Stefan Germer

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Stefan-Andreas Germer (born December 10, 1958 in Berlin ; † July 2, 1998 there ) was a German art historian and art critic . He was a co-founder of the magazine Texte zur Kunst .

The grave of Stefan Germer and his father Wolf-Dietrich in the Parkfriedhof Lichterfelde in Berlin.

life and work

Germer was born as the son of the internist Wolf-Dietrich Germer (1911-1996) and the literary scholar Barbara Germer (née Heier). He grew up in a bourgeois and art-friendly family in West Berlin and studied art history , economic and social history and recent German literature at the universities of Freiburg and Bonn . He received his doctorate in Bonn in 1985 with a study on murals in France in the 19th century. Here he pursued the attempts "... to renew history painting and thus to preserve art a national public".

From 1986 to 1987 he was a postdoctoral researcher (postdoctoral fellow) at the Art Institute of Chicago , where he immediately made contact with important American art historians, art critics and art theorists. From Chicago, he wrote about German contemporary art for the prestigious art magazine October , which appears in the MIT Press . From 1986 to 1992 he was a research assistant at the University of Bonn, after which he was professor at the universities in Leipzig and Halle. In 1987 he worked for the exhibition "Sciences in Berlin" in the newly opened congress hall in Berlin.

In autumn 1990 he and Isabelle Graw founded the quarterly magazine Texte zur Kunst , "... whose idiosyncratic recipe, reports, essays and interviews on contemporary art, on intellectual debates and on art history under common questions, turned out to be extremely successful." . In each issue of the eight years Germer was represented with an essay, a column, an interview or a review. His contributions also dealt with questions such as “Art in the accession area”, the “Documenta as an anachronistic ritual” or “Sponsors in Germany”. He wrote reviews about artists such as Jörg Immendorff , Louise Bourgeois , Mel Bochner , Wolfgang Tillmans and Gerhard Richter . Germer was co-editor - alongside Graw - until his death.

In 1992 Germer received a DFG scholarship to complete his habilitation in Paris on André Félibien , the French art theorist of the 17th century. In the habilitation thesis presented in Bonn in 1994, he illuminates art in the absolutist public of the court of Ludwig XIV. | and the conditions for Félibien's intellectual career. Since 1995 Germer has been professor of art history at the Art History Institute of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main , specializing in modern and contemporary art and art theory.

"The outstanding intellectual sharpness, brilliant diction and the rapid perception enabled him to work at a pace that could go to the point of breathlessness and was also communicated to his speech habitus."

- Werner Busch :

Germer died of leukemia . He was married to the art historian Julia Bernard. In 2003 the widow handed over his entire written estate to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg .

Fonts

  • Art - Power - Discourse. The intellectual career of André Félibien in France by Louis XIV. Wilhelm Fink, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-7705-3175-2 (at the same time: Bonn, Universität, habilitation paper, 1994).
  • Germeriana. Unpublished or translated writings by Stefan Germer on contemporary and modern art (= annual ring. Yearbook for modern art. Vol. 46). Edited by Julia Bernard. Oktagon, Cologne 1999, Volume 46 of Jahresring, Oktagon, Cologne 1999, ISBN 3-89611-082-9 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Historicity and autonomy - studies of murals in 19th century France: Ingres, Chassériau, Chenavard and Puvis de Chavannes . Studies on Art History Vol. 47, Olms, Hildesheim 1988 ISBN 978-3-487-09082-5 (dissertation)
  2. ↑ Michael F. Zimmermann : The will for freedom and tradition . In: Berliner Zeitung of July 11, 1998
  3. ↑ Michael F. Zimmermann: The will for freedom and tradition . In: Berliner Zeitung of July 11, 1998
  4. ↑ For example only: Stefan Germer, “Flight of the Fashionable - Promise of Art. Die Distinktionsgewinne des Wolfgang Tillmans ”, in: Texts on Art, Issue 25, Volume 7, Spring 1997, pp. 53–60; Stefan Germer: “Family connection. On the thematization of the private in more recent pictures by Gerhard Richter ”, in: Texts on Art, Issue 26, Vol. 7, Summer 1997, pp. 109–116.
  5. ^ Review by Ulrich Rehm . In: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 63rd Vol., Issue 2, 2000, pages 278–281
  6. ↑ Werner Busch Riddled with Modernism - On the death of the art historian Stefan Germer . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 11, 1998
  7. ↑ Anzeiger des Germanisches Nationalmuseums , 2003, p. 310
  8. ↑ Scan digital collection .
personal data
SURNAME Germer, Stefan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Germer, Stefan-Andreas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German art historian, curator and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH July 2nd, 1998
Place of death Berlin