Wilhelm Kempin

Wilhelm Kempin (born June 21, 1885 in Osternburg ; † March 30, 1951 in Oldenburg ) was a German landscape painter .

life and work

Kempin came from an old family of glassblowers from the district of Stettin and was the second child of the glassmaker Ludwig Ferdinand Richard Kempin and his wife Carolina nee. Petzold. After attending school, from which he spent the last two years with his grandparents in Pomerania , he started an apprenticeship under his father in the glassworks in Easter castle in 1900 . In his spare time he took over ten years painting lessons at the neighboring Kreyenbrück living Gerhard Bakenhus . The first artistic successes aroused the interest of the head of the glassworks, August Schultze, who commissioned him in 1910 with the production of several paintings to decorate new ships for the Oldenburg-Portuguese steamship shipping company , which Schultze also headed. In order to familiarize himself with maritime motifs, Kempin traveled to Portugal with a free passage . Encouraged by this recognition, he entered the newly nationalized art school in Weimar in 1911 , the director of which was Fritz Mackensen . Landscape painting enjoyed a special place here. In the following four years, Kempin attended Professor Max Thedy's nature class and, as his master student , was given a free studio within the academy.

After the First World War , the difficult economic situation at the university forced Kempin to return to Oldenburg. Here he devoted himself to the vastness and diversity of the Oldenburg landscape and found a variety of suggestions for his pictures in the period that followed. In 1922 he married the painter Helene Schulz-Dubois (1896–1944) from Frankfurt who, after training as a drawing and gymnastics teacher, attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the art school in Frankfurt a. M. had visited.

In 1925 the family moved into a house with a studio in Kreyenbrück, which, although close to the city, still offered a relatively intact landscape with the geestrücken , moor and lowland areas there. Kempin's wife played a decisive role in her husband's artistic career. She put her own drawing talent behind the family service, took care of the upbringing of the four children and then contributed to the family's upkeep by returning to the teaching profession.

style

Although Kempin lived permanently in Oldenburg from 1922, apart from a few trips, and looked for the motifs of his work in the local landscape, he cannot be assigned to the group of Oldenburg native painters. In his pictures, the topographically accurate representation of localities is not in the foreground and, with a few exceptions for which precise information is available, the landscape sections cannot be localized. Painting is here relieved of any direct reference and transposed into another dimension. Kempin broke away from the role model of his teachers very early on and found his own artistic style.

Honors

Wilhelm-Kempin-Strasse in Oldenburg is named after him.

literature

• Ewald Gässler, Elfriede Heinemeyer, Jose Kastler: Gerhard Bakenhus - Wilhelm Kempin, painter in Kreyenbrück. A contribution to landscape painting in Northern Germany. Isensee, Oldenburg 1987, ISBN 3-920557-69-7 , p. 76 ff.
• Jose Kastler: Heimatmalerei. The example of Oldenburg. Oldenburg 1988.

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Kempin in the catalog of the German National Library
• Wilhelm Kempin on the homepage of Jürgen Derschewsky: Biographies of Oldenburg Artists, K – L (with 16 photos)
• Discovered work by Helene Kempin. Only her husband Wilhelm Kempin plays a role in the city's art history. She had studied art in Strasbourg, Munich and Frankfurt. on nwzonline.de