Vera Krafft

Vera Krafft (born January 15, 1910 in Moscow ; † July 14, 2003 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German painter .

Life

Vera Krafft was born as the fifth child of the German-Russian merchant family Krafft in Moscow. During the Russian Revolution , the family emigrated to Germany and settled in Freiburg. Here Krafft attended high school and graduated from high school in 1929 . From 1937 on, she was a student at the Blocher School for Free and Applied Arts in Munich, founded in 1915 by Minni Bosshard and Karl Blocherer . The works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , Max Pechstein and Paul Klee shown in the exhibition on degenerate art in Munich in 1937 prompted the painter to find her own way into abstraction.

In 1942 Krafft went back to Freiburg and earned her living with illustrations for several publishers. In 1947 she became a member of the Professional Association of Visual Artists (BBK) Südbaden.

In 1942 she had her first exhibition at the Freiburg Art Association . Further exhibitions followed at almost annual intervals in Freiburg, including in the Augustinermuseum , the Kunstverein Karlsruhe , in Windhoek / Namibia (Galerie Nitzsche), in Guebwiller / France, in the Evangelical Academy Loccum , in Bad Krozingen (together with the Swiss Joseph Beuret ), in Bonn - Bad Godesberg , as well as group exhibitions in Konstanz , Hamburg , Munich . On the occasion of her 80th birthday, the last major retrospective took place at the “Schwarzes Kloster” art association in Freiburg.

Initially influenced by Karl Blocherer's style and motifs from the war and post-war years such as flight, expulsion, death, misery, although her charcoal drawings and linocuts show a similarity to Käthe Kollwitz , Krafft turned to watercolors and landscape painting, influenced by the Hamburg painter Eva Hasperg to. The painter Fritz Kronenberg gave her suggestions for color technology and color design. She had a lifelong friendship with the Russian-French painter Oleg Zinger . Suggestions from him can be found both in the illustrations and poster designs of her early days as well as in the more abstract, small-format pictures of her later years. Influences from Julius Bissier , for whom Vera Krafft drew nudes, can also be found in these later watercolors. Since around 1960, alongside ink, watercolors and graphic works, he has also created collages and a few works in oil.

As Dr. Sabine Heilig described at the opening of the last major exhibition dedicated to Ms. Krafft's life's work in the “Black Monastery” in Freiburg, especially in her last watercolors “ exciting and powerful geometric shapes are depicted that describe spatiality from the rhythmic interrelationship of line and surface . Other works show fragile, transparent forms that have a state of suspension between calm and movement as their theme and create haunting, magical worlds of images ”.