Otto Dorfner

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Otto Dorfner (born June 13, 1885 in Kirchheim unter Teck ; † August 3, 1955 in Weimar ) was a master bookbinder and art cover designer who, after being appointed by Henry van de Velde to the Weimar School of Applied Arts, worked there as a workshop manager and university teacher. He founded a bookbinding college and developed a style known as the "line style".

Life

Otto Dorfner was born on June 13, 1885, the eighth of twelve siblings in Kirchheim (Teck) in Württemberg. There he graduated from secondary school in 1899 with the final exam for one year of voluntary military service and in 1902 an apprenticeship as a bookbinder. He then worked for six years in various bookbinders in Germany until he passed his master craftsman examination in 1908 at the Chamber of Crafts in Meiningen . Further studies took him to Berlin , where he completed his knowledge and skills in the art class of the bookbinding college under the teachers Paul Kersten and Ludwig Sütterlin . The 25-year-old master bookbinder was appointed to teach at the Grand Ducal School of Applied Arts in Weimar in 1910, which was then headed by Henry van de Velde.

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In 1914, Dorfner received an award for the work of his students at the International World Exhibition for Book Trade and Graphics. He also received the gold medal for his own work. After the First World War he continued his teaching activities in the Weimar Bauhaus , which was newly founded in 1919 , but in 1922 he established a private technical school for handicraft bookbinding in the rooms of his own house on Erfurter Straße. Four years later he was appointed professor for graphics and font design at the College of Crafts and Architecture. In 1923 Otto Dorfner was one of the founders of the Association of Masters of Binding Art .

In 1930 his private teaching institution was expanded and machine bookbinding technology was introduced. In addition to his apprenticeship, Dorfner also appeared with bindings for Count Harry Keßler's Weimar Cranach press . But the honorary gifts of the city of Weimar and Thuringia to Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler also wear Dorfner bindings, they thanked him in 1944 when they added him to the list of those who were gifted by God shortly before the end of the war . In 1936 Dorfner received the art and literature prize of the city of Jena, and in 1937 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the International World Exhibition in Paris. He received the Gutenberg Ring of the City of Leipzig in 1940.

Dorfner's biographer, the Leipzig guild master Wolfgang Eckhardt, describes the turn to Goethe's Faust in 1946 as “new beginnings”. In fact, only a few Faust bindings are known from the time before. Accordingly, Dorfner decided, also with a view to the upcoming Goethe anniversary, to provide all available Faust editions that had appeared from 1790 to that point in time with his covers. He also made bindings for the 143-volume Weimar Sophia edition of Goethe's works. His collection of artistically bound Faust editions has been kept in the Duchess Anna Amalia Library since 2011 .

Dorfner's house and workshop in Weimar still exist largely unchanged and were most recently used as a training workshop for the Burg Giebichenstein art college . A takeover of the building by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar is under discussion in 2016 .

literature

  • Mechthild Lobisch: Between Van De Velde and Bauhaus: Otto Dorfner and an important chapter in the art of binding . - Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1999.
  • Löffler, Bernd: Otto Dorfner in his home environment in Kirchheim-Teck, In: Between Van de Felde and Bauhaus: Otto Dorfner ........, p. 72 ff.
  • Mangei, Johannes; Sellinat, Frank: A special acquisition 2011: The collection of Dorfner bindings for Goethe's Faust . In: Supralibros 10, p. 24ff.
  • Painting, graphics, book art: exhibition from May 7th – 26th. June 1955 in Weimar; Works by Alexander von Szpinger, Walter Klemm, Otto Dorfner . - Erfurt: Association of German Visual Artists, district management, 1955.
  • John Dieter Brinks, Beate-Dorfner-Erbs, Thomas Föhl and Frank Sellinat: Werkstatt Otto Dorfner - Book Art in Weimar , Klassik-Stiftung Weimar, Hirmer Verlag GmbH, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-7774-3279-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Harry Waibel : Servants of many masters. Former Nazi functionaries in the Soviet Zone / GDR. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-631-63542-1 , p. 71.
  2. ^ André Kühn and Benjamin Grau: The Sophien edition in a binding by Otto Dorfner. December 18, 2018, accessed January 27, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Dorfner, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German master bookbinder and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH June 13, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Kirchheim unter Teck
DATE OF DEATH 3rd August 1955
Place of death Weimar