Pitt Kreuzberg
Pitt Kreuzberg (born May 30, 1888 in Ahrweiler ; † February 21, 1966 in Bad Honnef ; actually Peter Josef Karl Hubert Kreuzberg ) was a German painter whose main work was close to Expressionism . The style of his late work can be interpreted as a forerunner of the Junge Wilde .
Life
Pitt Kreuzberg was born on May 30, 1888, the third of six children of the wine merchant Leopold Kreuzberg and his wife Maria, née Kreuzberg, in Ahrweiler. The family history of the Kreuzbergs can be traced back to the 18th century with the Jewish Seeligman family, who converted to Christianity in autumn 1763 (September 18 and October 30). Since the baptism takes place on the Kalvarienberg near Ahrweiler, the family takes, according to tradition, the name Creutzberg, from which the family names Kreuzberg, Kreutzberg and Creuzberg emerged in the following centuries. The four different spellings still mean that the painter Pitt Kreuzberg is sometimes written with “tz”.
Notable ancestors are the great-grandfather Georg Kreuzberg as the discoverer of the Apollinaris fountain and the Neuenahrer springs, the grandfather Anton Kreuzberg, director general of the Apollinaris fountain, and especially the nephew Harald Kreutzberg (1902–1968), who was one of the most famous expressive dancers of his time achieved worldwide fame.
Pitt Kreuzberg spent his childhood in Ahrweiler in a middle-class and well-to-do family. Father Leopold awakened a love of art and a bond with the Eifel in the young Kreuzberg at an early age . From 1894 to 1898 he attended the Latin and community school in Ahrweiler. In 1906 Kreuzberg produced the first traditional pen drawings.
In 1907 he switched to the grammar school in Brühl , where he stayed until he graduated from high school. In the same year, Kreuzberg applied at his own initiative to the Düsseldorf Art Academy , to which he was initially accepted, but which he had to leave the following year because he was said to have a lack of talent. From then on, Kreuzberg continued to train as an autodidact .
After losing the family fortune, the father Leopold Kreuzberg committed suicide on September 29, 1908 . Pitt is now financially on his own. After marrying Helene Gertrude Boosen, the young couple moved to Rosenheim in 1911 , where their son Claus was born on January 19, 1912 († March 14, 1980). Kreuzberg also lives in the mountains for a year, on the Tyrolean border. He works as a freelance artist and quickly finds a patron . For his first exhibitions, e.g. B. in the Munich art gallery , he gets positive reviews. The images preserved show stylistic influences from Art Nouveau . According to his own statements, Kreuzberg obtained his artistic impulses from visits to the Alte Pinakothek during this time . There would have been no contact with the Munich artist scene back then.
In 1913 the family moved to Schalkenmehren in the Eifel and lived there under the simplest conditions in the dance hall of an inn. In an interview, Kreuzberg justified this decision with the fact that he, the brooder, would find the necessary peace here to work. He was attracted by the "tremendous rhythm of the volcanic area, although it would have made him far away and therefore difficult to get into relationships".
Kreuzberg spent the years 1914 to 1917 as a soldier in the First World War on the western and eastern fronts. He is slow to recover from a serious infectious disease.
His daughter Theodora was born on November 8, 1919 († September 25, 2003).
After the war, Kreuzberg spends time in Düsseldorf . Since his art is too free for the Düsseldorf Art Association, he seeks proximity to the young Rhineland and Rhenish Secession artists' associations . There is evidence of close acquaintances with artists from the Düsseldorf scene, such as Gert Wollheim (1894–1974) and Erwin Wendt (1900–1951). In 1930 he took part in a collective exhibition in the Düsseldorf art gallery.
His pictures from the period between 1922 and 1932 are close to German Expressionism and are among his best works. On March 11, 1931, Kreuzberg, along with 66 other artists, resigned from the Malkasten artists' association in protest against the discrimination against Jewish artist colleagues .
