Sepp Mahler
Sepp Mahler (born May 30, 1901 in Wurzach ; † October 11, 1975 in Wangen im Allgäu ) was a painter and writer from Bad Wurzach in Upper Swabia .
Life
Sepp Mahler was born in the former leper house in Wurzach. From 1897 to 1914 his father was the peat master of the “Fürstlich Waldburg-Wurzach'sche Torfwerk Oberried” near Wurzach, which is now a museum. His mother ran the canteen of the local peat factory with a workforce of over 90 people (1902). In 1903 the Mahlers were able to build their own house in today's Ravensburger Strasse. His father, a descendant of Vorarlberg plasterers, recognized his son's talent early on. During his secondary school years, he broke away to Munich at the age of 14 with the desire to become a painter. He completed an apprenticeship there at the decorative painting school from 1915 to 1918 and also took evening courses in head drawing.
After completing his apprenticeship, he returned to his mother's home in 1918. The father died in 1916. He began to work and paint for a church painter in Ravensburg and in the moors of Upper Swabia . He attended the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule Stuttgart in 1921/22 and received a first exhibition at the local arts and crafts museum under the director Pazaurek. From 1922 to 1923 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart . In 1924 he sent pencil drawings, watercolors and a few poems from Wurzach to Herwarth Walden , who ran the Berlin gallery “Der Sturm”. Pictures by Sepp Mahler were exhibited alongside Chagall , Klee , Feininger and Kokoschka .
Vagabond time
After this time in Stuttgart, Mahler traveled as a vagabond through Europe and parts of the Orient. He earned his livelihood by changing odd jobs as a day laborer in a wide variety of professions. He felled trees in the forests of Norway, went fishing boats and whale ships, was a tourist guide in Italy, a donkey driver on Vesuvius and a water seller in Constantinople. As a caravan leader in Arabia, he failed because of the lack of Arabic.
At his mother's request, he returned home in 1929. He sought contact with Gregor Gog and thus became a permanent employee of a left-wing magazine, "Der Vagabund" (magazine and polemic of the international brotherhood of vagabonds). Sepp Mahler achieved great success with his pictures in exhibitions in Berlin and in Stuttgart galleries in the early 1930s.
time of the nationalsocialism
In the time of National Socialism , his art was considered degenerate . He was taken into protective custody for 46 days in Leutkirch im Allgäu in 1933 . Then his mother died. After he was refused admission to the Reich Chamber of Culture in 1935, he was banned from exhibiting. Mahler retired to Wurzach in his parents' house. Until 1945 he was without a steady income. He therefore lived in very poor conditions and paid the applicable municipal taxes with his pictures. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941, but dismissed as unfit for service in 1942 due to illness. In 1943 he married Gertrud Knausenberger, who was caring for Sepp, who was now seriously ill. A year later, their daughter Adelgund was born. Mahler was without any demonstrable merit during the entire period of National Socialism.
Later years
It was rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s. His pictures can be found in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart , in regional councils , museums, with well-known private collectors and in many art exhibitions at home and abroad. He became a member of various art associations, including the Oberschwaben-Bodensee Secession (SOB). Despite his closeness to the Cubism of the twenties, to the painting style of Van Gogh or to Klee's dream pictures, he was one of the most idiosyncratic artists in Upper Swabia . He died in 1975 of internal injuries sustained while hiking in the mountains.
After Mahler's death, his pictures were shown in over 50 exhibitions far beyond the Württemberg region. For example, at the Berlin traveling exhibition “Residence Nirgendwo” in 1982 and at the literary exhibition “Schwabenspiegel literature from the Neckar to Lake Constance 1800–1950”, which in 2008 traveled through the whole of Baden-Württemberg. In 2005 pictures of him were shown in an exhibition as far as St. Helier on the Channel Island of Jersey.
His literary work
From 1919 Sepp Mahler wrote poems and prose, but in addition to his artistic work, his literary work was hardly noticed, although he repeatedly read from them himself when the exhibition opened. In 1951 he read from his poems at the Weingarten Pedagogical Institute . At the suggestion of Martin Walser , the Oberschwaben Literature Archive Foundation in Biberach commissioned the writer Manfred Bosch to record the literary estate and to publish the texts. Manfred Bosch has recorded over a thousand poems, numerous notes, drafts and notes and some of them have been included in the book.
Most extensive is his poetry , next to his prose in stories, reflections and notes from his vagabond life. "The drama Die Nacht and numerous calls by Mahler, who called out during his wandering period, demonstrate the diversity of his literary talent." "From youth on, the pacifist and vegetarian drew life-defining impressions from the primal force of the Ried: Philosophical texts reflect on a life in harmony with the cosmos, on the world of work and industrialization."
Facilities
The Leper House with the Sepp Mahler Museum Bad-Wurzach
Mahler's birthplace, the Leprosenhaus, was inaugurated with an exhibition in 1987 as a museum of the city of Bad Wurzach with the lifestyle and living culture of the place. In 1991, the Sepp Mahler Museum in the basement was run by the city of Bad Wurzach, looked after by the friends and sponsors of the Leprosenhaus.
