Walter Vitt

Walter Vitt at a Düsseldorf Rhine bridge

Walter Vitt (born October 2, 1936 in Gera ) is a German journalist , art writer and exhibition curator. He initiated an ongoing memorial on the burning of books in Cologne . He is also an honorary member of the International Association of Art Critics.

Life

After graduating from high school in 1957 at Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Braunschweig . From 1957 to 1963 he studied German, journalism, history and philosophy in Münster . There he worked from 1958 to 1961 as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper Semesterspiegel . From 1961 to 1963 he worked as a regional reporter in the WDR office in Münster and then until 1998 as a political editor at the WDR in Cologne. Between 1989 and 1998 he worked there as deputy head of news for radio and as the station's art representative. At the beginning of the 1980s, Walter Vitt was appointed the first full-time training officer for the programs of the station WDR. In terms of operational policy, he was a member of the editorial committee in the early 1970s and a member of the staff council of the DJV from 1983 to 1987 .

In 1978 Vitt accepted a teaching position for broadcasting practice at the University of Münster , which he held until 1996. Further teaching positions at the universities of Bochum (1981), Dortmund (1984–1988), Siegen (1985/86) and Mainz (2000) followed.

1994–2004 the journalist was a member of the art advisory board of the city ​​of Cologne . In 2001 the art critic initiated the project in front of the Old University (Claudiusstraße / am Römerpark) in Cologne's Südstadt district to create a ground memorial named after the authors to commemorate the book burning during the Nazi era (in Cologne only on May 17, 1933) at the same location (now Cologne University of Technology). This memorial was updated every two years under the supervision of Vitt by Cologne stonemason trainees and completed in May 2018.

In 2005, together with Michael Zepter , he started a successful signature campaign against the demolition of the listed Cologne Opera House , a Riphahn building from the 1950s.

Walter Vitt increasingly shifted his professional focus to art criticism . Since 1978 member of the German section of the International Art Critics Association AICA , he was elected secretary of AICA in 1986, and then from 1989 to 2008 he was president of the association. After the political change, his presidency was responsible for bringing together critics from East and West Germany in an all-German AICA. Together with the presidium member Klaus Honnef , he promoted the external impact of the professional association by establishing three annually given critic awards: Museum of the Year , Exhibition of the Year and The Special Exhibition . He has been an honorary member of AICA since retiring from active participation.

Vitt founded the AICA-internal series “Writings on Art Criticism” in the early 1990s. After 28 volumes, he finished the “Schriften” in 2018 with a volume on texts by the British art critic John Anthony Thwaites, who lived in Germany after World War II. - The anniversary volume “Vom Kunststück, über Kunst zu Write - 50 Years AICA Germany” (2001) was published under Vitt's supervision.

As a curator he was responsible for over 60 exhibitions with works by modern and contemporary artists. Vitt has been developing a program for the Catholic parish of St. Maternus in Cologne, Neustadt-Süd and for the Cologne Dominican monastery Heilig Kreuz since the late 1990s to introduce the members of parishes to the aesthetics of modernity. The project in St. Maternus ended in 2011 with an Edgar Gutbub exhibition. Vitt ended the series of exhibitions in the Dominican Convent in spring 2017 with the double exhibition Rainer Plum / Günter Schwannecke.

Together with his wife Luiza Vitt, geb. Aschenbrenner (1938–2009), he brought together an art collection, in particular with works of concrete modern and contemporary art. More than thirty works from this collection were available to the Museum für Konkrete Kunst, founded in Ingolstadt in the early 1990s, as a start-up aid and also as permanent loans for 20 years; see: Museum für Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt, (inventory catalog with donations and permanent loans), Ingolstadt / Heidelberg 1993.

Leaning towards lyrical grotesques , he set up the online participation website www.forstlyrik.de in 2009; Vitt thus recalls the Hirsch poems he developed together with Eckehard Munck and Hendrik W. Höfig in Münster in the early 1960s, which they then published with illustrations by Robert Eid under the invented publisher names Hieronymus Hörnle and Hubertus Röhrer.

