Walter Dexel

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Walter Dexel (born February 7, 1890 in Munich , † June 8, 1973 in Braunschweig ) was a German painter , commercial artist , designer , traffic planner and publicist. He also worked as an art historian and headed a museum in Braunschweig during the Second World War.

life and work

Education and family

Walter Dexel studied art history from 1910 to 1914 at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich under Heinrich Wölfflin and Fritz Burger . He also attended the Gröber drawing school in Munich, went on a study trip to Italy and - still influenced by Paul Cézanne - painted his first pictures. Shortly before the outbreak of war , he went to study in Paris. In September 1914 he married Grete Dexel (née Brauckmann), daughter of the Jena teacher Karl Brauckmann . Grete Dexel gave birth to sons Thomas Dexel and Bernhard Dexel in 1916 and 1919 .

First World War and Weimar Republic

In 1916 Walter Dexel was assigned to the war archive in Jena and received his doctorate from the University of Jena under Botho Graef . Between 1916 and 1928 Dexel was the exhibition director of the Jenaer Kunstverein . He expanded the collection of the Kunstverein started by Graef, which eventually included works by Alexander Archipenko , Alberto Giacometti , Erich Heckel , Paul Klee , Oskar Kokoschka and Emil Nolde , among others . He organized Dada evenings as well as exhibitions by expressionists , Bauhaus artists, realists and constructivists . In Jena he was familiar with the Bauhaus, which was then located in Weimar, and some of the protagonists were friends. On January 26, 1924, Paul Klee gave his “Jena Lecture” on modern art in the Prinzessinnenschlösschen, the seat of the Jena Art Association.

In 1921 Dexel met Theo van Doesburg . Around this time, Dexel's art turned to an abstract, constructive world of images. In 1923 he organized a constructivist exhibition in Jena together with Willi Baumeister and Erich Buchholz . Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 1925 project of a residential house design for the Dexel family did not get beyond the first sketches.

In October 1922 Dexel demanded new exhibition rooms for the Kunstverein, also because " architecture , interior design , applied arts , exemplary industrial and handicraft products" are now in the foreground and picture exhibitions are only "part of a whole". Ultimately, these considerations gave rise to a “plan to make the art association usable for educational purposes”, which was drawn up together with the director of the Jena Adult Education Center , Adolf Reichwein . For Dexel it was confirmed that “the focus of interest today no longer belongs to the picture on the wall, but to the shaping of our surroundings”. He therefore focused increasingly on "Exhibitions good typography and advertising , factual furniture and utensils, on housing, settlement and urban development The calculations based on purely typographic design advertising works Dexel." - one in view of the number of visitors undoubtedly need to strengthen the public relations - were out of financial distress of the art association as a self-help of the managing director.

For him the sovereignty of the consumer was a conceptual prerequisite: Today's people have the right to demand that the messages they need be presented to them briefly and clearly and, above all, they can demand that they receive the abundance of undesired messages, including the Advertising in almost all its forms is likely to cause only a minimum of time loss. In doing so, Dexel succeeded in transferring its "image-immanent syntax" from the areas of collector and museum art to the functional areas of everyday urban life. Dexel's understanding of (good) advertising was quite limited; for him, “typography” and “advertising” almost coincided. In this respect, for him, advertising was “practical art” without any ingenious artistry. While contemporary advertising educators tried to justify that "the great noise of the street, the constant change of passers-by in their hurry" means that the "more intensive means of making yourself heard ... not necessarily within the limits of the Taste ”, Dexel later advocated aesthetic principles in everyday design. From 1923 to 1927 he was one of the artists of the November group , in whose exhibitions he participated until 1929.

In 1926 Walter Dexel settled in Frankfurt am Main, where he worked as a freelancer. Until 1928 he designed numerous banners, advertising clocks, neon signs and even telephone boxes. Ernst May also hired Dexel as a graphic designer for the New Frankfurt project . His work leads to the draft of a municipal advertising order (around 1927). Dexel transferred its “image-immanent syntax” to functional areas of everyday urban life. It can be assumed that the WMF products from the project were designed by Dexel. At least after the end of the project, WMF hired Dexel as a designer.

In 1927 he was represented in El Lissitzky's Cabinet of Abstracts in Hanover. In 1928 he joined Kurt Schwitters' “Ring neue Werbegestalter” . From 1928 to 1935 he taught commercial graphics and cultural history at the Magdeburg School of Applied Arts and Crafts . Dexel leaves painting, typography and graphics behind. Personal risks for himself and his family seemed too great to him.

