Otto Nagel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Otto Nagel (1950)

Otto Nagel (born September 27, 1894 in Berlin-Wedding , † July 12, 1967 in Berlin-Biesdorf ) was a Berlin painter. In 1970 he became an honorary citizen of Berlin posthumously .

Life

Otto Nagel was born the son of the carpenter and social democrat Carl Nagel. After elementary school, he began an apprenticeship as a glass painter in a mosaic and glass painting workshop , which he did not complete, and later worked as a transport worker. Nagel became involved in the working class youth early on and joined the SPD in 1912 . He initially did military service in World War I , but then came to the Wahn penal camp near Cologne because of conscientious objection . In 1917 he became a member of the USPD .

In 1919 Otto Nagel painted his first oil paintings and pastels under the influence of August Macke . In 1920 he became a member of the KPD . In 1922, together with Erwin Piscator , he initiated the aid to artists in the International Workers Aid (IAH) and was Käthe Kollwitz 's contact person for Willi Munzenberg . In 1924, Nagel joined the Red Group in Berlin and organized the First General German Art Exhibition in Moscow, Saratov and Leningrad in 1924/1925 .

In 1926 Otto Nagel exhibited his latest pictures in the Sängerheim , a beer bar in Wedding . Wedding had meanwhile become a red working-class district , so that the exhibition location on the world stage was called: “An unusual milieu for art. [...] The audience, men and women from Wedding, serious, silent, slowly looking at the pictures. You see yourself on the walls, painted by one of your own: the postman, the old woman in the hospital, the hooker from the square on Nettelbeckplatz, the idiot 'father' from the security company, the Budiker from the corner. I imagine the people who are looking at these pictures in the singers' home in the National Gallery. You walk from picture to picture, confused, perplexed, and go out the door, bewildered. You are allowed to go there, but you quickly feel that you are only tolerated ”. Since 1927 Nagel was active for the " Society of Friends of the New Russia ".

Otto Nagel was close friends with Heinrich Zille and Käthe Kollwitz, whose estate he organized. Nagel published numerous writings on her work. From 1928 to 1931 he exhibited in the November group and from 1928 to 1932 he was editor and editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine Eulenspiegel . In 1932 he was in charge of the Käthe Kollwitz exhibition in Moscow and Leningrad, where 160 works by the artist were shown.

From 1928 to 1932 he wrote the manuscript for his novel The White Taube or The Wet Triangle , which had disappeared several times before its first publication as a book in 1978 by the Mitteldeutscher Verlag Halle-Leipzig . The painter's widow, Walli Nagel, described the almost unbelievable story of this book in her foreword.

In 1933 Otto Nagel was elected chairman of the Reich Association of German Visual Artists . The election was canceled by the Nazis a day later because Nagel had been too politically active against them. House searches and imprisonment (including in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1936/1937) followed, and Nagel was banned from painting in the studio. Many of his pictures were classified as " degenerate " and destroyed. In 1937, Nagel was released on the initiative of his wife, but was still not allowed to work in his studio. So he advanced to become a street painter with cityscapes of Berlin, which was not yet destroyed at the time.

Otto Nagel during an exhibition in Berlin

After the end of the war, Otto Nagel lived and worked first in Bergholz-Rehbrücke near Potsdam , where a primary school was later named, from 1952 in Biesdorf . There is a street named after him , as well as a high school named after him, the Otto-Nagel-Gymnasium (ONG). Nagel was friends with the painter Ursula Wendorff-Weidt . One of Nagel's master students was Harald Metzkes , who founded the Berlin painting school .

Otto Nagel at the fifth party congress of the SED, July 10, 1958

In 1945 Otto Nagel was one of the founders of the Kulturbund . The forced unification of the SPD and KPD resulted in Nagel becoming a member of the SED in 1946 . The Kulturbund delegated him as a member of the Advisory Assembly of Brandenburg . He was also a member of the 1st and 2nd  People's Council of the Soviet Occupation Zone , the Provisional People's Chamber and then the People's Chamber of the GDR until 1954. During the formalism debate , Nagel warned of the dangers of an ideologically narrow-minded cultural policy that might a. directed against the supposed decadence of modernity. From 1956 to 1962 he was President of the Academy of the Arts of the GDR .

