Roland Hettner

Roland Hettner , also Rolando Hettner (born October 26, 1905 in Florence , † January 7, 1978 in Vaprio d'Adda ), was a German - Italian painter and ceramist .

Life

Rolando Hettner was born into a family of artists and intellectuals and spent his childhood in Florence. His father was the Dresden painter and sculptor Otto Hettner , his mother Jeanne Alexandrine, née Thibert (1878–1958), was French.

In 1913 the family went back to Dresden and his father taught there at the Academy of Fine Arts . The young Hettner initially dealt with ceramics, from 1920 to 1924 he attended the ceramics school in Landshut , but then soon decided to paint.

From 1929 to 1931 Roland Hettner was a student of Werner Heuser and Heinrich Campendonk at the Düsseldorf Art Academy . From Campendonck he learned the mastery of the figure composition composed of colored surfaces, which he was brought closer to him later in Milan by Carlo Carrà .

In 1930 Roland Hettner married Marfried Salomon (1907–1985) from Hamburg. In 1931 Roland Hettner went to the art academy in Dresden and was a master student of Otto Dix . In 1933, like Dix, he was expelled from the academy after the National Socialists came to power .

From 1933 to 1936 study trips to the Baltic States , Ticino , Italy and first exhibitions followed. After the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, his wife Marfried was considered a “ full Jew ”. Therefore he was advised to get a divorce. Hettner refused to do this, and in 1936, prompted by the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts , he was officially banned from painting and exhibiting in Germany. The divorce was officially carried out. He had no choice but to go into exile in Italy with his wife Marfried and his three-year-old son Florian, who was born on July 3, 1934. When he arrived in Italy, he settled in Milan in 1937 , where two friends from Dresden, the journalist Joachim Krull and the art critic Erich E. Baumbach, were staying. There, Roland Hettner found a connection with the Corrente group , whose magazine Ernesto Treccani published and which had its headquarters in Via Spiga in 1938. Roland Hettner took part in various exhibitions.

In 1943, the year Italy entered World War II , Roland Hettner was denounced in Italy for " racial disgrace "; his wife Marfried and son Floriano were identified as "foreign Jews" and interned in Brienza . Marfried Hettner received permission to go to Rome , allegedly in order to obtain a visa to travel to Brazil , and worked there secretly as an extra in Cinecittà (film studio). He went into hiding in several places until he followed his wife to Rome. After the liberation of Rome, Roland Hettner made contact with activists of the Resistance and worked as an illustrator for two new magazines, Folla and Il Cosmopolita .

In 1945 he returned to Milan to his studio on the devastated Via Rugabella and separated from his wife. In Milan he worked as an illustrator for Elio Vittorini's magazine , called Il Politecnico , but the wages were so poor that it was necessary to find work elsewhere. When Gabbianelli , a major manufacturer of ceramics, offered Roland Hettner a job, he accepted it. This allowed him to work in a field of art that he had learned in Germany before studying painting. Due to the privations of exile, he fell ill with tuberculosis and had to give up this promising activity. He went to a sanatorium in Cernusco Lombardone for a few months . With his second wife, Giuseppina Repuzzi, called José, he settled near Como in 1947 . There he bought an old mill and converted it into a ceramic factory. In the fifties, after obtaining his Italian citizenship, he was considered one of the leading ceramists in Italy, and in 1951 he received the gold medal at the IX. Triennial Milan.

From 1953 to 1958 he continued his ceramic work in Milan. He has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the USA and has received several awards. Since 1958 he has been mainly concerned with painting. He taught art classes at the experimental school of Oulx (Province of Turin) using innovative teaching methods and thus contributed significantly to the reform of art teaching in Italian secondary schools. Further teaching activities were at the Scuola Umanitaria (Milan) and at the Scuola d'Arte Cantù (Province of Como).

In 1967 he retired to an old farmhouse in Vario d'Adda near Milan and concentrated his remaining energies on the extreme forms of expression of Expressionism. He died there on January 7, 1978. His son Floriano Hettner (1934–2004) became an architect and lived, like his mother Marfried, on Ischia .

Exhibitions (selection)

• 1939: Paintings and watercolors, joint exhibition with the German painter and draftsman Martin Ritter (1905–2001), Zoagli (Genoa)
• 1942: Painting, Galleria Del Vivaio, Milan partecipazione mostra collettiva
• 1947–1958: various exhibitions of pottery
• 1976: Drawings and gouaches from 1932 to 1975, Holly Gallery, Milan
• 1976: Paintings and graphics, Arengario, Milan
• 1983: Rolando Hettner, un espressionista dimenticato, Fondazione Corrente, Milan
• 1984: Rolando Hettner, testimonianza artistica e di vita di un grande espressionista, Mixo Astrolabio, Bergamo
• 1985: Rolando Hettner un espressionista tedesco in Italia, library, Trezzo d'Adda (Bergamo)
• 1986: Disegni della Resistenza 1941-1945, permanent exhibition in the Castello di Trezzo, Trezzo d'Adda (Bergamo)
• 1986: Paintings and graphics, Centro Parete, Lissone (Milan)
• 1995: Omaggio a Rolando Hettner, paintings and graphics, Villa Castelbarco-Albani, Vaprio d'Adda (Milan)
• 1995: precarious refuge - refuge on revocation, artists and intellectuals the Germans in Italy 1933–1945, Palazzo della Ragione, Milan
• 1995: precarious refuge - refuge on revocation, artists and intellectuals the Germans in Italy 1933–1945, Akademie der Künste, Berlin
• 1995: between Dix students, near and far, art collection in the orangery, Gera
• 1995: between Dix students, near and far, Otto Dix House , Hemmenhofen
• 1995: Roland Hettner, Villa Breda, Italian-German cultural institute
• 2001: Rolando Hettner - painting and graphics, Leonhardi Museum, Dresden
• 2005: Roland Hettner - painting, graphics and collages , Galerie Finckenstein, Dresden (on the occasion of the artist's 100th birthday)

literature

• Erich Baumbach: The painter Roland Hettner - Le Peintre Roland Hettner , Campografico Editions, Milan, 1939.
• Antonello Negri, Klaus Voigt: Rolando Hettner un Tedesco Italiano, dall'esilio all'integrazione, graphics 1932-1977 , catalog, Gabriele Mazzotta, Milano, 1995, ISBN 8820211475 .
• Haßler-Schobbert, Ulrike and Ralph Kühne: Rolando Hettner. Painting and graphics, catalog, published by the Cultural Office of the City of Dresden and the Leonhardi Museum Dresden, 2001.
• Ursula Wieland Lambach: Roland Hettner: 1905 - 1978; Life and work, with a catalog of his painterly oeuvre . U. Wieland Lambach, Berlin, 2009, ISBN 9783000251351 .
• Otto Hettner Roland Hettner. In the collection of the Städtische Galerie Dresden . Catalog. Text Linda Karohl, ed. Linda Karohl, Gisbert Porstmann, 2015, ISBN 9783941843189 .

Web links

• Websites about Rolando Hettner
• Roland Hettner manuscripts, autographs, bequests in the Saxon State Library - State and University Library Dresden
• Rolando Hettner on Worldcat
• Dresden television: Works by Roland Hettner in the city museum
• Portrait of Roland Hettner, drawing by Otto Dix on Artnet