National Socialism

On May 1, 1933, Dexel joined the NSDAP - like all teachers at the Magdeburg School of Applied Arts and Crafts. Nevertheless, the applied arts and crafts school in Magdeburg dismissed him in 1935, on the grounds that he was a "degenerate artist" and an "unreliable National Socialist". In 1937 two of his works were shown in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition: the oil painting Locomotive from around 1921 and the reverse glass painting Abstract Composition . The whereabouts of both works is unknown. 1936 to 1942 Dexel was professor for theoretical art and form instruction at the State University for Art Education in Berlin-Schöneberg . In 1942, Dexel was commissioned by the city of Braunschweig to build up a collection of historical and modern utensils from trade and industry. At the same time, he taught at the Braunschweig “Master School for the Design Crafts” (the Nazi name for the later University of Fine Arts ). Dexel thus followed up on its own collection and publication activities on the subject of “household appliances”, which began in 1931. He worked at the newly founded Institute for Craftsmanship and Industrial Design in Braunschweig and published in collaboration with the Ahnenerbe Foundation.

After the Second World War

Dexel was fired in 1945 and reinstated in 1946 after a denazification process that classified him as exonerated. In 1953, the collection was now connected to the art school of that time as a "Formsammlung" in Broitzemer Strasse. Dexel worked there until his retirement in 1955. The "Formsammlung" acquired parts of his private collection on the same subject when he left. His son Thomas Dexel then headed the "Formsammlung" with his own changed focus. In the meantime it is stored in the Löwenwall City Museum with a total of around 1600 inventory numbers. A small part is exhibited in the permanent presentation of the museum. In 1948 and 1952 Walter Dexel took part in the exhibitions of the Braunschweig artists' group “the independent”. For the first time, some of his constructivist works from the prewar period were shown again. In 1961, after completing his research on European household appliances, he began to paint again. The Braunschweig City Museum dedicated an exhibition to him in 1962. The journalist Walter Vitt published important aspects of Dexel's life and work for years and published his texts. The art historian Ruth Wöbkemeier researched and documented his artistic work. The graphic designers and design historians Eckhard Neumann and Friedrich Friedl published significant contributions to Dexel's typographic and creative drafts . Dexel was now in demand again as a critic and contemporary witness. Neumann published Dexel's contribution “The 'Bauhaus Style' - a Myth” for the first time in the catalog for the exhibition “Bauhaus - Idea - Form - Purpose - Time” at the göppinger gallery in Frankfurt am Main. The concise text, in which Dexel claims to have been an “observer at close range”, had a decisive influence on the debate about avant-garde movements in the interwar period. He summed up that after 1945 "all too comfortable journalism did not bother to really research the history of the twenties". The buzzword Bauhaus style cannot simply "cover up a wide-ranging event that has grown from many roots".

Lighting and light objects

Light object art by Dexel: Colored light column (1926) in Gustav Mahler Park, Hamburg

Dexel was one of the first gas lamps to be created for advertising purposes in Jena in the 1920s . Formally, Dexel developed these “three-dimensional, illuminated posters ” from his painting and commercial graphics. In 1926 Walter Dexel went to Frankfurt am Main as a freelance consultant for advertising design . The main aim of an advertising system designed by him for Frankfurt was to standardize the facades , to achieve harmony between advertising and architecture . In Frankfurt in 1927/28, Dexel designed not only numerous banners and advertising clocks, but also larger illuminated advertising designs on house fronts and roofs. There were also illuminated telephone boxes and light columns for normal clocks . In doing so, Dexel advocated - as was already practiced with its pharmacy advertisement in 1926 - for the comprehensive introduction of the trade mark, “which today is unjustifiably almost completely extinct. […] The doctor, the midwife, the car repair shop, the car exit, post offices, telephone booths and much more should be made familiar to us through signs. In business life, almost only the baker's pretzel , the hairdresser's brass basin and the pharmacy's cross have survived from the past . "

Traffic signs

In September 1925, Dexel designed the world's first illuminated signpost for road traffic on the Jena wood market . In 1925, Dexel was still experimenting with the color design of the directional signs for Jena and the surrounding area, but in the following year he suggested “that certain colors should be determined from the beginning for certain points of the compass, for example north: white writing on a black background; South: white writing on a red background; East: black writing on a yellow background; West: white lettering on a blue background. ”Although the Jena gas and waterworks reported in 1925 that it had registered the traffic lights as a Reich patent , due to the standardization according to DIN, the yellow signs with black letters that are known to this day prevailed. In addition, Dexel advocated a graphically and semantically logical as well as visually quickly recognizable design of the traffic signs . Adzes made forward-looking proposals for structuring urban road networks : "With the growing importance of the automobile as a travel agent would be in the big cities to mark firstly appropriate ways of suburbs the central business area, secondly exit roads to the main routes that would be for major directions in question (these come only in secondly, perhaps provided on a reduced scale with the name of the temporary locations of more local importance), and thirdly, that keep streets passage travel from the center of the city "probably the" world's first illuminated, colored glass sculptures arranged in rows on the market set up in Jena to serve as festive decorations ”, designed Walter Dexel in 1926.

