Werner Fechner

Werner Fechner (born July 7, 1892 in Berlin , † January 9, 1973 in Ravensburg ) was a German painter and etcher .

Life

Werner Fechner's grandfather Wilhelm Fechner was a painter and court photographer. His father Hanns Fechner , who was a well-known portraitist in Berlin around 1900, enabled his talented son to take lessons from 1906. Werner Fechner was able to gain special insights into nature from Ludwig Heck , zoo director in Berlin, from the ornithologist Pastor Otto Kleinschmidt and from the botanist Joseph Friedrich Nicolaus Bornmüller .

Fechner studied from 1911 to 1915 at the art academy in Weimar . There he learned painting and graphics from Professor Köhler and later became a master student of Fritz Mackensen .

In 1919 he married Käte Meis, who came from a respected Erfurt family and was later called Mei Fechner. The two had met while studying.

Also in 1919, the year the Bauhaus was founded , Fechner began a two-semester course of study with Walter Gropius . He was one of the moderns who loved the smooth and clear.

Fechner was a freelance painter and etcher in Weimar from 1920 to 1935. During this time Fechner was a juror at the art academy and made a name for himself with portraits of well-known personalities. In 1933 he received the Albrecht Dürer Prize from the city of Nuremberg for two portraits of women.

In 1933 a studio house was built in Schreiberhau , in the Lower Silesian part of the Giant Mountains . His father, who went blind around 1911, withdrew to Schreiberhau and founded the artists' association "Lukasmühle" there. When he died in 1931, his son Werner Fechner received part of his father's property and built a studio house there.

Since Fechner's mother came from a Jewish family, Fechner was banned from working in 1935. The Fechners then retired to their house in Schreiberhau, where they stayed until 1946. Here Fechner continued to paint portraits in silence. a. by many officers who ignored the ban on his profession.

In the course of the expulsion of the Silesians from their homeland in 1946, Fechner and his wife had to leave Schreiberhau, leaving behind their valuable belongings, and came to Eldagsen near Hanover . When the city of Wangen im Allgäu offered him a new home, Fechner moved his residence to the artists' settlement that had arisen there in 1953.

In 1973 Werner Fechner died in Ravensburg .

Exhibitions

• Werner Fechner, a painter from the Weimar Art School: an exhibition by relatives and friends of the artist in collaboration with the Weimar City Museum from September 7th to October 29th, 2000

literature

• Literature by and about Werner Fechner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Werner Fechner, a painter from the Weimar Art School . Exhibition catalog Stadtmuseum Weimar, Weimar 2000
• Otto Kleinschmidt: German nature in monthly pictures (bird book) . With colored illustrations by Werner Fechner, New Edition, Zittau in Saxony: W. Klotz, 1930. IDN: 359478263

Web links

• His work Rotkehlchen appeared in Mecklenburgische Monatshefte. - Schwerin, vol. 4.1928