Werner Lange (painter)

Werner Lange (born March 31, 1888 in Kiel , † July 13, 1955 in Kiel) was a German painter.

Life

After attending the crafts school in Kiel and the arts and crafts school in Hamburg , Lange traveled to Paris in 1912 on a Hamburg scholarship , where he visited Picasso and received decisive suggestions from Otto Freundlich . From 1913 until the outbreak of World War I, he worked as an assistant to Cesar Klein in Berlin. 1914–1918 he was a soldier and fought in the Carpathian Mountains and on the Western Front near Verdun . From 1919 to 1943 he taught at the crafts and arts and crafts school ( Muthesius School ) in Kiel and was one of the organizers of the artists' festivals. In 1919 he became a member of the Expressionist Working Group in Kiel and formed a studio community with his friends Karl Peter Röhl and Friedrich Peter Drömmer . Their group exhibition in the Kiel Kunsthalle sparked a scandal in May 1919. In order to make ends meet financially, Lange adapted his style to the respective requirements. From mid-1935 he was a painting consultant in the state management of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts . Nevertheless, in 1937 two landscape watercolors, which were created on a trip to Spain in 1926, were confiscated in 1937 as part of the Degenerate Art campaign in the Kiel Kunsthalle.

plant

From 1912 to around 1922, under the influence of Otto Freundlich, expressionist pictures with figurative surfaces were created. Since 1922 he created colored glass windows. Although he had calmed down his style since the mid-1920s, the murals of the Kiel Light and Water Works from 1928 were painted over in 1937 as "degenerate". After the Second World War, Lange reinvented himself as a painter and, under the influence of the French painting of the 1950s, mainly created landscapes with calmly reclining figures or groups of figures.

Works

• Mother and Child , 1913/20 Stadtgalerie Kiel
• Woman's head , 1919 Schleswig-Holstein State Museums Foundation, Gottorf Castle
• Design of a glass window for the Harbeck House, Hamburg, 1922. Heikendorf Art Museum
• Design of the hall of honor for the dead of the Second World War in Kiel Town Hall, 1953

literature

• Karl Rickers, The Kiel painter Werner Lange , Kiel City and Maritime Museum 1978
• Masquerade Werner Lange on the 100th birthday, Stadtgalerie Kiel 1988
• Bärbel Mantiz, Werner Lange - Human, Group, Hope , in: Kat. Kunstwende - The Kiel Impulse of Expressionism 1915–1922, Kiel 1992
• Sabine Behrens and Henning Repetzky, Werner Lange Have a bit of imagination , Heikendorf Art Museum 2013
• Ulrich Schulte-Wülwer, Kiel artist Volume 3: In the Weimar Republic and National Socialism 1918–1945 , Heide 2019, pp. 114–130.