Sepp Mahler House cultural monument
The house built in 1903 at Ravensburger Str. 21 was added to the list of cultural monuments in Baden-Württemberg in 2013 through the preservation of monuments in the Tübingen district . It is the "vividly preserved house" of the peat master more than 100 years ago. Three estates of the Mahler family are housed here: painting and literature by Sepp Mahler, plus the social history of peat work using the example of Mahler's ancestors from 1817. Pictures and other artistic works by Sepp Mahler are on display throughout the house. Daughter Adelgund Mahler organizes annually changing exhibitions and events with the Sepp-Mahler-Haus cultural monument.
From 2007 to 2009, the Ravensburg district took care of the digital version of Sepp Mahler's painterly legacy, comprising over 4000 numbers.
In the Sepp Mahler house
Bad Wurzach, Sepp Mahler House, in the office , father's desk
Exhibition 2015 with carved nativity scene
Peat mill , 1915
Mother in 1920, father in 1914
Work in the moor , 1922, for the academy, 23.5 × 25 cm
Haus im Grund , 1927
Young peat farmer , 1930
In the prison camp for Russians , 1942
Hikers in the hill country , around 1950
Man with autumn tree , around 1958
Last self-portrait in 1975
literature
- Sieglinde Klein-Schiller: The Wurzach reed painter Jos. Mahler. His life and his work . (Admission thesis 1964).
- Werner Knoblauch: Upper Swabia - face of a landscape . Ravensburg 1971.
- Squidward Troll: Praising me with a lot of fine speech . Hamburg 1972.
- Manfred Schlude: Sepp Mahler, the moor painter from Bad Wurzach. Biography and career . (Approval work PH Weingarten). Liebenhofen 1975
- Otto Frisch: Bad Wurzach. History and development of an Upper Swabian spa town . Hinterzarten: Chroniken-Verlag 1975.
- Josef W. Janker: Views and Perspectives. 7. Landscapes . Ravensburg, Kreissparkasse 1979.
- Klaus Trappmann: Landstrasse customers vagabonds . Gregor Gog's League of the Homeless. Berlin 1980.
- Gisela Linder: The Wurzacher Leprosenhaus is to become a museum for Sepp Mahler . In: Schwäbische Heimat, Stuttgart 1981/4.
- Otto Frisch: Memorandum on the future use of the infirmary on the occasion of the Sepp Mahler Memorial Exhibition in May / June 1981 . Bad Wurzach 1981.
- Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Ed.): Residence Nirgendwo - About life and survival on the street . Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-88725-070-2 , pp. 343-368.
- Hans Dieter Mück (Ed.): Classical Modernism in the German Southwest. The Oberschwaben-Bodensee secession. Artus, Ochsenhausen / Marbach 1993.
- Uwe Degreif: By the trees . Sepp Mahler 1901–1975. Biberach: Museum Biberach 2009.
- Uwe Degreif: The persecution of visual artists using case studies from Upper Swabia. In: Victims of Injustice . Edwin Ernst Weber. Ostfildern: Thorbecke
- Uwe Degreif: Right at the front. A creation design by Sepp Mahler . In: Ders .: Later departure into the modern 1900–1933. Lindenberg: Fink 2014, no. 2.
- Ursula Rückgauer, Adelgund Mahler: Refuge and home of the moor painter and painter-poet. The Sepp Mahler House in Bad Wurzach . Im Oberland 25 (2014), no. 2.
- Manfred Bosch: In memory of the artist Sepp Mahler - Part 1 . In: Swabian homeland. Stuttgart, 66th year 2015/4
- Manfred Bosch: In memory of the artist Sepp Mahler - Part 2 . In: Swabian homeland. Stuttgart, Volume 67, 2016/1
- Manfred Bosch (Ed.): Sepp Mahler. I the rascal, philosopher of the street - the literary work, poems, prose, documents, pictures . Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1984, ISBN 3-7995-1638-7 ; Revised new edition as Book on Demand, Waldburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-935093-66-8
- Antje Merke: A new look at Sepp Mahler. Museum in the Kornhaus in Bad Waldsee brings together works that have only rarely been seen before . In: Schwäbische Zeitung, May 3, 2017, p. 11.
Web links
- Literature by and about Sepp Mahler in the catalog of the German National Library
- Sepp Mahler - Official Website
- Short biography on LEO-BW
- Museum Sepp Mahler in the Leprosenhaus
- Cultural monument Sepp Mahler Haus Förderkreis e. V.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Biography of Sepp Mahler ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Stuttgarter Nachrichten : Scored trees in Upper Swabia from February 11, 2010, accessed on September 9, 2010
- ↑ Manfred Bosch
- ↑ Biography of Sepp Mahler ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Mahler, Sepp |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Mahler, Josef |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 30, 1901 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Wurzach |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 11, 1975 |
| Place of death | Wangen in the Allgäu |