Otto Thiele

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Painter Otto Thiele

Otto Karl Albert Thiele (born March 27, 1870 in Rackitt in the Cammin district , Western Pomerania ; † December 20, 1955 in Bonn ) was a German painter .

Life

Thiele was born on March 27, 1870 in the forester's house in Rackitt (today Rokita ) in Western Pomerania. He was the sixth child of eleven siblings. His father Julius Thiele was - like his grandfather - the forester of a large estate. His mother Elwine, b. Reinholz, also came from a forester's household. There was no special artistic stimulus in the family, but his sister Maria was married to the artistically gifted drawing teacher Paul Stampa (1858–1933) at the Stargarder Gymnasium.

Because of his short-sightedness, Thiele was unsuitable for a career as a forester. His father sent the 18-year-old to train for a civil service career at the Reichspost in Barth on the West Pomeranian Baltic coast. After completing his training, he was transferred to Berlin . He was assigned to night duty there. Since the night hours counted one and a half times, he had time during the day to look around galleries and museums. He bought oils and watercolors and mainly began to paint still lifes .

He soon realized that he was not getting on like this. So he went to the young landscape painter Max Uth . With him he learned to paint figures, interiors and landscapes. He then came to the Norwegian painter Adelsteen Normann . With him he went on a summer and study trip to Lofoten. From 1896 he attended the Berlin Royal Academy of Arts in addition to his service with the Reichspost . Otto Thiele was a student of Lovis Corinth , Martin Brand and Max Klein for a long time .

In 1902 he met his future wife Katharina (Käthe) Lange, who belonged to a wealthy family. It enabled him to devote more time to his studies, which he completed in 1906. He retired from the Post Office for health reasons and since then has devoted himself exclusively to painting, from which the couple could live from now on. They had two children: Klaus in 1910 and Eva in 1915.

After a bombing raid on Berlin during the Second World War , he was evacuated on 23 August 1943 with his family, household and studio to Stargard in Western Pomerania. With the approach of the Russian army he had to leave Stargard. 500 to 600 paintings and studies from his studio there have since been lost. Members of the Soviet army are said to have thrown the pictures on the street in Stargard in the spring of 1945.

The turmoil at the end of the war brought the Thieles, completely penniless, to Egestorf in the Nordheide , where they were well received. Here he found a new home again.

At the end of 1955 he visited his daughter in Bonn , where he died on December 20th. He was buried next to his wife Käthe, who died in 1951, in the New Cemetery in Egestorf, where the grave can still be found today.

In 1995, 2005 and 2015 the Egestorf homeland association held memorial exhibitions in Dressler's Hus in Egestorf.

Create

French impressionism , which dissolved the representational forms into patches of color and reflections of light, had a decisive influence on his artistic work.

Otto Thiele was in the portrait category of Lovis Corinth at the Art Academy. His pictures were regularly included by the jury in the Great Berlin Art Exhibition , including a picture of the Berlin Flower Market Hall. To which Max Liebermann said: "I wish I had painted the picture." Max Liebermann's artistic attitude remained exemplary for Otto Thiele. He was a member of the Association of Berlin Artists . In 1924 he was appointed to the exhibition commission for the Great Berlin Art Exhibition.

Several large-format paintings were created in the Berlin Flower Market Hall. Seven pre-war versions are still known. After the war he painted a colorful flower market hall for a couple of teachers in Egestorf and for a client from Berlin.

He went on study trips to Germany , Norway , Holland , Switzerland and Italy . This resulted u. a. City views of Scheveningen , Dordrecht , Stockholm , Prague , Madrid and Venice , low mountain landscapes in Franconian Switzerland and the Giant Mountains , mountain landscapes in Norway, Switzerland and Italy, southern landscapes in Provence and Spain .

Berlin motifs particularly attracted him, so he created pictures of the banks of the Spree, loading bays with smoking steamers and snow-covered boats, of the traffic on Berlin streets, the department stores and the market halls. He was particularly fond of the market halls because they had so much to say in terms of color. In the large flower market hall on Friedrichstrasse in particular, he captured many motifs with their play of colors in the flowers and the light effects of the fronts made of industrial glazing and architecture.

In the 1920s he received an order from Siemens-Bauunion to paint the Schwarzbachtalsperre in the Black Forest . This is how works from the Dynamowerk at Siemens-Schuckert in Berlin, port facilities and the interior and exterior of Dutch residential buildings were created.

The Prussian state and the city of Berlin bought u. a. for their museums the paintings: "The winter landscape near Angermünde", "The Berlin Humboldthafen" and "The Steglitzer Park".

In 1930, at the invitation of Westermannmonthshefte and Lufthansa, on the occasion of their 75th anniversary , he traveled with a Junkers plane from Berlin-Tempelhof with several stopovers to Madrid. He remembered: “The painter's eye is cheering, the brush just dances across the cardboard.” The plane was still slow enough that he managed to capture some “aerial photos” in pastel, watercolor and oil paint.

Life in Berlin in the 1910s and 1920s was eventful. Contacts and friendships etc. a. to the painter Louis Lejeune , Gerhart Hauptmann or the brother Carl Hauptmann were cultivated. He visited the Hauptmann family's summer residence in Agnetendorf in Silesia a total of eight times to paint there.

In the last ten years of his life in Egestorf, many pictures were initially created to be exchanged for natural produce, which are still in the possession of the population in and around Egestorf. This resulted in many - mostly small-format - pictures with motifs from the village, portraits of people from the surrounding area, village life and the heathland surrounding the village.

Works (selection)

  • 1894 portrait of his father (first known work)
  • Daughter Eva Thiele on ice skates
  • Flower wholesale market hall Berlin
  • In Provence
  • Cervantes Court in Toledo
  • About Castile
  • Giant Mountains
  • Rieckmanns yard with refugee truck
  • Humboldt Harbor , 1916
  • Winter , 1917
  • Evening in the Mark , 1928
  • city ​​Park

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Brochure: Art exhibition in Egestorf / Nordheide in August 2005 "OTTO THIELE 1870–1955" , self-published by Volkrat Stampa with the participation of Eva Thiele and Marlies Schwanitz.
  2. ^ Standesamt Berlin-Tegel, Register No. 37 on September 24, 1903.
  3. ↑ a b AdK / VBK archive no. Verein BK 567 (letters and letters from OttoThiele).
  4. ^ Resident register of the municipality of Egestorf.
  5. ^ Exhibition catalog: Great Berlin Art Exhibition 1924 in the State Exhibition Building at Am Lehrter Bahnhof.
  6. ↑ Friedrich Düsel in booklet Masters of Color. No. VIII, 1918, Verlag EA Seemann Leipzig.
personal data
SURNAME Thiele, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thiele, Otto Karl Albert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Rackitt , Cammin i. Pom.
DATE OF DEATH December 20, 1955
Place of death Bonn