Rudolf Jahns

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Rudolf Jahns (born March 13, 1896 in Wolfenbüttel , † July 1, 1983 in Holzminden ) was a German painter and graphic artist . His artistic work spanned six decades from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the 1980s. Jahns occupies a special position among the constructivists . He is described as a “romantic constructivist” (J. Büchner), a poet and musician among the painters of his time. Since 1927 he belonged together with Kurt Schwitters , Carl Buchheister , Hans Nitzschke and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart to the circle of the " abstract hannover ".

life and work

Rudolf Jahns received early artistic inspiration from his grandfather. His great-grandfather was a drawing teacher at the high school. His father worked as an accountant in Braunschweig . Jahns graduated from high school here in 1915. He then served as a soldier (medic) in the First World War until 1918. His plans to study architecture and painting could not be realized. Instead, Jahns attended evening courses at the arts and crafts school in Braunschweig. The first works are from the period 1917/1919. The early works were created in his own Braunschweig studio. After the First World War, Rudolf Jahns began working as a customs and tax officer. He has practiced this "bread and butter" since 1920 in the small town of Holzminden in southern Lower Saxony . However, painting remained the real task for him throughout his life, to which he felt himself called. The Weserbergland , the region around Holzminden, becomes the artist's adopted home. Holzminden has described Jahns as a small provincial town, which lies “in one of the most beautiful landscapes of northwest Germany on the Weser”, “embedded on all sides in the wonderful forests of the Solling, the Vogler, the Weserberg.” Painter can develop best. In 1923 he married the piano teacher Renate Helmke. A son and daughter are born in the 1920s. The contacts to Berlin and Hanover, which are important for the artistic recognition of his work, also fall during this time.

Nature, landscape, music and people were defining themes for the artist, most of which can be found in abstract drawings, watercolors and paintings. Nature and art, this relationship has always interested him in his literary notes. Jahns received early artistic impulses in particular from painters such as Kandinsky , Klee , Feininger , but also from the field of Far Eastern painting. Both expressionist and cubist elements can be found in his early works. The decisive breakthrough, which made Jahns better known, came from 1924 through contacts in Berlin with Herwarth Walden , and later with the Hanoverian artist circle around Kurt Schwitters. Nevertheless, Jahns remained a loner in his artistic work over the decades. As an autodidact , he trained himself further in dealing with the music and artistic trends of the Weimar Republic and thus found his own way.

Between 1933 and 1945 abstract painting was ostracized by the National Socialists as " degenerate art ". This also applies to Rudolf Jahns. The catalog raisonné published in 2003 shows a gap for this period. After 1945 artistic works, individual oil paintings, mostly naturalistic, emerged again before a phase began in the mid-1950s in which Rudolf Jahns referred to his early works. Numerous works are created after the tax officer Jahns retired in 1957. From then on he was able to devote himself entirely to his artistic activity, to participate again in art exhibitions and to receive honors. In addition to painting, from 1957 he also dealt with various graphic techniques (linocut, etchings). In his late work he succeeded both in building on the style of his early work and in setting new accents in his drawings, miniatures and other compositions.

Rudolf Jahns Foundation

After the death of the first chairwoman Barbara Roselieb-Jahns, the Rudolf-Jahns-Foundation is assigned to the Sprengel Museum Hannover . The purpose of the foundation is to promote art historians and the fine arts, in particular to maintain and develop the work of Rudolf Jahns.

Every two years since 1994, the Rudolf Jahns Foundation has announced the “Rudolf Jahns Prize”, which was last endowed with 10,000 euros and was awarded to art historians, publicists and art educators who made outstanding contributions to the artistic work of Rudolf Jahns and / or his time . In 2006, this award was converted into a two-year foundation volunteer service for museums.

Art-historical classification and evaluation

The artistic work has been extensively examined and assessed in a dissertation by Ulrike Müller. The diverse work from around 60 years of creation eludes clear style assignments. Partly representational factors and elements are transformed into their own visual language with different transformation services.

The author emphasizes the importance of nature, the human figure and music as the basic factors of artistic life achievement. With this rather intuitive imagery compared to his contemporaries, the autodidact has achieved an independent place in the second generation of artists who have dedicated themselves to work beyond representationalism. At the beginning of his creative period around 1919, Expressionism , Cubism and Constructivism had already emerged, which the artist not simply adopted, but expanded and supplemented with a “new, lively expression and a statement of their own”.

The resulting variety of expressions is quite the opposite, as can be seen in the theme of “Spring”, which was implemented in 1919 in a geometric-constructive composition and in 1923 in a biomorphic abstract representation. According to the author, the artist's life's work cannot be assigned to a main style, since in addition to abstract and constructive works, there are also abstracting and, on the other hand, constructivist images, to which biomorph-abstract and even naturalistic images are added.

Instead of a stylistic classification, the reason for this diversity is more helpful for understanding life's work, which the author sees in the artist's core statement, "who works like nature, not according to nature". The artist succeeded in achieving a balance of the opposites between "geometrizing, harmonic constructions" and "expressive, biomorphic compositions". He should be classified as a summarizing artist who does not see the opposites, but the symbiosis .

According to the author, the basic prerequisite for this polar equilibrium runs through the artist's life:

  • Binding in the bourgeoisie and perseverance in the unpopular civil service on the one hand and valve in artistic creation on the other
  • Friendship with the strict rationalist Walter Wilhelm as a counterpart to the more intuitive artist,
  • Occupation with the constructivism of the group the abstract hannover and the release of creative opposing forces,
  • The image of man in artistic creation is also shaped by polar opposites, which Rudolf Jahns himself named as "the problem of the unification of the design worlds Eros and Logos, feeling-spirit, color-form".
  • He depicts nature in the field of tension between a legal educational principle and lively and moving forms of design.
  • His music-oriented (“musical”) images are designed from a contrapuntal point of view based on the musical fugue , in which the theme and counter-theme are combined into a balanced, harmonic form.

“In the more than 60 years of its creation, Jahns' work has remained a 'work in progress' in a positive sense. The creative engine of the self-taught Jahns was the search, in which finding the pure form as a painted formula was not enough for him, in which the relationship to life was more important: 'Painting! What is that (?) If not life! '"

- Ulrike Müller

Literature (selection)

Literature citations

  1. ↑ Ulrike Müller: Rudolf Jahns (1896-1983) The painter and his subjects: nature - figure - music. (Theory of Contemporary Art, Volume 9). Münster 1997, p. 248.

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ a b c d e Ulrike Müller: Rudolf Jahns (1896-1983) The painter and his subjects: nature - figure - music . (Theory of Contemporary Art, Volume 9). Münster 1997, ISBN 3-8258-3295-3 .
  2. ^ Rudolf Jahns: Painting is life. Diaries. Letters. Texts. Münster 1988, ISBN 3-88789-083-3 .
personal data
SURNAME Jahns, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH March 13, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Wolfenbüttel
DATE OF DEATH July 1, 1983
Place of death Holzminden