Otto Albrecht (painter)

Otto Albrecht (born June 26, 1881 in Berlin ; † February 14, 1943 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp ) was a German landscape and portrait painter .

Life

Karl Rudolf Victor Otto Albrecht spent childhood and youth in the German capital. The father, Wilhelm Albrecht, a trained master painter , had recently moved from Damgarten to Berlin, where he and a business partner founded a craft business as a room and sign painter.

The apartment was on Eisenbahnstrasse, in today's Kreuzberg district . The father's brother, Hermann Albrecht, a musician at the Berlin Opera, lived in the same house . Otto received music lessons from him for a while. Every now and then his father took young Otto to the nearby Reichstag to attend political debates. This may have laid the foundation for the artist's critical political awareness.

Otto Albrecht initially apprenticed to his father and then received training as a decorative painter in Berlin from Carl Enger , who discovered his artistic talent and issued a letter of recommendation. Further training took place at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Düsseldorf . From October 1908 to April 1909 he attended Moritz Heymann's school for drawing arts in Munich , and in the summer semester of the same year he was enrolled in Professor Martin von Feuerstein's drawing class at the art academy .

Around 1911 Otto Albrecht went on an art journey with painter friends Carl Jörres and Albert König , which took them via Switzerland to Naples .

Returning to Germany , he received the order to decorate the Peterswalde manor near Pasewalk in Western Pomerania. A follow-up assignment took him to Amlishagen in Württemberg, where he had to paint the rooms of the castle there. Here he met his wife Emma Baier and settled down as a freelance painter.

Registration card of Otto Albrecht as a prisoner in the National Socialist concentration camp Dachau

He spent the First World War as a private in a Landwehr infantry regiment literally on the front line in Russia and made dozens of drawings and watercolors during this time . Marked by terrible war experiences, he returned to Amlishagen in 1918 as a staunch pacifist. The following years were determined by financial worries and, after 1933, by increasing reprisals from the National Socialists . In April 1942 Otto Albrecht and his wife Emma were arrested by the Gestapo because of their political views . Otto first came to the Dachau concentration camp and was later transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , where he died on February 14, 1943. Emma Albrecht was released from the Ravensbrück concentration camp in November 1943 .

Of Otto Albrecht's four children, who all had great artistic talent, their daughter Gisela Hennig-Albrecht (1921–1985) - wife of the sculptor Hans-Detlev Hennig  - studied painting in Berlin and Munich and became a freelance artist.

Works

In artistic terms, Otto Albrecht remained largely committed to a conservative style in the sense of realism . Although he was familiar with the current artistic trends of his time and was able to experience the development of the Blue Rider up close during his time in Munich , nothing of this can be seen in his pictures. This is mainly due to his long-term precarious financial situation. In rural seclusion, away from the big art metropolises, he was forced to keep his family of six afloat with commissioned works and genre paintings. Many of his pictures were adapted to the provincial tastes and the limited budget of the rural population. How he could have developed artistically under more favorable conditions is shown by his free works, which need not shy away from comparisons with the works of his models, the German impressionists Max Liebermann , Lovis Corinth or Max Slevogt .

His subtle portraits, in which he succeeds in expressing the inner characteristics of the portrayed such as melancholy, humor or dignity, are persistently convincing. How surprisingly modern he could think is shown by an architectural sketch, the design of an artist's villa with a studio in the Bauhaus style.

swell

• Personal estate of Otto Albrechts, a. a. Birth and marriage certificates, notice of death from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, letters of recommendation from C. Enger, academy certificates and the works shown are in the possession of the author.

literature

• Working group Otto Albrecht in the Museum and Culture Association Kirchberg an der Jagst (ed.); Otto Albrecht 1881-1943. A painter's fate in Hohenlohe , Baier Verlag, Crailsheim 2010. ISBN 978-3-942081-03-0
• Association of former members of the Landwehr Infantry Regiment 34 (ed.): Landwehr Infantry Regiment No. 34 in world wars 1914-18 . It includes illustrations by Otto Albrecht. Self-published, Hamburg 1920

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Crailsheim City Museum: Otto Albrecht (1881–1943) - artist, pacifist, persecuted.