At the invitation of a friend in 1933 he lived for some time in Scheveningen on the Dutch North Sea. During this time he created a series of very colorful, expressive pictures that were later acquired by a collector friend from Mayen . After a bomb attack, the pictures are rescued, but later all stolen at the recovery site.
The relationship between Kreuzberg and its rural environment is naturally difficult: on the one hand, the hard-working rural population who strive for their daily livelihood, on the other hand, the "unemployed" artist and adherent of strange worldviews (Kreuzberg was a follower of Steiner's teachings ). Women and children also suffer, not least because they suffer from reprisals ordered by the authorities . In his painting “Die Augen Überall”, Kreuzberg also depicts this conflict. The whole curious neighborhood crowd is represented as a being with eyes directed to all sides, which lets him find no rest.
But there are other things to report about the relationship between the family and the local population. While Kreuzberg was in Düsseldorf, his wife built a new house on the Schalkenmehrener Maar in 1930 with the support of the village community . Later, in difficult economic times, the family is always supported by friends and acquaintances. While Kreuzberg's art is not accessible to parts of the rural population or is simply priceless, as can still be seen today in many places, there is sometimes a lively barter trade - images for everyday goods.
The National Socialist dictatorship and the Second World War survives Kreuzberg no prohibition and no losses in the family. While the art of many of his Düsseldorf companions was branded as "degenerate" , he took part in numerous exhibitions. Artistically, this is the time of his large Eifel landscapes, flower pictures and depictions of human and animal bodies, sometimes combined with landscape pictures. Political statements cannot be found in his pictures.
The then NSDAP district leader Kölle rated the artistic work on the occasion of an exhibition in 1938 as follows: “... we hardly see anything in him of the expressionist landscape conception of a bygone era. His pictures are confessions to the German attitude towards landscape; however, the images are not all equal. A deep belief in nature speaks from the pictures ... "
Occasionally, his pictures offend those in power. The story of a picture has been passed down that Kreuzberg painted in 1937 as a commissioned work by the NSDAP for the HJ home in Daun . The work displeased the party leaders and was rejected as "degenerate". Influential friends, it is reported, were the ones who protected him from distress, including the Daun district administrator who had the picture hung in his office in 1940.
There is a historical record of an encounter between Kreuzberg and Joseph Goebbels in 1936 in Berlin . As a participant in a delegation from the district of Daun , well-known artists from the region personally present the Reich Minister with their works of art to thank him for the economic revitalization of the region, which was created by placing an order for the winter aid organization .
Outwardly perhaps adapted, Kreuzberg is a strict opponent of the regime, although as a cultural worker he has to belong to the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts from September 1933 . As an applicant, he must have the "small proof of parentage", i. H. have an Aryan certificate for himself and his wife Trudel, back to the grandparents' generation. A non-inclusion or exclusion would in fact have meant an occupation and exhibition ban. It is therefore wrong to derive a compulsory NSDAP membership from chamber membership, even if many artists were forced to join the party through informal pressure. A clarification request to the Federal Archives, which has 80 percent of the NSDAP membership file, was unsuccessful.
After an air raid on Daun in 1944, Trudel Kreuzberg helped with the clean-up work and suffered a mental and emotional breakdown. From now on she has to rely on intensive care from her husband.
In 1949, Pitt Kreuzberg suffered a minor stroke from which he fully recovered. The constant care of his wife is increasingly becoming a burden.
He is increasingly leaving the performing landscape painting and turning to new topics. Political thinking and religious scenes find their way into the artist's oeuvre. Two events in particular are decisive for this: the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the rearmament of Germany. Between 1954 and 1957 he produced a large number of charcoal and pen drawings, some of which were of the highest quality.
In 1957 an exhibition took place in the Electoral Palace in Trier on the occasion of Kreuzberg's 70th birthday, in which 70 paintings, watercolors and drawings were shown. This is his largest exhibition to date.
