Otto Michael Schmitt

Otto Michael Schmitt (born January 1, 1904 in Laufen ; † February 1, 1992 in Anhausen ) was a German artist.

Life

In 1910 he came to Augsburg with his parents. After attending high school, OM Schmitt worked in an architecture office, practiced as a bricklayer and carpenter, finally learned art turnery from 1921 to 1922 and ran his own workshop in Thuringia. From 1924 to 1928 he studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Munich with Robert Engels and Franz Klemmer . Thanks in particular to his teacher Franz Klemmer, whom he admired and held in high regard throughout his life, his turn to fresco painting. From 1928 to 1932 he was a master student with Klemmer at the Munich Art Academy . From 1932 until his appointment in 1941 as a teacher of figural composition and wall painting at the Nuremberg Art Academy , OM Schmitt made a name for himself in Augsburg as a freelance painter in Augsburg . War and imprisonment cost him valuable working years between 1939 and 1947, but also gave rise to many excellent drawings. After returning to Nuremberg, OM Schmitt was President of the Academy of Fine Arts from 1957 until his retirement in 1968. The award of the Bavarian Order of Merit is one of the many honors he has received .

In 1934 he married Elise Schönherr and the marriage had four children. After the destruction of the Nuremberg apartment during an air raid in World War II, the village of Anhausen, where Schmitt had owned a weekend house since 1936, first became a refuge and finally the family's permanent residence.

During the National Socialist era , Schmitt became a member of the NSDAP in 1937 . In 1939 he was drafted into the 74 police battalion and was initially employed as a first lieutenant in occupied France. In the meantime he was released for painting work in the city of the Nazi party rallies. In September 1942 Schmitt was active in a "Nuremberg Police Battalion". In 1943 he was deployed with his unit in occupied Yugoslavia and Istria.

The Weberhaus on Moritzplatz in Augsburg from the southwest

In addition to his teaching activities, the focus of his extensive work has always been on fresco painting . Among his most important works, which include many frescoes on churches and public buildings, the painting of the historic weaver's house in Augsburg (1959–1961), which was rebuilt after the war, should be mentioned. But his artistic work also includes monumental murals (such as in the Nuremberg Federal Labor Office or the wall fresco created in 1939 in the officers' mess of three barracks near Augsburg , which depicts the battle on the Lechfeld ), designs for tapestries ( Nuremberg town hall ), large wall mosaics as well as an almost impossible to count variety of great landscape pictures, drawings and illustrations, including numerous woodcuts and linocuts.

literature

• Anja Prölß-Kammerer: The tapestry in National Socialism. Propaganda, presentation and production. Facets of a handicraft in the “Third Reich” . Olms, Hildesheim 2000.
• Manfred H. Grieb (Hrsg.): Nürnberger Künstlerlexikon . Visual artists, artisans, scholars, collectors, cultural workers and patrons from the 12th to the middle of the 20th century. KG Saur, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-091296-8 , p. 1356.

Web links

• The painter Otto Michael Schmitt - A selection of works
• The Augsburger Weberhaus - short documentation / The fire of June 2004 / The frescos by OM Schmitt

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Max Gnugesser-Mair: Critique of the embellished and abridged presentation of numerous artist biographies from the Nazi era in the Nuremberg Artist Lexicon , 2016 (Review by Manfred H. Grieb (ed.): Nürnberger Künstlerlexikon, 2007 )