Rudolf Behrend

Rudolf Behrend, 1930s, Atelier Hattesen, Flensburg

Rudolf Behrend (born March 25, 1895 in Neuheikendorf , Kieler Förde ; † February 10, 1979 there ) was a German painter and graphic artist.

Life

Rudolf Behrend was born on March 25, 1895 in Neuheikendorf / Plön district as the son of a farming family. His father came from Mohrungen / East Prussia .

After finishing school, Rudolf Behrend completed a manual apprenticeship, initially as a bricklayer, then - following his inclinations - as a decorative painter. Plans to study painting were thwarted by the start of the war in 1914. As a soldier on the Western Front , he was taken prisoner by the British in 1917 in Flanders. An attempt to escape failed; “Charcoal drawings” on the walls of his detention cell, however, marked the beginning of “free painting” and brought him “souvenir” orders for handicrafts. In 1919 he returned home with completely disillusioning war experiences. He recorded the suffering and horror of people and the tortured creatures in a folder with 19 pen drawings.

From 1920 Rudolf Behrend attended the arts and crafts school (later: Muthesiusschule) in Kiel for a short time and received lessons from Professors Vogel and Zimmermann, and in the nude hall from Werner Lange. He owed further impulses to his meeting Heinrich Blunck, the academically trained landscape painter who had settled in Heikendorf in 1923. From then on, Behrend found his way completely autodidactically , in exchange with painter friends and above all in dealing with the subjects and pictures of the great painters since Impressionism . He was close friendship with the later Worpswede art historian Hans-Hermann Rief .

Through the economically difficult twenties, Rudolf Behrend maneuvered himself with his wife and daughter as a decorative painter, initially in Westerland on Sylt . He tried his luck with a traveling cinema (around 1928) and as a glider pilot. At the beginning of the thirties he worked temporarily in the photo studio of his friend, the art dealer Peter Hattesen in Flensburg. There he made contact with the North German Expressionists Heinrich Steinhagen and Karl Peter Röhl , with Max Schwimmer and Bernard Schultze .

In 1926 he crossed the Baltic Sea to East Prussia , the home of his father's ancestors. For a long time there was a lack of funds for extensive adventure or educational trips. His longing for a world trip, expressed in the woodcut cycle “Träumereien” (after 1930), remained unsatisfied. On the other hand, he was not spared the involuntary “journey under a steel helmet” even at the beginning of the Second World War . Discharged from the attack on Poland in 1940 , suffering from kidney disease , he had to do security and office duties in naval facilities on the Kiel Fjord until the end of the war.

In the post-war years, his livelihood came from a small farm, and his painterly vigor was all the richer from dealing with new European art movements. In 1956 he fell from the roof of his thatched farmhouse without any problems: one leg remained lame, the “rebirth” spurred artistic creativity, especially through themes of life and death.

Shortly before the age of 84, Rudolf Behrend died in the middle of the snowy winter of 1979 on February 10th in Heikendorf.

plant

After impressionistic approaches in the twenties and thirties, Behrend found his own, unmistakable visual language in expressively accessible design methods. For a decade from the early 1950s onwards, he switched to more experimental procedures and abstract representations. An extremely fruitful and diverse late phase of his work began in the early sixties: large-format, theme-centered oil paintings, including the cycle “Golgotha” and twelve triptychs , tapestries and watercolors alongside monotypes as well as wood and linocuts are the result. Among the ink drawings with watercolors, an illustration folder for Gerhart Hauptmann's hexameter epic “ Till Eulenspiegel ” (27 sheets, 1960) is particularly noteworthy.

In 1964, Rudolf Behrend joined forces with Georg Hensel, Fritz Neuser, Hans Rickers and Hannes Schultze-Froitzheim to form the artist group NO “Nordsee-Ostsee”.

Larger exhibitions

• 1946 Rauhes Haus, Hamburg
• 1950 Laboe
• 1952 "New Group 1952", Gottorf Castle, Schleswig
• 1953 First state show of Schleswig-Holstein artists, Ostseehalle Kiel
• 1955 Worpswede
• 1956 City Hall Studio Lübeck
• 1961 Bayerwerke, Leverkusen
• 1964 “Gruppe NO”, Gothenburg and the Flensburg Municipal Museum
• 1970 Borderland exhibition, Aabenraa / Denmark
• 1972 Holiday Center Holm / Schönberg
• 1975 Heikendorf secondary school
• 1980 Danish Central Library in Flensburg
• 1981 Brunswiker Pavilion, Kiel
• 1982 Plön district administration
• 1995 Heikendorf town hall
• 1997 Hattesen art dealer, Flensburg
• 2006 Heikendorf Art Museum
• 2012 State House of Kiel
• 2015 Heikendorf Art Museum

literature

• Karl Rickers: Rudolf Behrend, a late expressionist. In: Schleswig-Holstein. Monthly notebooks for home and folklore. Issue 5/1975, p. 116
• Uwe Ruberg : The Holstein painter Rudolf Behrend (1895–1979) and his art as a “companion through the wild and mysterious life”. In: Nordelbingen. Volume 65, 1996, ISBN 3-8042-0723-5 , pp. 161-177
• Heike Wendt: Rudolf Behrend and the art of his time in Schleswig-Holstein, with a catalog raisonné of the paintings in oil. Master's thesis University of Kiel 1999
• Uwe Ruberg: The village pond as the prism of life and microcosm of the big world in painting and graphics by Rudolf Behrends. In: Nordelbingen. Volume 76, 2007, pp. 215-225
• Sabine Behrens / Henning Repetzky (eds.): Rudolf Behrend (1895–1979). Quiet way to something new, exhibition catalog Heikendorf 2015 , ISBN 978-3-00-049577-9 , 166 pages

Web links

• Heikendorf-Kieler Förde artist's museum - Rudolf Behrend 1895–1979, the quiet path to something new