Cultural Office of the City of Pforzheim, Pforzheim 1993. ISBN 3-9802822-9-5
  • Anke Scharnhorst:  Nerlinger, Oskar . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Tanja Frank (née Mandić / Maudić): Oskar Nerlinger , Berlin 1990, DNB 911441727 (habilitation thesis ( dissertation B ) Humboldt University Berlin 1990).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martin Papenbrock, Gabriele Saure (Ed.): Art of the early 20th century in German exhibitions . Part 1. Exhibitions of German contemporary art during the Nazi era . Publishing house and database for the humanities, Weimar 2000, ISBN 3-89739-041-8 , p. 44 , doi : 10.1466 / 20061109.28 .
  2. ↑ Anne Applebaum : The iron curtain . Siedler-Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-8275-0030-4 , p. 426
  3. ↑ Anne Applebaum: The iron curtain . P. 426
  4. ^ New Germany , April 9, 1963, p. 2
  5. ↑ Alice Lex-Nerlinger. Picture Atlas Art in the GDR ; Retrieved April 8, 2015
  6. ↑ a b c d Anne Applebaum: The iron curtain. P. 427/428.
personal data
SURNAME Nerlinger, Oskar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nilgreen (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, draftsman and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Schwann near Pforzheim
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 1969
Place of death East Berlin