Grave of Otto Nagel and his wife Walli

He was married to Valentina ("Walli") Nagel. Otto Nagel was buried in the artist department of Berlin's central cemetery in Friedrichsfelde , and his tomb, created by Gerhard Thieme , is a listed building. His grave is the honor grave of the state of Berlin .

Awards

Otto Nagel received the Goethe Prize in 1957

Places of remembrance

Memorial plaque on the house at Reinickendorfer Strasse 67, in Berlin-Wedding

Works (selection)

In addition to portraits and studies from the lives of ordinary people, Otto Nagel mainly captured old Berlin in his drawings and paintings.

  • 1923: old worker
  • Self-portrait with a hat
  • 1929: Heinrich Zillon
  • 1931: Armed workers
  • 1935: The 70th birthday of the forest worker Scharf
  • 1936: Self-portrait in front of an empty easel
  • 1935–1937: Spreewald landscapes
  • 1937: Marktplatz , lost,
    rediscovered in Berlin in 2012
  • 1939–1945: Old Berlin Pictures - a pastel series
  • 1949: Self-portrait in profile
  • Portrait of a girl
  • Portrait of a young mason
  • mother and child
  • flutist
  • Illustrations for The White Taube or The Wet Triangle (Roman, Halle / Leipzig 1978; new edition: Berlin 2017)

Exhibitions

In 2012 there was the Otto Nagel (1894–1967) exhibition . Places - people in Biesdorf Palace in Berlin in cooperation with the Academy of Arts.

In 2008, the Mitte Museum in Berlin organized an Otto Nagel exhibition.

literature

  • Bernd-Rainer Barth :  Nagel, Otto . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Erhard Frommhold : Otto Nagel. Time, life, work. Berlin 1974.
  • Erhard Frommhold:  Nagel, Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 711 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Wolfgang Hütt : World of Art - Otto Nagel. Henschel Verlag. Art and Society, Berlin 1984.
  • Heinz Lüdecke: Contemporary Artists 1 - Otto Nagel , VEB Verlag der Kunst, Dresden, 1959
  • Walli Nagel: You mustn't do that! From Saint Petersburg to Berlin-Wedding. Memories , Wedding books / Verlag Walter Frey, Berlin 2018
  • Gerhard Pommeranz-Liedtke: Otto Nagel and Berlin , VEB Verlag der Kunst, Dresden, 1964
  • Brunhilde Wehinger: Afterword. In: Otto Nagel, The White Taube or The Wet Triangle , Wedding-Bücher / Verlag Walter Frey, Berlin 2017

Filmography

Web links

Commons : Otto Nagel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Berlin residents> Nagel, Carl; Carpenter> Reinickendorfer Str. 37 b . In: Address book for Berlin and its suburbs , 1900, I, p. 1079 (all other nail (s) have apartments in the east or south-east of Berlin).
  2. ↑ a b Carl-Peter Steinmann: Sunday walks 2 . Transit-Buchverlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-88747-286-3 , p. 28-29 .
  3. ↑ Neues Deutschland, May 2, 1979, p. 4
  4. ↑ Berlin state monument list: Otto Nagel grave
  5. ↑ Pictures at Artnet for auction. Retrieved December 17, 2012 .
  6. ^ Exhibition Otto Nagel in Schloss Biesdorf. Accessed in 2013 .
  7. ^ Otto Nagel - Berlin City Landscapes, Portraits and Documents. Mitte Museum Berlin, accessed on December 17, 2012 .
personal data
SURNAME Nagel, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, MdV
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Wedding
DATE OF DEATH July 12, 1967
Place of death Berlin-Biesdorf