Paul Citroen

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Paul Citroen (1981)
Postage stamps designed by Paul Citroen

Paul Citroen (born December 15, 1896 in Berlin ; † March 13, 1983 in Wassenaar ) was a painter , draftsman , photographer and art educator who spent most of his life in the Netherlands.

Life

Paul Citroen was born as the child of a Dutch-Jewish couple in Berlin, where his father ran the fur manufacture and fur store " AB Citroen " on Werderscher Markt . From 1908 to 1910 he attended the Askanische Gymnasium in Berlin, with the later photographer Erwin Blumenfeld as a classmate. He showed artistic and commercial talent early on. In 1915 he began an apprenticeship as a bookseller. Through Georg Muche's contact , with whom he had previously studied painting and sculpture in Berlin-Charlottenburg from 1912 to 1914, he met Herwarth Walden and set up the Sturm art bookstore for him and then went on as the official representative of Storm in the Netherlands in 1917.

Through Walden he made the acquaintance of the members of the Dada group in 1918 and, inspired by his friend Erwin Blumenfeld, created his first “adhesive pictures” ( photo montage ) from 1919 onwards . Blumenfeld married Paul's cousin Lena Citroen (1896–1990) in 1921.

On the advice of Georg Muche, Paul Citroen continued his artistic training and studied at the Weimar Bauhaus from 1922 to 1924 , where he took Johannes Itten's preliminary course . In 1923 he supported Paul Klee in organizing the first major Bauhaus exhibition. His photo collage Metropolis was part of the exhibition.

Otto Umbehr (Umbo) and Marianne Breslauer , both of whom he knew from the Bauhaus, brought him closer to photography, one after the other, back in Berlin. Through Breslauer, who portrayed him several times, he also met Werner Rohde , with whom he had a lifelong friendship.

After temporary stays in Paris and Basel, he finally moved to Amsterdam in 1927. On December 18, 1929 Paul Citroen married the sister of the painter Jacob Bendien, Celine (Lien) nee Bendien. The couple moved into a house on the Kerkstraat in Amsterdam where Jacob Bendien had his studio. As a wedding present, his parents gave him a camera ( 6 × 9 format ). He earned his living by taking portraits. In 1930 his daughter Paulien Charlotte Lena was born.

A first exhibition of his photographs took place in Amsterdam in 1932.

In 1933, together with Charles Roelofsz, he founded a free art academy based on the Bauhaus methods : the Nieuwe Kunstschool . This institute, which had to close in 1937 due to a lack of financial resources, was finally dissolved in 1943 by the National Socialists , who occupied the Netherlands at the time, as degenerate .

From 1935 onwards, Citroen was also a teacher of evening courses in advertising at the Art Academy in The Hague ; in 1936 he moved to Wassenaar on Oostdorperweg 100. In 1937 he was appointed professor of painting at the Art Academy in The Hague. As in the Nieuwe Kunstschool , he taught in the Bauhaus style, which was considered an innovation in Dutch art classes. Among other things, he was Toon Wegner's teacher there.

On November 23, 1940, Paul Citroen was released as a lecturer at the academy. He was one of the two teachers who were dismissed from their function by the appointed Reich Commissioner for the occupied Dutch territories during the war years because they had Jewish blood . Citroen went underground with his family in 's-Graveland (North Holland) until 1944 . From 1945 to 1960 Paul taught again at the Art Academy in The Hague.

As a member of the Pulchri Studio company, among other things, Citroen maintained contacts with the important writers and artists of the Netherlands. For example, he illustrated The King Is Dead by young Cees Noteboom (1961). He also portrayed German and international personalities in cultural life in photographs (as well as drawings), such as JJP Oud , Oskar Kokoschka , Thomas Mann (and his children), Max Ernst , Ossip Zadkine , Yehudi Menuhin , Benjamin Britten , Darius Milhaud , John Cage , Curt Bois and many others.

In 1956 there was a first retrospective of his graphic and then painting work, first in the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag , then in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and other cities in the Netherlands. The first solo exhibition of his works was in 1971 in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn and in 1973 photographs by Citroen were in the exhibition Medium Photography. Photo works by visual artists 1910–1973 can be seen in the Leverkusen Museum Schloss Morsbroich . In the following year he was again with paintings in the National Museums in Berlin on realism and objectivity. Aspects of German art 1919–1933 represented.

