Ulrich Christoffel

Ulrich Christoffel (born January 28, 1891 in Chur ; † December 22, 1975 there , entitled to live in Trins and Chur) was a Swiss art historian , art critic and author .

life and work

Christoffel was the youngest son of the wine merchant Martin and Kathinka, née Olgiati. Christoffel began studying German at the University of Basel and then switched to art history . Further semesters followed in Berlin, where he attended lectures with Karl Joel . Christoffel then studied at the University of Munich with Karl Vossler and Heinrich Wölfflin , whom he admired and with whom he was friends throughout his life. Christoffel received his doctorate in 1917. His doctoral thesis was dedicated to the written estate of Anton Raphael Mengs .

Christoffel married a fellow student in 1920 , Grete, née Reinecke , from Bremen . In the same year he published his first major publication on romantic drawings . In it he conjured up the fairytale world of the painter-poets Peter Cornelius , Moritz von Schwind and Ludwig Richter . It was during these years that Christoffel wrote his first art-critical reports, inspired by Wilhelm Hausenstein, for the Münchner Neues Nachrichten . Musicians, painters, scholars, musicians and poets met in the couple's Munich home. So Eberhard Hanfstaengl or Ricarda Huch . As enthusiastic opera lovers and admirers of Richard Strauss as a Mozart interpreter, they regularly visited the Bavarian State Opera .

In the following years Christoffel worked as an assistant at the Kupferstichkabinett at the Kunstmuseum Basel and as an art consultant for the Basler Nachrichten . 1927 Christoffel's work appeared on Hans Holbein the Younger , with whom he in 1928 at the Technical University of Munich habilitated .

After a short time in teaching and a longer stay in Greece , Christoffel succeeded Hans Trog as the feature editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) . Since Christoffel uncompromising statements on local art events and his occasionally apodictic judgments were not approved, he left Zurich and Switzerland and lived in Spain for the next nine months . Some of his main works were created here. For example his first volume from 1936, The Old Spain , which describes the history, literature, painting, character and customs of an old cultural people. Back in Germany , Christoffel wrote smaller papers and was a permanent contributor to the journal Die Kunst . In the work The World of Great Painters Christoffel wrote biographies of 250 painters in concentrated texts. The clichés of the picture part were destroyed in a bombing during the Second World War .

Christoffel and his wife finally returned to Switzerland in 1945 and initially lived in Haldenstein Castle , where he wrote the book From Poussin to Ingres and Delacroix . Also in Haldenstein, Christoffel brought his study of symbolic art to a close in his book Painting and Poetry . Christoffel dedicated monographs to the sculptor Alexander Zschokke , the painters Anselm Feuerbach , Martin Lauterburg , Eugène Delacroix , Maria Cecilia Adelaide Bass and Werner von Houwald . On behalf of the Swiss Alpine Club , the book The Mountain in Painting , written by Christoffel, was published for its centenary , a vivid depiction of the mountain world from antiquity to the present day .

From 1950 the couple lived in the "Stuppishaus" of Johann Peter Stuppa until Grete Christoffel's death . For a number of years Christoffel was the curator of the Bündner Kunstmuseum , and the exhibitions by Cuno Amiet were of particular concern to him. As an employee of the Neue Bündner Zeitung , Christoffel was primarily committed to contemporary and Bündner art. Many of his articles also appeared in the Bündner Jahrbuch.

He was unable to finish his last work Italy in the first millennium , which Christoffel had been working on since 1960 and which required long stays in Rome. For his writing From Greek Antiquity to German Romanticism , Christoffel received honorary membership from the Winckelmann Society .

literature

• Leonhard Meisser : Obituary for Dr. Ulrich Christoffel. In: Bündner Jahrbuch: Zeitschrift für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte Graubünden , Vol. 19, 1977, pp. 154–156 ( digitized version ).

Web links

• Ulrich Christoffel. Index entry in: German biography
• Ulrich Christoffel. In: WorldCat