Richard Grune

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Richard Grune (born August 2, 1903 in Flensburg , † November 26, 1984 in Kiel ) was a German painter and graphic artist.

life and work

Grune was born in Flensburg in 1903. He initially trained as a commercial artist at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Kiel and then completed two preparatory courses with Johannes Litten at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922/1923 without being accepted. It is unclear whether he also - as his sister Grunes remembers - took courses with Paul Klee , Wassily Kandinsky , Oskar Schlemmer and Lyonel Feininger . The Kieler Volkszeitung predicted a hopeful future for him on the occasion of his first exhibition in Kiel in 1926. Grune visited Edvard Munch in Norway in 1927 and introduced himself as an "artist of the new generation". In 1927, as artistic director, together with Nils Brodersen, he designed and designed the art educational concept of the "Seekamp Children's Republic" in Kiel-Schilksee ; an educational reform experiment to educate working-class children in democracy. The "Children's Republic" received positive attention throughout the country and set standards for many subsequent initiatives. Grune published books and worked closely with the Friends of Nature movement and the working class youth . In 1933 he moved to Berlin .

Grune worked there on an anti-Nazi newspaper project. Because of his homosexuality he was arrested at the beginning of December 1934 and from then on, with brief interruptions until shortly before the end of the war, was alternately in prisons and concentration camps . At the end of April 1945 he was able to flee the death march from Flossenbürg to Dachau and find his way to his sister Dorothea (called Dolly) Cornelius, who was later married to the Kiel photographer Peter Cornelius .

During his imprisonment he had secretly drawn everyday life in the camp, the suffering of the concentration camp inmates, their everyday life and their death, but also their solidarity. And he had also portrayed the perpetrators. On March 2, 1946, with the support of the city of Kiel , he was able to open his exhibition The Outcasts in the House of Farmers in Sophienblatt 32-34 (now the Sophienhof is located there ). It was the first official art exhibition in Kiel after the war. On the night of April 1, 1946, his exhibited works were completely destroyed when the exhibition rooms were broken into. The fact could not be solved.

Grune was the first artist who made the concentration camp sufferings public after the war and confronted society with the horrors of the concentration camp. exhibited his concentration camp lithographs in various cities (Lüneburg, Nuremberg, Munich, Kiel, Flensburg), but was then unable to gain a foothold again, either artistically or economically. The homosexual section of the Criminal Code ( Section 175 ) remained in force unchanged in the Federal Republic until 1969; therefore Grune was denied recognition as a victim of National Socialism. Then his track is lost. From 1955 he lived and worked in Spain (Barcelona) and tried new artistic formats. In 1962 Grune moved to Hamburg, did a lot of drawing and had smaller illustration assignments, otherwise worked as a construction worker and finally died almost forgotten in 1984 in a nursing home in Kiel. Grune drew until the end of his life; It is noticeable that he only ever chose people as a motif and that the size of his drawings was ultimately only stamp-sized.

Green works can now be found in many international museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem.

Works (selection)

  • 1929 Worker athletes demonstrate on the Nuremberg main market
  • 1934 Illustration in a short break
  • 1940 Sachsenhausen camp song book
  • 1945 In prisoner district 9-10 (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg)
  • 1945 Hanged woman (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg)
  • 1945 Hanged in front of the Christmas tree (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg)
  • 1945 Crucifixion (Archive of Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial)

Exhibitions

  • 1926: Kunsthalle Kiel
  • September 1945: Roter Str. 7, Lüneburg
  • January 1946: Franconian Gallery, Nuremberg
  • March 1946: Farmers' House, Kiel
  • March 1946: Home of the Bavarian Red Cross, Munich
  • August 1946: Erlangen Orangery, Erlangen
  • Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 , Museum of Modern Art , New York , July 29 to November 5, 2012

literature

  • Rolf Fischer : The radical life. The Kiel painter Richard Grune and his time, 1903–1984 , Kiel: Ludwig [2019] (special publications by the Society for Kiel City History; 89), ISBN 3-86935-355-4 .
  • Thomas Röske: Sexualized suffering. On some of the lithographs by Richard Grune , in: IMAGO, Gießen 2013, pp. 155–167.
  • Ulrich Schulte-Wülwer: Richard Grune. In: ders .: Kiel artist. Volume 3: In the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism 1918-1945 , Heide: Boyens 2019 (special publications by the Society for Kiel City History; 88), ISBN 978-3-8042-1493-4 , pp. 184-192.
  • Hans Simon-Pelanda: memory. An exhibition. Art in the Flossenbürg concentration camp , Ingolstadt 1996, ISBN 3-9802831-8-6 .
  • Hans Simon-Pelanda: Art and concentration camps . Artists in the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp and in the satellite camps, Bonn 2002 (giving your voice a hearing; 3), ISBN 3-89144-332-3 .
  • Andreas Sternweiler: ... he kept himself alive by drawing. The artist Richard Grune , in: Homosexual men in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-86149-097-8 , pp. 190–206.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Grune, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH August 2, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Flensburg
DATE OF DEATH November 26, 1984
Place of death Kiel