Walter Bertelsmann

Walter Bertelsmann (born January 2, 1877 in Bremen , † February 11, 1963 in Worpswede ) was a German landscape painter .

biography

Bertelsmann was the eldest of three sons of the businessman Friedrich Wilhelm Bertelsmann and Sophie Bertelsmann born. Delius. He completed an apprenticeship as a tobacco merchant and worked from 1898 to 1902 in his father's tobacco company as an authorized signatory and traveling company representative ("traveler with the sketchbook").

In 1898 he took his first painting lessons from Wilhelm Otto in Bremen. From 1902 to 1904 he was a pupil of Hans am Ende in Worpswede and worked all his life as a landscape painter in the Worpswede artists' colony , the last of the “Old Worpswede Masters”. In 1905 he exhibited for the first time in the Kunsthalle Bremen . In 1910 he was represented in Leipzig at the exhibition of the German Association of Artists with his picture “March Sun”. In 1912 he married the Hamburg painter Erna Lundbeck (born July 12, 1880–1956). They had three children, their son Jürgen Bertelsmann , who died in Russia in 1942was also a painter. The two daughters became musicians, Hilda became a pianist and Renate became a singer. After his deployment in the First World War on the Western Front in France, in 1918 in Worpswede im Rusch he acquired an old farmhouse with a thatched roof and half-timbered structure that was built in 1785 and is still almost unchanged today. As a painter with ties to his home country (“a country without a free horizon is for me North Germans cannot be endured in the long run”), he represented a German national sentiment and after 1933 he adapted to the prevailing conditions. Like Otto Modersohn, he joined the Reich Chamber of Culture in order to be able to continue exhibiting. The death of his son Jürgen in 1942 and the decreasing public interest in landscape painting led to the artist's emotional and material hardship. The painter fell silent. In 1957 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class.

Works

Bertelsmann's motifs were the Worpswede landscape with the Weyerberg , meadows and fields of the Hammeniederung , floods or the quiet moor. He was the first to discover the beauty of the Lower Elbe and Lower Weser and became known as a "water painter". From fresh studies in the great outdoors, he developed larger paintings in the studio, mostly on canvas, with elaboration of the details. In addition to his oil paintings, watercolors with maritime motifs have also been preserved.

Bertelsmann captured his motif from an elevated position in landscape format and was thus able to convey the vastness of the flat landscape. Knowing exactly the effect of the contrasting colors, he worked with short, often filigree strokes, with which he created impressive moods (“late evening”), in which he captured the glistening shimmering light on the beach or a delicate winter landscape. Most of his works can be assigned to impressionism. His extensive work includes over 1,000 paintings.

Literature, web links

• Inventory catalogs of the Kunsthalle Bremen I: paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries . Bremen 1973.
• Kunsthalle Bremen: Walter Bertelsmann
• Thomas Felgendreher: Walter Bertelsmann: from Bremen businessman to Worpswede painter. Lilienthal 2005, ISBN 3-927723-91-6 .
• Günther Busch: Worpsweder biography. Worpswede yesterday and today. Also contains: Ernst von der Heide: Worpswede and Rainer Maria Rilke. Verden / Aller 1948.
• Sophie D. Gallwitz: The painter Walter Bertelsmann . In: Lower Saxony , February 1930, pp. 58–63.
• Literature by and about Walter Bertelsmann in the catalog of the German National Library