Exhibitions

Fonts

  • with Grete Dexel: The house of today. (= Prometheus books). Hesse & Becker, Leipzig 1928.
  • Unknown handicraft. Used equipment in metal, glass and clay. 1935, 2nd edition, Metzner, Berlin 1942.
  • Home appliance that is not out of date. 1938, 4th edition, O. Maier, Ravensburg 1950.
  • German handicrafts. A history of culture and form of the home appliance. Propylaea, Berlin 1939.
  • Wooden device and wooden mold. Ahnenerbe Foundation, Berlin-Dahlem 1943.
  • Glass. Material and shape. O. Maier, Ravensburg 1950.
  • The Goethe House in Weimar. Franz Schneekluth, Darmstadt 1956.
  • Ceramics. Fabric and shape. Klinkhardt & Biermann, Braunschweig, Berlin 1958.
  • The home appliance in Central Europe. Nature and change of forms in two millennia. Germany, Holland, Austria, Switzerland. 1962, 2nd edition, Klinkhardt & Biermann, Braunschweig, Berlin 1973, ISBN 3-7814-0182-0 .
  • The Bauhaus style: a myth. Texts 1921–1965. With 4 essays by Grete Dexel. Edited and commented by Walter Vitt. Keller, Starnberg 1976, ISBN 3-7808-0113-2 ; Reprint Steinmeier, Nördlingen 2000, ISBN 3-927496-71-5 .

literature

  • The November group. Part 1: The painters. Catalog for the 15th European Art Exhibition. Berlin 1977.
  • Walter Dexel - New advertisement. Introduction by Friedrich Friedl. Edition Marzona, 1987, ISBN 3-921420-32-6 .
  • Ruth Wöbkemeier, Walter Vitt (ed.): Walter Dexel catalog raisonné . Umschau, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-89466-106-2 .
  • Maria Schmid (Ed.): Dexel in Jena. Glaux Verlag Christine Jäger , Jena 2002.
  • Cecilie Hollberg (Ed.): Walter Dexel (1890–1973) - Constructed Worlds . Exhibition City Museum Braunschweig. Sandstein Verlag, Dresden 2014.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A compact biographical sketch of Dexel's work and activities of Hans-Peter Thun can be found in Reichwein-Forum No. 7/2005, pp. 6-11.
  2. ↑ Walter Dexel, Apennine Bridge , 1913, pen and watercolor, 12 × 12 cm
  3. ↑ Biograph. Data based on: Ruth Wöbkemeier: Walter Dexel, image, characters, space. Exhibition catalog. Bremen / Berlin 1990, pp. 10-15.
  4. ↑ Volker Wahl reports in detail about Dexel's time in Jena: Jena as a city of art 1900–1933, EA Seemann, Leipzig 1988.
  5. ↑ A life full of ambiguities. In: FAZ. December 18, 2014, p. 11.
  6. ^ Walter Dexel denazification files, Lower Saxony State Archives.
  7. ^ Stephanie Barron (ed.): Degenerate Art, The fate of the avant-garde in Nazi Germany . Los Angeles County Museum of Art , Hirmer Munich, ISBN 3-7774-5880-5 , p. 223
  8. ^ Hansjörg Pötzsch: Walter Dexel as buyer 1941-1944. On the circumstances of the acquisition of the form collection of the Städtisches Museum Braunschweig, in: Provenienz & Forschung 1 (2016), pp. 8–15.
  9. ↑ Cecilie Hollberg (Ed. For the Städtisches Museum Braunschweig): Walter Dexel - Konstruierte Welten. Exhibition catalog. Braunschweig / Dresden 2014, documents the creation of the "Lehrschau" for the first time and exemplifies some of the provenances of the collection.
personal data
SURNAME Dexel, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, commercial artist, designer, traffic planner, art historian and museum director
DATE OF BIRTH February 7, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH June 8, 1973
Place of death Braunschweig