Walter Bullert

Walter Bullert (born May 24, 1895 in Potsdam ; † February 28, 1986 there ) was a German painter, graphic artist and sculptor.

Career

Born in Potsdam as the son of the lithographer Paul Bullert, Walter Bullert received drawing lessons from Wilhelm Thiele in the advanced training school on the canal in Potsdam from 1906 . From 1911 he learned the profession of chemographer and worked in various companies in Potsdam and Berlin. From 1914 to 1916 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin and was a master student of Arthur Kampf (1864-1950). He had to break off his studies when he was called up in 1916. Until 1918 he served as a soldier in the First World War . From 1919 to 1920 he continued his studies at the educational institution of the State Museum of Applied Arts in Berlin with Max Doepler (decorative painting),Max Koch (nude class) and graphic artist Karl Michel (stone and copperplate printing) and settled in Potsdam in 1921 as a freelance painter, graphic artist and press draftsman. Here he was active in the Potsdam Artists' Association (founded in 1909) and was a member of the Guild's Art Council (founded in 1925). He was a jury member at exhibitions, a. a. also at the “Potsdamer Kunstsommer” (1921–1923) initiated by the art association.

In 1925 Bullert built a residential building in the English country house style based on the design of the architect Heinrich Laurenz Dietz in the "Eigenheim settlement" developed by the settlement association , in which he lived and worked between 1941 and 1956 until the end of his life in 1986 with one break. In addition to Dietz, he also had a working friendship with the photographer Max Baur , whose MB logo he designed. In return, Baur photographed many of the portrait busts of Walter Bullert. In 1933 his press card was withdrawn and the “Reich Chamber of Culture” issued him two new cards: one as a painter, one as a sculptor. He also worked for the city during the Nazi era and designed, among other things, the honorary citizenship certificate for Paul von Hindenburg and an advertising poster with the garrison church depicting Potsdam as the "birthplace of the Third Reich". Drafted into the Wehrmacht from 1939 to 1945 , military service and a right hand wound again interrupted his work. Returning to his destroyed hometown in the summer of 1945, he recorded the remains of the former royal seat in watercolored rubble drawings on behalf of the magistrate. From 1948 Walter Bullert belonged to the Association of Visual Artists in Potsdam, from 1952 to the Association of Visual Artists (VBK) of the GDR and was temporarily a member of the VBK's expert and commissioning committee. At the technical college for advertising and design (FWG) he was temporarily active as a lecturer in life drawing. In the GDR, Bullert mainly worked as a sculptor and shaped Potsdam and other cities in Brandenburg with building-related works until his death. He was mentally and physically active into old age and was able to practice his art as a freelancer.

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Figure group “Workers in the Glass Industry” in Weißwasser , err. 1955

Walter Bullert's early work includes portraiture, drawings, expressionist printmaking, woodcuts and wood sculptures. Commissioned by the city architect Reinhold Mohr (1882–1978), he made wall paintings (frescoes) in 1921 for the representative branch of the Sparkasse in Potsdam's old town hall . For the city of Potsdam he designed a series of emergency money (“Soldier Series ”, 6 × 50 Pfennig, 1921) and the “Potsdamer Ehrenmal” memorial book for those who fell in World War 1914–1918 (1927). From 1927 Bullert also occupied himself with sculpture, which mainly determined his work in the form of portrait sculptures until his later years. In the 1920s and 1930s Bullert worked as a press draftsman, graphic artist and book designer for various Potsdam publishing houses, a. a. the Academic Publishing House Athenaion and Rütten & Loening. After the end of the war in 1945/46, a series of water-colored rubble drawings was created to document the war-torn city of Potsdam. In the following years he received various architecture-related commissions and increasingly turned to portrait sculpture. For example, the portrait busts of Egon von Kameke , Hans Klohss, Otto Nagel, Bruno H. Bürgel, Friedrich Wolf, Albert Schweitzer and Karl Förster were created. Sculptures, reliefs and busts are preserved in public spaces, such as the memorial in the Soviet cemetery on Michendorfer Chaussee near Potsdam, the memorial stone for the building officer Arno Neumann who was shot in 1946 and the tomb Bruno H. Bürgel, the Max-Dortu memorial plaque, the Frieze on the Heinrich-Mann-Allee sports hall, fountain figures in Weißwasser and the steel band sculpture in Hennigsdorf. The sgraffito created in 1952 for the Potsdamer Sparkasse in Nansenstrasse was temporarily imposed for reasons of formalism, was visible again from 1980 and was only destroyed during the renovation work in 1990. Works are in the collections of the Kupferstichkabinett zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz and the Potsdam Museum .

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  50 Pfennig emergency note "Strippenjungs"

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  50 Pfennig emergency note "Paddenstecher"

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  50 Pfennig emergency note "flour sacks"

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  50 Pfennig emergency note "bomb thrower"

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  50 Pfennig emergency note "tree frogs"

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  50 Pfennig emergency note "Heufresser"

Exhibitions

Bullert has participated in numerous exhibitions since 1919, mainly in Potsdam, but also in Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Prague.

• 1951 VBK art exhibition “Artists create for peace”, Berlin
• 1953 III. German art exhibition, Dresden

Personal exhibitions were dedicated to him in Potsdam in 1985 (“Early Graphics and Sculpture”), 1995 (“Destroyed. Potsdam 1945–1952”) and 2015 (“Art that you need and use”).

literature

• Renate Bergerhoff: Walter Bullert. Early graphics and plastic. Catalog for the exhibition on the occasion of the 90th birthday in the Club of Artists and Architects "Eduard Claudius", Potsdam 1985
• Renate Bergerhoff: Destroyed. Potsdam 1945–1952 in the drawings by Walter Bullert. Catalog for the exhibition in the Old Town Hall, Potsdam, May / June 1995;
• Klaus Büstrin: A versatile work that amazes. For the 110th birthday of the Potsdam artist Walter Bullert. In: PNN of May 24, 2005

Individual evidence

1. ↑ https://wirhaben.wordpress.com/2015/05/23/max-baur-fotos-als-paket-zum-120-geburtstag-von-walter-bullert/
2. ↑ http://www.maz-online.de/Lokales/Potsdam/Walter-Bullert-Retrospektiven-im-Potsdam-Museum
3. ↑ https://wirhaben.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/kunst-die-man-brauch-und-gebrauch-sonderausstellung-zu-walter-bullert-1895-1986/#more-661