Walther Wolff (sculptor)

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Karl Gustav Walther Wolff , also Walter Wolff (born April 30, 1887 in Elberfeld , Rhine Province ; † January 22, 1966 in Ossiach , Carinthia ), was a German-Austrian sculptor , lithographer and landscape painter .

Life

Hussar memorial : Regimental memorial 1914–1918 of the 2nd Westphalian Hussar Regiment No. 11 , 1929, Krefeld, Grafschaftsplatz

Wolff was the son of the Protestant Elberfeld chemist and factory owner Walther Wolff (1856-1945) and his wife Anna Margaretha, née Pagenstecher (1863-1934). After school in Elberfeld, attending education in Bad Godesberg and graduating from high school in Traben-Trarbach , he went to Munich and Tittmoning in 1906 , where he became a student at Hermann Groeber's painting school . In 1907 he switched to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts to study painting . In the same year he became a student of Hugo von Habermann . He took sculpture courses with Balthasar Schmitt . In 1908 he was accepted into the 2nd Guard Uhlan Regiment in Berlin and did his military service. In 1909 he met the voice trainer Else Steinmann, the daughter of the Swiss economist Arnold Steinmann-Bucher . The couple married in 1910. The honeymoon went to Rome . Until 1912, when their son Vincent was born, they then lived in Paris and Meudon . Impressed by Auguste Rodin , whose art he had already come into contact with as a youth in the Godesberg Villa von der Heydt of the banker Karl von der Heydt and whom he met personally through Hugo von Tschudi in Paris, he began to concentrate more on sculpture to employ, which he studied from 1912 with Georg Kolbe and as a master student of Louis Tuaillon at the Berlin Art Academy until 1914. The Berlin sculpture school shaped him into a neoclassicist artist .

As a soldier in the cavalry , Wolff took part in the First World War, first on the Western Front , later on the Eastern Front , and finally again on the Western Front. Shortly after the birth of their daughter Maria, Wolff's wife died in August 1914. The children came to live with their maternal grandparents. In 1918, after the end of the World War, Wolff went to Cologne , where he stayed with friends in Marienburg in a garden house and accepted a series of portrait assignments. In the summer of 1919 he exhibited his sculptures in the Kölnischer Kunstverein . In 1925 he married Käte Gabriele Lucas, the daughter of the book printer owner Paul Samuel Arthur Lucas, who was born in Elberfeld in 1902. The couple moved to Berlin-Dahlem . Wolff moved into the former studio of the animal sculptor August Gaul . He worked as a sculptor and lithographer in Berlin for about two decades before the Wolffs finally moved to Ossiach in 1945, where they had already acquired a house on Lake Ossiach in 1939 . In 1947 they took on Austrian citizenship.

Works (selection)

In 1923, Wolff created a memorial in the form of a dying naked warrior for 31 bank employees who died in the First World War for the lobby of Deutsche Bank in Elberfelder Königstrasse , which was transferred to the Barmen cemetery in 1960 . At the end of the 1920s, together with the Düsseldorf architect Gotthold Nestler , he realized the memorial of the 2nd Westphalian Hussar Regiment No. 11 in Krefeld for the members of the regiment who died in the First World War. By 1932 he also created a war memorial for those who died in the First World War for the Stolberg (Rhineland) mountain cemetery . It shows a mourning, naked youth with a lance on a simple natural stone plinth with the inscription I had a comrade .

He was represented with busts at Berlin Academy exhibitions and at major German art exhibitions in Munich in the 1930s and 1940s . His portraits of musicians ( Walter Gieseking , Wilhelm Furtwängler , Paul Graener , Alfred Cortot , Otto Klemperer , Hans-Erich Riebensahm ) became famous . He also portrayed the scientist Max Planck . He created a bronze bust of Hermann Göring in 1936, an iron relief with the portrait of Adolf Hitler , which was distributed as the “honor plaque of the Führer” for propaganda purposes, as early as 1933. A copy of the latter is in the collection of the German Historical Museum Foundation . In addition to Arno Breker's busts of Hitler, those of Wolff were among the best-known “Führer” heads; they shaped the public image of Hitler iconographically, for example in reading books, and appeared almost at the same time during the National Socialist era . In later times he created not only portraits, but also mainly animal sculptures and landscapes.

literature

  • Wolff, Walther . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 36 : Wilhelmy-Zyzywi . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1947, p. 218 .
  • Hans Wille: The sculptor Walther Wolff . In: Romerike Berge. Journal for the Bergisches Land, published by the Schloßbauverein Burg an der Wupper and the Bergisches Geschichtsverein. Bergischer Geschichtsverein, Remscheid, Volume 11 (1962), Issue 3, pp. 129-135.
  • Marie-Luise Baum: View of a fulfilled life. The sculptor Walther Wolff-Ossiach is 75 years old . In: Our Bergische Heimat . Volume 11.
  • Marie-Luise Baum: Walther Wolff 1887–1966 . In: Wuppertal biographies . 6th episode (= contributions to the history and local history of the Wuppertal , volume 14), Born-Verlag, Wuppertal 1966, pp. 123-131.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bernhard Koerner, Edmund Strutz: Bergisches gender book . Volume 3 (DGB 83), Görlitz 1935, pp. 140, 576
  2. ↑ Marianne Strutz-Ködel among others: German gender book . Volume 135, Limburg / Lahn 1965, p. 337
  3. ↑ 03272 Walther Wolff , matriculation database of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich
  4. ↑ Memorial Deutsche Bank (Santander death warriors) , the portal website denkmal-wuppertal.de , accessed on May 14, 2019
  5. ↑ Bronze bust of Hermann Göring, dated 1936 , website in the alamy.de portal , accessed on May 13, 2019
  6. ↑ The Leader's Plaque of Honor , website on abebooks.co.uk , accessed May 13, 2019
  7. ^ Metal plate: Portrait of Adolf Hitler , data sheet in the portal deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de
  8. ↑ Claudia Schmölders: Hitler's face. A physionomic biography . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-46611-7 , p. 129
  9. ^ Joachim Stephan Hohmann: First World War and National Socialist "Movement" in the German Reader 1933–1945 . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 978-3-8204-1156-0 , p. 165
personal data
SURNAME Wolff, Walther
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wolff, Karl Gustav Walther (full name); Wolff, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Austrian sculptor and lithographer
DATE OF BIRTH April 30, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Elberfeld , Rhine Province
DATE OF DEATH January 22, 1966
Place of death Ossiach , Carinthia