Rudolf Hengstenberg

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Rudolf Hengstenberg (born August 16, 1894 in Untermais , today City of Meran , South Tyrol , † January 5, 1974 in Bremen ) was a German painter and graphic artist .

Life

Hengstenberg's father was an engineer and owned the gas works in Merano. After it was sold in 1899, the family moved to Berlin , where Rudolf Hengstenberg attended the Zehlendorf secondary school. He was the brother of Elfriede Hengstenberg . When the First World War broke out , he volunteered and was deployed with the regiment of the Gardes du Corps on various fronts and wounded several times.

In 1919 Hengstenberg began studying architecture at the Technical University in Berlin . In 1920 he moved to the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences, and finally to the Stuttgart Art Academy , where he studied with Heinrich Altherr . In 1924, Hengstenberg graduated from Altherr's master class and moved to Potsdam as a freelance artist .

Hengstenberg was exhibited by the Prussian Academy of the Arts and sponsored by the painter Ludwig Dettmann . In 1926 he joined a circle around the painter Egon von Kameke . Artistically, Hengstenberg pursued an expressive realism and increasingly oriented himself towards the New Objectivity .

Hengstenberg had already joined the NSDAP in 1931 . In 1935 he painted the large painting Bauhütte for the new building of the Reich Labor Ministry in Berlin. The painting was exhibited and awarded under the title Comradeship or Working Group at the Paris World Exhibition in 1937 . It is considered a subtle implementation of the work community, as it was propagated as exemplary by the Nazi art ideology. His picture May Day celebrations in the Berlin Lustgarten , also exhibited in the German pavilion, represented a mass rally that was regularly held in the Third Reich. In 1938, Hengstenberg received the Harry-Kreismann-Foundation's prize awarded to deserving National Socialist cultural workers and awarded by the Prussian Ministry of Culture .

In World War II Hengstberg was used as a war artist. Notwithstanding his own statements after the war that Joseph Goebbels and the Schutzstaffel were not satisfied with the realism of his pictures and claims that it was not glorifying propaganda, his art was exhibited, reproduced in art magazines and received positively. On the occasion of his 50th birthday, the Völkischer Beobachter attested him “heroic pathos”. In 1943 he took over the management of the National Socialist Nordic Art School in Bremen . Back at the front, he was taken prisoner by the Americans in 1945, but returned to his wife Lilli, whom he married in 1942, in September of the same year.

In 1946, Hengstenberg turned down an appointment to the Berlin art college. In 1948 he was denazified as a “fellow traveler” . He worked as an art teacher and from 1950 carried out public commissions for wall paintings, including a wall painting in the radio house of Radio Bremen . As an illustrator, he provided the new editions of Else Ury's Nesthäkchen series with text illustrations. From 1965 he withdrew from the public.

A memorial exhibition that was to be dedicated to Hengstenberg in Potsdam was temporarily canceled on December 9, 1994 by the mayor of the city as a glorification of a former Nazi artist. It was only opened on December 20, 1994 after an art historian compared Hengstenberg's vita in a commentary with that of other artists who had been active in propaganda in Germany at the time of National Socialism. In 2009 in the exhibition “degenerate” - confiscated in the Städtische Galerie Bremen . Bremen artists during National Socialism also showed work by Hengstenberg. Ferdinand Krogmann criticized the exhibition because its title would mislead the artists shown into being persecuted by the Nazi regime. Above all, however, there was a complete lack of work from 1933, namely the system-compliant work of Hengstenberg such as his tank pictures, which were praised by the Völkischer Beobachter, or his monumental Nazi propaganda pictures.

Rudolf and Lilli (1911–2005) Hengstenberg are buried in the church cemetery in Bremen-Lesum.

society

In 1996 the Rudolf Hengstenberg Society was founded in Bremen. V. for the maintenance of the artistic estate.

literature

  • Jörn Barfod: The painter Rudolf Hengstenberg: 1894–1974. (On the occasion of the commemorative exhibition for the 100th birthday of the painter Rudolf Hengstenberg in the Potsdam Museum, Potsdam, from December 6, 1994 to January 29, 1995) . Husum Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft, Husum 1994, ISBN 3-88042-709-7 .
  • Klaus P. Lücke: Rudolf Hengstenberg: Painter in National Socialism . Microplan publishing house, Eschborn 1996, ISBN 3-00-000691-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Wolfgang Schmidt: "Painter at the Front". On the role of war painters and press illustrators in World War II. In: Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann (eds.): The Wehrmacht. Myth and Reality. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, p. 651.
  2. ↑ The foundation was originally named after Harry Kreismann, the son of a former American consul general in Berlin, who died in an accident in Bonn in 1885 at the age of 18.
  3. ↑ Controversy over the planned exhibition of the controversial painter Rudolf Hengstenberg in Brandenburg's capital The widow thinks it is good advertising Berliner Zeitung, December 9, 1994
  4. ^ Postponed exhibition of the painter opens Hengstenberg in Potsdam Berliner Zeitung, December 21, 1994
  5. ↑ Ferdinand Krogmann: Honor rescue for Nazi artists . In: Ossietzky , two-week magazine for politics, 22/2009
  6. ^ Andreas Hüneke : Rudolf Hengstenberg. In: Hans-Joachim Manske and Birgit Neumann-Dietzsch (eds.): "Entartet" - confiscated. Bremen artist under National Socialism. (On the occasion of the exhibition in the Städtische Galerie Bremen from September 6 to November 15, 2009) Bremen 2009, pp. 66–69.
personal data
SURNAME Hengstenberg, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Untermais , today the city of Meran , South Tyrol
DATE OF DEATH 5th January 1974
Place of death Bremen