On December 24, 1958, Trudel Kreuzberg died of mental derangement. Pitt Kreuzberg's most productive creative period ends with her death. From 1959 a sudden change in his work can be seen.
The art expert and relative of Pitt Kreuzberg, Bernhard Kreutzberg, assessed the last creative period as follows: “What is now characteristic is the ecstatic, the passionate, the tempo, and also the willingness to leave some things to chance. The classification of this late phase is not clear. The interpretation remains subjective. You can see it as a kind of dissolution, but you can also see it as an anticipation of an artistic self-expression that has only been found in the present. The relationship with the paintings of the Junge Wilde in the eighties is unmistakable. As in any art movement, there are precursors. Pitt Kreuzberg seems to be a forerunner of the present in art when it comes to his old work. "
After a severe attack of angina pectoris , the daughter Theodora takes her father to live in Bad Honnef , where he dies on February 21, 1966. Following his request, the corpse is driven back through the Eifel to his adopted home of Schalkenmehren, where he is buried in an honorary grave in the cemetery on Totenmaar on February 25th .
Pictures of the Pitt Kreuzberg are available to the public at the Vulkaneifel district administration.
Works
Women with newborn
Goache on white watercolor paper
24.2 × 22.3 cm
unsigned and dated (around 1916)
»Kornreife«
pastel on gray paper
50.8 × 36.3 cm
signed and dated lower right »P. Kreuzberg 22. «
Swans in the snow
tempera on plywood
58 × 55 cm
signed and dated lower left "Pitt Kreuzberg 1948"
Tempera on canvas on plywood
80.3 × 70 cm,
signed and dated lower right »Pitt 56«
Petrus' fish haul
Tempera on plywood
42 × 28 cm
unsigned and dated (around 1956)
Descent from the Cross
tempera on plywood
42 × 28 cm
signed and dated lower right »Pitt 56«
»Reife«
tempera on canvas on plywood
90.5 × 60.5 cm
signed lower right »Pitt« (around 1958)
»Apotheosis«
tempera and oil on chipboard
75 × 48 cm
signed and dated lower right »Pitt 66«
literature
- Bernhard Kreutzberg (ed.): Pitt Kreuzberg. A painter's life. , Catalog for the exhibition of the ARE artists' guild, Bad Neuenahr / Ahrweiler 1963
- Franz-Josef Ferber: Pitt Kreuzberg on the 100th birthday , In: Conrad-Peter Joist (ed.). Landscape painter of the Eifel in the 20th century . Eifelverein Verlag: Düren 1997, pp. 79–82
- Conrad-Peter Joist: Pitt Kreuzberg (Peter Joseph Karl Hubert Kreuzberg). In: Conrad-Peter Joist (ed.): Landscape painter of the Eifel in the 20th century [short biography], Eifelverein Verlag, Düren 1997, pp. 83–84
- Hans Joachim Bodenbach: Encounters with Eifel painters - A family story . In: Neues Trierisches Jahrbuch 2000, Volume 40 - Volume 51, old series - Trier 2000, pp. 247–268, here: pp. 255–261, with color plate IV
- Heike Wernz-Kaiser (ed.): Pitt Kreuzberg. A painter in the Eifel . Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler 2007, ISBN 978-3-00-022785-1
- Ute Bales : Under the big sky. Pitt Kreuzberg - Story of an Unwavering One . Roman, Rhein-Mosel-Verlag 2012, ISBN 978-3-89801-057-3
Web links
- Artist homepage at http://www.eifel-und-kunst.de/
- Pitt Kreuzberg -Life and Afterlife by Hartmuth Flothmann
- Exhibition for the 120th birthday of Pitt Kreuzberg
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kreuzberg, Pitt |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Kreuzberg, Peter Josef Karl Hubert |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German expressionist painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 30, 1888 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Ahrweiler (Rhineland-Palatinate) |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 21, 1966 |
| Place of death | Bad Honnef (Rhineland-Palatinate) |