Willy Colberg

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Willy Colberg in conversation in early 1980

Willy Colberg (born March 31, 1906 in Hamburg ; † March 11, 1986 there ) was a German painter , graphic artist and boat builder .

Live and act

Willy Colberg was born in Barmbek, grew up in a social democratic family of craftsmen and learned boatbuilding from 1921 to January 1925 at the Franz Mello company . He then went hiking for two years, during which he reached Lake Constance . At this time he was already making his first drawings. Colberg decided to become an artist and in 1926 attended a drawing school in Karlsruhe . He then returned to his hometown and began studying at the state art school . From 1927 to 1930 he learned applied graphics from Willi Titze and life drawing from Willy Habl and Willy von Beckerath . He continued his studies in the winter semester of 1932.

Colberg was politically active throughout his life. He was a member of the Friends of Nature and the Young Socialists . During the time of National Socialism he was considered to be close to the KPD and became a party member after the end of the Second World War . He was also close to the Hamburg branch of the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists .

After the Gestapo searched Colberg's apartment on Alsterkrugchaussee in 1933 and interrogated the artist, Colberg fled to Kiel . In 1934 he received a four-week visa with which he could leave Germany and travel on to Cyprus via Italy and Greece. In 1935 he worked here on an orange plantation for a year. He then took over the management of a boatyard in Palestine , from where he sailed to Egypt . Colberg planned to travel to South Africa , but was arrested by the English police in Port Said . Since he could not show a valid visa, he was deported to Germany.

In Hamburg in 1939 he married Anna-Marie Heitmann, known as Ayong, with whom he had their daughter Antje in 1940. Colberg initially worked as a ship carpentry. Since an art collector stood up for him, he did not initially have to do military service. He later worked as a technical draftsman at Blohm & Voss . In a bomb attack in 1943, the apartment and studio on Hopfenmarkt were destroyed. Colberg's entire oeuvre, which had been created up to that point, was lost. Colberg was eventually called up for military service in the Navy. He was initially stationed in Stralsund and was involved in a fight in Italy. Here he joined local partisans and fell into American captivity.

After the end of the Second World War Colberg returned to Hamburg. He worked as an advertising and press illustrator and as a stage painter for the film industry. Colberg was a founding member of the Kleiner Hamburger Künstlerring , founded in 1949 , which wanted to deal politically with fascism. Since Colberg tried to approach the socialist realism of the GDR in his free work , he was largely excluded from public exhibitions and commissions. He was invited to the GDR several times. From 27.2. Until April 25th, 2000 there was also the exhibition "Ahrenshooper Malgast Willy Colberg (1906-1986) Painting, Graphics, Drawing" in the art gallery in Ahrenshoop .

Colberg created etchings and woodcuts that dealt with war and rearmament until the seventies and lived with his wife in Hamburg-Horn . His daughter Antje Fretwurst-Colberg is also a painter, graphic artist and lives in Dändorf district Vorpommern-Rügen .

Works

Colberg creates politically motivated illustrations, caricatures, posters and banners. He was also known outside of the GDR for the picture "Picket in Hamburg". The painting was created in 1952/53 during a stay with an artist brigade in the Ore Mountains , to which Colberg had been invited by the Association of Visual Artists . There he also created the less-noticed commissioned work “Thälmann and the Barmbeck Uprising 1923”.

He also painted portraits and landscape drawings, which he saw as his “real” artistic work. He recorded the motifs on site in drawings and watercolors and later transferred them to canvas in his studio. Colberg used light-dark contrasts with color accents. His style was based on the realistic painting of Wilhelm Leibl and Max Liebermann and shows the influences of the Hamburg Secession of the 1930s. Colberg was constantly looking for the optimal relationship between content and form of his paintings and therefore often revised them.

Colberg's works can be seen today in the Historisches Museum in Berlin , the Kunsthalle Hamburg , the art collection of the NDR and the Stadtmuseum Flensburg.

Web links

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Guest Guide Ostseebad Ahrenshoop 2000, p. 13
personal data
SURNAME Colberg, Willy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, graphic artist and boat builder
DATE OF BIRTH March 31, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH March 11, 1986
Place of death Hamburg