Otto Fröhlich (painter, 1869)

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Otto Fröhlich (born March 15, 1869 in Schleiz , Reuss j. L .; † December 29, 1940 in Weimar ) was a German painter and etcher and professor at the State Bauhaus in Weimar.

Live and act

Robert Heinrich Otto Fröhlich was born in Schleiz and, after graduating from high school, studied at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar from 1887 to 1895 . His formative teachers were Leopold von Kalckreuth (1855–1928) and later the Norwegian Carl Frithjof Smith (1859–1917) in the "nature class", which has now been established . The former preferred the large-format figure painting in the open landscape as well as motifs from popular life. Smith taught the preliminary drawing with charcoal directly on the canvas. Fröhlich went on study trips to Munich and Stuttgart. In 1919 he was appointed to the master council of the State Bauhaus in Weimar . Because of the too modern orientation and political polarization, conflicts arose, so that Fröhlich resigned from his teaching post in early 1920 and remained a freelance painter in Weimar. He cultivated special friendships with Max Beckmann (1884–1950) and the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925).

tomb

He is buried in the historical cemetery in Weimar .

Appreciation

Fröhlich painted expressive portraits and atmospheric pictures as low-action genre scenes within Thuringian village landscapes. In 1940 he completed the copy of the Schwind frescoes on the Wartburg. From 1893 he sent to the major art exhibitions in Berlin, Munich and Düsseldorf. His pictures are in private ownership, in the Weimar art collections as well as in the public museums of Eisenach and Altenburg. He also designed book covers for reading books. Etchings by him were published in the portfolios of the Weimar Radier Association.

Works (selection)

  • Etchings in the portfolio of the Radierverein zu Weimar ("Zecher", "Mädchenkopf" etc.)
  • Portrait of Rudolf Steiner (1892)
  • Forest landscape
  • Landscape near Weimar
  • Forest with figures (1910)
  • In the Thuringian Forest (1912)
  • The Temptation of the Hermit (1913)
  • Shepherd sits in the shade of a tree. His goats rest at the waterhole
  • Artists bar on the Lobedaburg near Jena
  • Picnic in the Tuscan countryside
  • Wanderer in a Forest Landscape (1916)
  • Moonlit night at the lake in autumn
  • Mountain stream
  • Stream with ravens (1928)
  • Children's home - reading book for the 1st school year

literature

  • Ulrich Thieme: General Lex. D, image. Artist from antiquity to the present, founded by U. Thieme and F. Becker, Volume Twelfth (Fiori - Fyt). Leipzig 1916, p. 514
  • Singer: Artist Lexicon, supplement, Frankfurt 1906
  • Journal of Fine Arts 1898, 23 u. 192
  • Art Chronicle 1900, column 424
  • Catalog of the Great Art Exhibition Berlin 1892, 1913
  • Catalog of the 14th International Art Exhibition Berlin 1896
  • Catalog of the Glaspalast in Munich 1907
  • Catalog of the art exhibition in Düsseldorf 1913
  • Renate Müller-Krumbach: In: Weimar-Lexikon zur Stadtgeschichte. Weimar 1993, 127-128
  • Martin Stolzenau: Robert Heinrich Otto Fröhlich, teacher at the early Bauhaus, was born 150 years ago on March 13th. In: Thür. Allgemeine, Weimar Edition, v. March 13, 2019, p. 14
  • Christoph Lindenberg: Rudolf Steiner - A biography. 1861 - 1925. Stuttgart 1997, p. 203
  • Volker Wahl: The controversy about modern art in Weimar in 1919. - The beginning of the “Bauhaus dispute”. In: Hellmut Seemann and Thorsten Valk: Classic and Avant-garde. The Bauhaus in Weimar 1919 - 1925, Göttingen 2009, p. 291, footnote 16

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Otto Fröhlich at the Bauhaus pdf accessed on March 19, 2019
  2. ^ Portrait of Rudolf Steiner
  3. ↑ Otto Fröhlich in Thieme-Becker
personal data
SURNAME Happy, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and etcher
DATE OF BIRTH March 15, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Schleiz
DATE OF DEATH December 29, 1940
Place of death Weimar