Josef Mages
Josef "Sepp" Mages (born October 6, 1895 in Kaiserslautern ; † November 28, 1977 there ) was a German sculptor and professor at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf .
Life
Josef Mages made his first experiences with sculpture in his father's stonemason workshop and then studied from 1913 to 1920 at the Royal School of Applied Arts in Munich with Richard Riemerschmid and Joseph Wackerle .
In 1938 Mages was appointed to the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf , where he worked as a professor of sculpture until 1961. At the academy, students could study for artistic teaching or so-called “free art ”. The pupils were taught in classes led by the individual professors. In addition to Mages, Joseph Enseling , Ewald Mataré and Zoltan Székessy led sculpture classes .
There were also classes in stage design, graphics, art history and painting, as well as lectures on special topics such as iconography, and courses in fresco and painting techniques. During the Nazi era, several professors such as Mataré were dismissed because their works were considered " degenerate art ".
In March 1945, the Düsseldorf Academy was hit by bombs for the second time and various academy buildings were badly damaged. The British military authorities responsible after the end of the war were interested in a quick normalization of public life and ensured that the academy was reopened quickly. Contrary to the announcement that former National Socialists would no longer teach, only the directors were replaced. Teaching was resumed at the beginning of 1946. The college consisted of three professors who were dismissed between 1929 and 1938 and reappointed in 1945, including Ewald Mataré, as well as several teachers, some of whom were only appointed during the Third Reich, including the sculptors Joseph Enseling and Josef Mages.
One of the sculptor students at Mages was Günter Grass , who began his studies in 1948, but soon fell out with him and then switched to Otto Pankok , where Grass learned drawing and graphic craft. Later, in his world-famous novel Die Blechtrommel , Grass developed his fictional character Professor Maruhn based on the model of Josef “Sepp” Mages and created a literary monument for him. Other Mages students included Rudolf Christian Baisch from 1938 , Anneliese Langenbach from 1946 , Heinrich "Heinz" Klein-Arendt from 1947 to 1952 and Hede Bühl and Wolfgang Liesen from 1958 to 1961 .
In 1961 Mages retired. Joseph Beuys was unanimously elected as his successor to the chair and appointed professor at the art academy. On the list of suggestions for the successor to Mages, Hans Schwippert named the Minister of Culture of North Rhine-Westphalia , Werner Schütz , Beuys in front of three other artists. The chair occupied by Beuys was henceforth called monumental sculpture .
In addition to his teaching post, Mages worked for several years as a consultant for the German granite industry in Karlsruhe .
plant
In the 1920s he carried out several public commissions as a sculptor in the Kaiserslautern area, his hometown. These early works by Mages included a number of “grotesquely playful” fantasy figures made of majolica , which were set up in the “Weinhof”, an inner courtyard of the halls on the city's exhibition grounds at the time. During the Nazi period, the figures were from the Nazis considered "degenerate art" and destroyed.
Josef (Sepp) Mages: Sports comrades , 1936
External web link !
The conservative and little-known Mages came to terms with the Nazi regime; he was commissioned with Karl Albiker , Willy Meller and Joseph Wackerle to create sculptures for the Olympic site and the Olympic stadium in Berlin . The group of sculptors created monumental stone sculptures that were aimed at long-distance effects. This archaic style no longer played a role in later Nazi sculpture and only became relevant again after the Second World War.
Mages created a group of two young men as a monumental sculpture for the Olympic site, titled “Sports Comrades” - naked “heroic heroes” armed with a sword in the tradition of the war memorials of the First World War . With his monumental sculpture, which stands on the edge of the Maifeld , he was in competition with the four five-meter-high stone figures by Albiker. "Mages rigid figures [...] are extraordinarily effective in terms of urban planning, but do not have the power to [...] artistically captivate" , said Carl Georg Heise , the art historian and museum director of the St. Anne's Monastery in Lübeck, who was dismissed by the National Socialists in 1933 . in a contemporary review in the Frankfurter Zeitung.
Works (selection)
- 1920s: Fantasy figures made of majolica, set up in an inner courtyard ("Weinhof") of the hall buildings on the exhibition grounds of the city of Kaiserslautern at that time (see also image on web links)
- 1936: "Sports comrades " , also "comrades" , on the Maifeld on the Olympic site in Berlin (formerly Reichssportfeld ), monumental sculpture made of stone material ( travertine )
- Around 1939: “Erb's Tomb” , Karlsruhe main cemetery, stone material ( Syenite )
Web links
- Information about Sepp Mages on the website www.bildhauerei-in-berlin.de
- Search for Josef Mages in the German Digital Library
- Search for Sepp Mages in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
- Illustration of the majolica figures from the 1920s in Kaiserslautern, "Weinhof" on the exhibition grounds at that time (on the private website www.lautringer.de)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Anett Beckmann: Mentality-historical and aesthetic investigations of the tomb sculpture of the Karlsruhe main cemetery . Universitätsverlag Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe 2006, ISBN 3-86644-032-4 . (. zugl dissertation, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Karlsruhe , as digitized May 2, 2009 last call freely available online;; 179)
- ↑ Ewald Mataré's Art of Teaching ( Memento of the original from June 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Dissertation by Roland Meyer-Petzold , Justus Liebig University Gießen ; Excerpt, 2002, p. 93ff. ( PDF file; 7.76 MB; last accessed: May 2, 2009)
- ↑ Ewald Mataré's Art of Teaching ( Memento of the original from June 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Dissertation by Roland Meyer-Petzold , Justus Liebig University Gießen ; Excerpt, 2002, p. 116ff. ( PDF file; 7.76 MB; last accessed: May 2, 2009)
- ^ Susanne Anna (ed.): Joseph Beuys, Düsseldorf . Hatje Cantz, Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf, September 29 to December 30, 2007, Ostfildern 2008, ISBN 978-3-7757-1992-6 , p. 44
- ↑ Joseph Beuys and New Ways of Art ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Annual work 2004/05 by Max Illner , p. 12 ( PDF file; 851 kB, last accessed: May 2, 2009)
- ↑ a b The Weinhof in the former exhibition grounds , under “old city views from Kaiserslautern” on the private website www.lautringer.de (last accessed: May 3, 2009).
- ↑ Basics for creating a sculptor's catalog raisonné ( Memento of the original from April 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Report on the sculpture research project in Berlin (last call: May 2, 2009)
- ↑ Sculptures on the Olympic grounds - models, photographs, documents, the exhibition for the 2006 World Cup in the Georg Kolbe Museum ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Exhibition report at the German Road Races interest group (last call: May 3, 2009).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Mages, Josef |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Mages, Sepp (nickname) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German sculptor and professor at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 6, 1895 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kaiserslautern |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 28, 1977 |
| Place of death | Kaiserslautern |