His wife Lien Citroen-Bendien died on August 22, 1961. In March 1964 he married again, to Christi Frisch. Citroen had already moved to Wassenaar in 1960 , where he died in 1983 at the age of 86.

Works

Paul Citroen is best known as a draftsman. In the Hague Letterkundig Museum (Literature Museum ) there are 49 portraits of important authors. He is also recognized as a photographer. His negative archive has been in the possession of the Kupferstichkabinett of the Leiden University Library since 1986 . In 1923 he created his most famous works, the photo collages Großstadt and Metropolis , which Fritz Lang is said to have inspired for the film of the same name . Ref?

Between 1947 and 1949 he also designed stage sets for the Nederlandse Opera , ceramics and postage stamps for the Dutch Post (1948 special stamps for children's aid and 1949 for sport).

family

His father was the Amsterdam-born Hendrik Roelof Citroen (1865-1932) and was the owner of the fur factory and fur store "AB Citroen" at Werderscher Markt 7 in Berlin. His mother Ellen (Eileen), a née Philippi (1872–1945) came from a Jewish family in Berlin. The parents lived at Derfflingerstraße 21 from 1910 to 1932 . Hendrik Citroen died in Berlin on October 9, 1932. Mother Ellen stayed in the Netherlands during the Second World War, was deported from Amsterdam on January 1, 1945 to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and died there on January 6, 1945.

Paul Citroen had two sisters and a brother:

  • Charlotte Lena Pauline Hendrik Citroen (1894–1912) was only 18 years old.
  • Ilse Luise Citroen-Ledermann (1904–1943), was murdered with her husband Franz Ledermann (born 1889) and daughter Susanne (born 1928) on November 19, 1943 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp .
  • Hans Albert Hendrik Citroen (1905 – early 1985), later in Israel under the new name Chanan Cidor, was able to flee to Paris in 1933, where he started his own fur business, and in 1942 with his wife, the Bauhausler Ruth Cidor-Citroën and three children in escaped from Switzerland, he later became Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands.

Web links

literature

  • Retrospective photography: Paul Citroen . Edition Marzona, Bielefeld, Düsseldorf 1978.
  • Jeannine Fiedler (Ed.): Photography at the Bauhaus . Dirk Nischen, Berlin 1990. ISBN 3-88940-045-0 .
  • Hans-Michael Koetzle: The Lexicon of Photography 1900 to today . Knaur, Munich 2002, pp. 88-89. ISBN 978-3-4266-6479-7 .
  • Herbert Molderings: Paul Citroen. Painter, photographer and photo fitter . In: ders .: The modern age of photography . Philo Fine Arts, Hamburg 2008, pp. 337–352. ISBN 978-3-86572-635-3

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Klaus Honnef, Frank Weyers: And you left Germany ... had to. Photographers and their pictures 1928–1997, exhibition catalog, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, PROAG, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-932584-02-3 . P. 106.
  2. ^ Paul Citroen: "... photographing?" (1977) In: Retrospective photography: Paul Citroen, Edition Marzona, Bielefeld / Düsseldorf 1978, p. 7f.
  3. ↑ Paul Citroen: "... photograph?" (1977) In: Retrospective photography: Paul Citroen, Edition Marzona, Bielefeld / Düsseldorf 1978, p. 5 f.
  4. ^ A b Paul Citroen: "... photographing?" (1977) In: Retrospective photography: Paul Citroen, Edition Marzona, Bielefeld / Düsseldorf 1978, p. 6.
  5. ^ Jeannine Fiedler (Ed.): Photography at the Bauhaus, Dirk Nischen, Berlin 1990, p. 343.
  6. ^ Retrospective photography: Paul Citroen, Edition Marzona, Bielefeld / Düsseldorf 1978, p. 12f.
  7. ↑ Due to legal concerns, only a reference to the English article on Citroen, where Metropolis is shown.
  8. ^ Retrospective photography: Paul Citroen, Edition Marzona, Bielefeld / Düsseldorf 1978, p. 11.
  9. ^ Commemorative sheet: Ellen Citroen
  10. ↑ Anja von Cysewski: Afterword . In: Ruth Cidor-Citroën: From the Bauhaus to Jerusalem: Stations of a Jewish life in the 20th century . P. 268.
personal data
SURNAME Citroen, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Citroen, Paul Roelof Hendrik
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch painter, draftsman and photographer
DATE OF BIRTH December 15, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 13, 1983
Place of death Wassenaar