Otto Rodewald

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Otto Rodewald painting, oil on wood
Otto Rodewald, Bathing Boys, oil on canvas

Otto Rodewald (born October 3, 1891 in Schöningen ; † March 27, 1960 in Hamburg ) was a German painter and graphic artist and member of the Hamburg Secession .

life and work

Youth and education

Otto Rodewald came from a merchant family from Schöningen. He himself described his school days at the Helmstedter Gymnasium as not very educational and successful. He liked to explore the great outdoors and later remembered his first drawings, which he made lying on his stomach on the forest floor. From 1909 he was a student at the Landeskunstschule Hamburg and studied in his five years of training together with Alexander Friedrich and Anne-Marie Vogler, among others . One of his teachers was Carl Otto Czeschka , whose designs based on Viennese Art Nouveau inspired his early graphics. In 1910 Rodewald won second prize in the competition for the design of monograms and signets.

First World War and first creative years

In the war years 1914–1918 Otto Rodewald served as a member of a storm battalion . The impressions and experiences from this time shaped the drawings, etchings and woodcuts from the years 1918/1919. He suffered all his life from the consequences of serious injuries and blue cross poisoning .

After the war Rodewald set up his studio on the seventh floor of a house in Sierichstrasse in Hamburg, where the painting “Wunderwald” was created in 1919. In a later letter he wrote: "It was only necessary to build walls around me from color and shape, to get rid of what had been and to be able to lift my head again."

In 1921 he took part in an exhibition of the Hamburg Secession and, through the intermediary of the Kunsthalle director Gustav Pauli, received a scholarship and contact with one of his first buyers, the banker Paul Michael Mendel (1873–1942), with whom he was a deep friend. Rodewald was able to finance his stay in a lung sanatorium in Davos through the first sales . In the years 1921–1923 he created his graphic cycle “Clouds and Mountains”, in which he described the atmospheric changes in the high mountains in several pressure stages. His former college friend Alexander Friedrich supported him with the priming and etching.

Hamburg and distant countries

In 1925 the Hamburg Senate bought graphic and etching plates from him in order to enable him to take another cure in the south. In addition to a group of collectors in Hamburg, his works also found their way to museums and galleries throughout Germany. He was a co-founder of the “Die Insel” art club and, from 1928, after having participated in several exhibitions, was a permanent member of the Hamburg Secession. He was also a member of the Hamburg Art Association . Over the years his work has repeatedly been affected by health problems.

From the end of the twenties Rodewald undertook trips to the Mediterranean region, Africa and the Middle East, financially supported by the Amsinck Foundation, among others. He painted pictures, the formal design of which can be assigned to Magical Realism and New Objectivity .

From 1929 to 1931 he lived in Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia .

He married his student Charlotte Thiede (1917–1979) in his second marriage.

"Degenerate Art" campaign and activities after 1945

In 1933 the last exhibition of the Hamburg Secession was closed by the National Socialists. During the “ Degenerate Art ” campaign in 1937, works by Otto Rodewald, including the painting “Morning”, a watercolor and three etchings from the Hamburger Kunsthalle, fell victim to the raids. Despite his inner rejection of the Nazi ideology, he worked on several murals with war themes for an infantry and an artillery barracks in Hamburg on behalf of the Army Construction Administration in 1937/38. He depicted the wars of freedom in original costumes, but also modern trench warfare, the material battle of the First World War and a history of the development of the gun. In an interview with Hugo Sieker , he said he was pleased about the possibility of “getting walls and painting pictures for real needs, not just for a few gourmets”. After the Second World War, Rodewald and his wife were dependent on their salary. “Rodewald belonged to a group of Frondeurs. After 1945, he designed a new weekly newspaper in his studio on Sierichstrasse: ' Die Zeit '. ”Together with Erich Hartmann , Herbert Spangenberg and Hans Martin Ruwoldt , Rodewald was elected to the board of the re-establishment of the Hamburg Secession in 1948. In the fifties he traveled again to Italy, Greece and Turkey. In 1957 he made three large murals for a Marienburg memorial in the Museum of Hamburg History on behalf of the Hamburg cultural authority. The pictures were whitewashed or destroyed during the general renovation of the house, as were the murals in the House of Sports from 1951.

In 1960 Otto Rodewald died of complications from appendicitis . He was buried in the Ohlsdorf cemetery northeast of Chapel 2 (grid square W20, 120-22). The grave site no longer exists, the grave stone (W20, 120-2) for his wife Charlotte Eisler-Rodewald, born in 1979, who died in 1979. Tiede, has been in the women's garden cemetery area since June 2020 .

Exhibitions (selection)

  • From 1920 participation in exhibitions of the Hamburg Secession
  • 1927 European contemporary art , Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg
  • 1928, 1930, 1933, 1955, 1958 Griffelkunst eV
  • 1945 Exhibition of the Hamburg Secession
  • 1951 Painting-Watercolors-Graphics , Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg
  • 1961 Monographic exhibition in the Hamburg artist club "Die Insel"
  • 1970 Kunsthaus Hamburg, Alexander Friedrich, Otto Rodewald, Heinrich Stegmann
  • 2016 exhibition room 1112, Rudolf Steiner Haus Am Mittelweg, Hamburg
  • 2019 work of the week , Hamburger Kunsthalle

Collections

  • Hamburger Kunsthalle
  • Altona Museum
  • Stylus art e. V. Hamburg

literature

  • Maike Bruhns: Art in Crisis . Dölling and Galitz, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-933374-93-6 .
  • Volker Detlef Heydorn: Otto Rodewald, Heinrich Stegemann, Alexander Friedrich. Hamburg 1970.
  • Lieselotte Kruglewsky-Anders (Ed.): 50 Years of the Griffelkunstvereinigung. Art education in the spirit of Lichtwark . Edition Griffelkunst, Hamburg 1977, DNB  780616014 .
  • Fritz Herbert Lehr: clouds and mountains. In: Die Kunst, Volume 51/1925, p. 251.
  • Friederike Weimar: The Hamburg Secession: 1919–1933 . History and dictionary of artists. Verlag Atelier im Bauernhaus, Fischerhude 2003, ISBN 3-88132-258-2 .
  • Willi Wolfradt: Otto Rodewald. In: Die Kunst, monthly for free and applied arts, volume 63/1931, pp. 318-320.
  • Der Kreis, magazine for artistic culture. Organ der Hamburger Bühne, Volume 3, January 1926, Issue 1, pp. 254-259.
  • German Art and Decoration, Volume 27, Darmstadt 1910/11, p. 88.
  • German Art and Decoration, Volume 33, Darmstadt 1913/14, p. 404.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Letter from 1924.
  2. Ibid.
  3. ^ Rita Bake: Charlotte Thiede Eisler-Rodewald. In: Database of women's biographies in Hamburg . City of Hamburg, accessed on August 23, 2020 (biography).
  4. Friederike Weimar: The Hamburg Secession: 1919–1933 . History and dictionary of artists. Verlag Atelier im Bauernhaus, Fischerhude 2003, ISBN 3-88132-258-2 .
  5. ^ Die Insel, catalog for the 1961 exhibition.
  6. Hamburger Abendblatt, No. 164 of July 18, 1957, p. 7.
  7. ^ Petra Schmolinske: Ohlsdorf and the artists of the secession. In: Ohlsdorf - magazine for mourning culture. Förderkreis Ohlsdorfer Friedhof, November 2019, accessed on 23 August 2020 (for the location of Otto Rodewald's grave, see below).
  8. Former grave site on the interactive map of Ohlsdorf