Honors

• 1999: Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon
• 2000: Rudolf Jahns Prize
• 2004: Rhineland thaler from the Rhineland Regional Council

Publications (selection)

• My ways to Walter Dexel, Braunschweig 2014, catalog Dexel, Städt. Braunschweig Museum;
• E-Mails in the year of mourning - Ein Trostbuch, Deiningen 2011;
• From talking about art, Deiningen 2010;
• Dexel as an art critic, Cologne / Deiningen 2010;
• The case of Arno Breker (with Christoph Zusatz), Cologne / Deiningen 2007;
• Palermo died on Kurumba, Cologne 2003;
• From the feat of writing about art, Nördlingen 2001;
• Johannes Theodor Baargeld, Fummelmond & ferngefimmel (eds.), Nördlingen 2001;
• Enzo Maiolino - The graphic work (German-Italian), Nördlingen 2000;
• Walter Dexel, catalog raisonné of printmaking, Cologne 1998;
• Enzo Maiolino, Ingolstadt 1996;
• Roberto Cordone's Movimenti-Bilder, Leverkusen 1995;
• Lienhard v. Monkiewitsch, edition “libri artis”, Hanover 1994;
• Artist dreams, Regensburg 1994;
• News in the WDR - A training course, Cologne 1992;
• Nice days in the Dexel house ... The painter's guest book (with Ruprecht Stolz), Cologne 1990;
• Johannes Theodor Baargeld, texts from Zentrodada (ed.), Siegen 1987 a. 1990;
• Jean Leppien, Hanover 1986;
• The painter Bruno Erdmann, Cologne / Darmstadt 1986;
• Bagage de Baargeld - News about the Cologne Zentrodada, Starnberg 1985;
• Tadaaki Kuwayama, Cologne 1982 (Galerie Reckermann);
• From strict designers, Cologne 1982;
• Michael Enneper's landscape interventions (progetto d'arte 1980), Cologne 1981;
• Hommage à Dexel, Festschrift for the painter's 90th, Starnberg 1980;
• Walter Dexel's “Heads”, Starnberg 1979;
• Walter Dexel, The graphic work, Salzgitter 1979 (Kunstverein Salzgitter);
• In search of the biography of the Cologne Dadaist Johannes Theodor Baargeld, Starnberg 1977;
• Gerhard Wittner, Berlin 1976 (Edition Bossin);
• Walter Dexel, The Bauhaus Style - a Myth (ed.), Starnberg 1976, Reprint Nördlingen 2000;
• Hoerle and Seiwert - Die Progressiven, Cologne 1975;
• Walter Dexel, Catalog raisonné of the graphic arts, 1st version, Cologne 1971;
• The work of Walter Dexel, Basel 1970 (Charles Lienhard Gallery);
• Anthologie der Forstlyrik (with Eckehard Munck and Hendrik W. Höfig), Münster 1961;
• Oskar - the complaint book of an average student, Braunschweig 1961;
• University Guide Münster 1958 (founded together with Helmut Beck and Reinhard Theodor Kleinmann); Issues 1959 (editing with Helmut Beck, among others); 1960 (again with Beck); 1961 (with Beck); 1962 (sole editor); 1963 (sole editor).

TV reports on art history

• WDR television film ("Looking for cash", 83 min., 1983; abridged new version, 45 min. 1989)

literature

• Lienau, Marianne, curiosity is enough. A conversation with Walter Vitt (about his Dada research) in: Bagage de Baargeld, Starnberg 1985
• Jappe, Georg, Dada alpin, on Walter Vitt's book “Bagage de Baargeld - News about the Zentrodada from Cologne”, in: Die Zeit, Hamburg, February 28, 1986
• Dattenberger, Simone, Vergessener Bergkünstler / Walter Vitt on the forgotten Dadaist J. Th. Baargeld, in: Münchner Merkur, March 11, 1986
• Ohff, Heinz, several lives. A reader about cash, in: Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin, April 27, 1986
• Kraehling, Werner, art criminalistics: The search for cash money, in: Handelsblatt-Magazin, Düsseldorf, 8.8.1989
• Volkwein, Peter, The Luiza and Walter Vitt Collection. In: "museum", volume "Museum for Concrete Art Ingolstadt", Westermann-Verlag Braunschweig 1991
• Hüllenkremer, Marie, excursion in dream worlds / Walter Vitt and his book about "Night encounters", in: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, April 15, 1995
• Lufft, Peter, u. Brüdern, Jutta, Walter Vitt, in: Profiles from Braunschweig - in picture and text, Appelhans Verlag, Salzgitter 1996, o. S. (114f.)
• Volkwein, Peter (ed.), Believe in art, dream of art. Walter Vitt on his 60th birthday, Ingolstadt 1996
• WDR public relations (ed.), Art in the WDR, acquisitions from a decade and a half. Farewell to Walter Vitt, Cologne 1998
• Kleinertz, Everhard (ed.), Cologne Authors' Lexicon 1750–2000, Volume 2, Cologne 2002
• Herzog, Günter, Walter Vitt on his 80th birthday, in: ZADIK - Central Archive for German and International Art Market Research eV , Cologne, October 2016