Oswald Baer (painter)

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Oswald Baer (born June 17, 1906 in Bielitz , Austrian Silesia , † May 27, 1941 in Jena ) was an Austrian painter of the New Objectivity .

life and work

The family of his father, the high school professor Hans Baer (1886–1936), came from Vorarlberg . After various business relocations ( Reichenberg / North Bohemia, Trient , Innsbruck ) he became director of the upper secondary school in Dornbirn in 1938 . Hans Baer was a subscriber to the magazine Nudism , strict vegetarian and abstainer and let his children run around in the fresh air as unclothed as possible to “toughen them up” during the summer. To learn to swim, they were thrown into Lake Constance until they learned to swim . Oswald Baer fell ill with rheumatoid arthritis and an incurable heart disease in 1911 . He then had to rely on a bed and a wheelchair for two years. He blamed his father for it and did not shy away from making financial claims for life. Even his honeymoon was paid for by his father. With the prospect of imminent death, Oswald Baer was very productive.

In the year of Oswald Baer's Matura in 1925, two of his paintings were exhibited in the Vorarlberg art community. At the insistence of his father, he began to study architecture in Vienna , but dropped out after just two semesters. In 1926 he went to Dornbirn . From 1927 he attended the State University of Fine Arts in Weimar as a student of Fritz Feigler (1889–1948) and Walther Klemm (1883–1957).

In 1928 he became a member of the artists' association Der Kreis - painters and sculptors on Lake Constance and also took part in their touring exhibitions. In the Vorarlberg Art Museum, his picture was cut up by Josephine Baker . In 1929, at the age of 22, Baer became a master student at the Weimar University. In 1930 he fell ill with typhus . In 1931 he took part in the 9th Thuringian Art Exhibition and exhibited together with other master students of Walter Klemm in the Berlin City Palace .

In 1932 he had his first solo exhibitions and, with Walther Klemm, Otto Herbig , Karl Pietschmann and Alexander von Szpinger, founded the Weimar Secession exhibition group . In 1933 he exhibited together with Karl Pietschmann in Weimar, with Else Jaskolla in the Jenaer Prinzessinnenschlösschen ( Jena Art Association ) and in Erfurt with Otto Hofmann .

On October 24, 1933, he married Ense Heß, with whom he moved to Anacapri on the Italian island of Capri that same year . From 1934 on, the center of life was Jena , the birthplace of his wife. In 1935 the daughter Gunhild was born, in 1939 the daughter Ilsmarie.

In 1937 the self-portrait with the nurse in the Kunstsaal Weimar was confiscated and burned in Berlin in 1939. The next few years can be described as inner emigration and earning a living: Oswald Baer now designed emphatically folk frescoes in the stairwell of the Ernst Abbe Library Jena (1937) and in the Jena restaurant Schnapphans. In 1938 the first exterior fresco was created on the gable wall of the Kupferhütchen restaurant in Jena (today Lucullum Helvetia , Löbdergraben 16). This popular representation is no longer preserved, but a restoration in 2007 revealed four sgraffiti in the taproom. Before his death from a heart attack in 1941, Baer was only able to finish the middle section of a triptych in the woman's house in Jena. Oswald Baer also owed the public commissions to Werner Meinhof (1901–1940), the father of Ulrike Meinhof , who was appointed director of the Jena Art Museum in 1936.

Why do we paint? To accomplish a task. “That is Oswald Baer's bourgeois philosophical attitude, his widow Ense Hess is quoted in a letter from Rudolf Lemke .

Exhibitions

  • Dornbirn City Museum, April 11 - May 7, 2006
  • Romantic House of the Jena Municipal Museums, 6. – 12. November 2006 (25 privately owned prints and watercolors that Baer made of his home environment in the last years of his life)

literature

  • Maria Schmid: The painter Oswald Baer 1906–1941. Exhibition for the 90th birthday from the estate. Municipal museums, Jena 1997, ISBN 3-930128-26-8 .
  • Gertrude Enderle-Burcel: Twenties? Thirties, Oswald Baer - painter, Georg Ligges - painter, Johannes Wolf - civil engineer, Wilhelm Wolf - historian, minister. Vorarlberg State Museum , Bregenz 1993.
  • Klaus Feldkircher, Maria Schmid: Views. Oswald Baer 1906 - 1941. Art in the Rohnerhaus , Lauterach 2000, ISBN 3-9501459-0-7 .
  • Sebastian Lemke: Painting brings me over the crisis of the present time. Letters between Hans Trimborn and Rudolf Lemke 1931-1957. (= Documentation series of the Jena Municipal Museums; 11). Jena 2004, ISBN 3-930128-61-6 .

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