Vita Petersen

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Vita Petersen (born January 21, 1915 in Berlin , † October 22, 2011 in New York City ; full name: Luise Viktoria Margarete Beate Petersen ) was an American painter and draftsman of German origin.

Life

She was born as the daughter of the later State Secretary Ernst von Simson , her mother Martha Oppenheim was a descendant of Moses Mendelssohn . During her childhood and youth, Vita often visited her grandfather Franz Oppenheim , who with his second wife Margarete had built up a collection of paintings by Paul Cézanne , Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet . She took painting lessons from Willy Jaeckel and attended Karl Hofer's master class during her studies at the Berlin Art Academy . A career as a painter was blocked as an artist of Jewish origin in National Socialist Germany , the pictures of her teachers were considered “ degenerate art ”. Vita met the Hamburg merchant Gustav Petersen (1911–2002), whom she was not allowed to marry. Petersen emigrated to the USA, Vita followed him in 1938 and the couple married in New York in August of the same year.

plant

The Swiss-American photographer Herbert Matter introduced Vita Petersen to young American painters such as Jackson Pollock , Willem de Kooning , Lee Krasner and Franz Kline . She took lessons from Hans Hofmann , who came from Germany, in his famous Hofmann School . Petersen was so impressed by Pollock's painting that it had a lasting impact on his own art production. In 1948 and 1949 the Petersens spent the summer with Pollock and other artist friends in Springs, East Hampton . Her colorful abstract painting took on figurative elements in the 1960s. In the 1970s she turned back to abstraction. According to her teacher Hans Hofmann, they are “[…] highly sensitive compositions of form, color and rhythm and build a bridge from European modernism to American art after 1945”.

Petersen, like Pollock, exhibited in the Betty Parsons gallery in New York in the late 1960s and 1970s . Her works are in the Joseph Hirschhorn Collection , the Corcoran Gallery of Art , the Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the art collection of the First National Bank of Chicago.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Günter Klein, Richard Wolff: The Mendelssohn family: family tree from Moses Mendelssohn to the seventh generation . Berlin State Library - Prussian Cultural Heritage, 2007, ISBN 978-3-88053-145-1 , p. 41
  2. ↑ Lisa Zeitz: In the Spell of Pollock - Painter of the New World: Vita Petersen has died. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 26, 2011, page 35
  3. ↑ New York Studio School  ( 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.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.nyss.org  
personal data
SURNAME Petersen, Vita
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Luise Viktoria Margarete Beate Petersen (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter and draftsman
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 22, 2011
Place of death New York City