Walter Kurt Wiemken

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Self-portrait, oil on canvas, 1939

Walter Kurt Wiemken (born September 14, 1907 in Basel , Switzerland ; † December 30, 1940 in Castel San Pietro , Breggia gorge) was a Swiss painter .

Life

Walter Kurt Wiemken's parents were Germans who were naturalized in Switzerland in 1898 and moved to Basel. Wiemken fell ill with polio at the age of four months and remained handicapped and dependent on help throughout his life. He lived in his parents' house all his life and also ran his artistic studio there . Wiemken's father ran a lithography business .

From 1923 to 1927 Walter Kurt Wiemken was a student at the trade school in Basel. There he was taught by Fritz Baumann in the graphics class . He was the founder of the expressionist artist group Das neue Leben and also conveyed the ideas of the Bauhaus . Wiemken's illustrations from this period are based on Expressionism. During this time, Wiemken sought connection to the Red-Blue artist group , which consisted of students of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner .

In 1927, Wiemken studied the summer semester at the State University of Applied Arts in Munich . He was tutored there by Fritz Hellmut Ehmcke and Richard Klein . After his stay in Munich, Wiemken went on a study trip to Paris with Otto Abt . His last expressionist pictures were taken during this stay. They almost exclusively depicted gloomy street scenes. After that, Wiemken dealt with impressionism . In 1928 and 1929 Wiemken traveled with Walter Bodmer and Otto Abt, with whom he had a lifelong friendship, to the artists' town of Collioure in Roussillon and Ticino . During these stays he created landscape paintings. Wiemken and his friends visited Collioure several times up until 1939.

The observation of the funeral of a girl and the everyday business of a butcher taking place at the same time had a lasting influence on the artistic work of Wiemken. He then tried to depict the contradictions of the events in human life simultaneously in his pictures. In the 1930s, Wiemken's art was influenced by the works of Serge Brignoni , Kurt Seligmann and Pablo Picasso and their surrealism . From then on, his works were characterized by the fact that they represented the sunny and dark sides of human life. In 1936 Wiemken took part in the exhibition Time Problems in Swiss Painting and Sculpture at the Kunsthaus Zürich .

Together with his friends Walter Bodmer and Otto Abt, Wiemken was one of the co-founders of Gruppe 33, which was founded in 1933 to protest against conservative tendencies in the Swiss (especially Basel) artist and architect scene . This also had a clear anti-fascist orientation. In 1936 and 1937, he was influenced by the constructivist art of his friend Walter Bodmer. Wiemken traveled to Belgium in 1937, where he studied the surrealist art of James Ensor . Some of his works emerged from the competitions of the Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt .

On December 30, 1940, Wiemken went for a walk and crashed in the process. His body was found on January 23, 1941 in the Breggia Gorge near Castel San Pietro.

Wiemken's works are valued and exhibited internationally. Wiemken's works were also represented at documenta 1 in Kassel in 1955 .

literature

  • Georg Schmidt : Walter Kurt Wiemken (1907-1940). In: Architecture and Art. Volume 28, Issue 9, 1941, pp. 225-231 ( e-periodica.ch ).
  • Wiemken, Walter Kurt . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 35 : Libra-Wilhelmson . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1942, p. 535 .
  • Memories of Walter Kurt Wiemken by Walter Bodmer and Otto Abt. Œvrekatalog by Helene Sartorius and Claus Krieg. Holbein, Basel 1942.
  • Beat Wismer, Paul-André Jaccard: Works of the 20th Century - From Cuno Amiet to Today. Collection catalog Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau, Aarau 1983.
  • Dorothea Christ : The meaning of the group 33. In: Basler Stadtbuch 1983. P. 31–41 ( baslerstadtbuch.ch ).
  • Harald Szeemann (Ed.): Visionaries Switzerland in the Kunsthaus Zürich. Sauerländer, Aarau 1991, ISBN 3-7941-3437-0 .
  • Agathe Straumann, Basel-Stadt Education Department. Walter Kurt Wiemken. In: Art for Basel: 75 years of art credit Basel-Stadt. Art in public space. Schwabe Verlag, Basel 1974, ISBN 3-7965-0968-1 .

Web links

Commons : Walter Kurt Wiemken  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Wiemken, Walter Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss painter
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 1940
Place of death Castel San Pietro TI