Willy ter Hell

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Willy ter Hell 1913
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Willy ter Hell (born December 2, 1883 in Norden , † July 1, 1947 in Hofgeismar ), actually Wilhelm Reemt ter Hell, was a German landscape painter , draftsman and graphic artist .

Life

Wilhelm Reemt ter Hell was the seventh of nine children of the northern auctioneer Jan ter Hell and his wife Aleida Harmina, nee. Meyer, who both immigrated to East Friesland from Dreibergen in Ammerland . Both were devout Lutherans and had their son baptized Lutheran. His mother was an art-loving woman who taught all of her children to draw herself. Willys eldest brother Johann Hermann later worked as a porcelain and painter in Berlin , his cousin second degree was the Norderneyer marine painter Poppe Folkerts . He was also related to the Emden painter Gerhard Heinrich Nanninga .

Willy ter Hell first attended the Ulrichsgymnasium Norden , which he graduated with a high school diploma. However, his father's financial situation did not allow his original wish to then begin studying art. In 1901 he began an apprenticeship as a theater painter in Berlin . After three years he was allowed to switch to Professor Harder at the Berlin Academy of the Arts , where he dealt intensively with panoramas and dioramas. Since Ter Hell’s father’s illness could no longer finance his further stay in Berlin, he was employed by Harder as a paid assistant, which enabled him to continue his work. At the same time, he attended evening courses at the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts .

Friends urged ter Hell to submit three of his works for the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in 1906, which were finally accepted. This confirmed his determination to shape his future as a painter. In the same year he moved to Dresden as a student of Eugen Bracht . Although his working style did not appeal to him, Bracht ter Hell worked as a master student. At the student exhibition in 1909, ter Hell was awarded the Great Silver Medal, and in 1910 also the Great Gold Medal for his painting Höhenblick, which he made in the Sauerland . Since the city of Dresden no longer appealed to him after that wave of success, he moved back to Berlin, where he met Margarete Starck, who was four years his junior, in 1912 and married a little later. In 1920 his only daughter Ina was born, who after attending the arts and crafts school also appeared as a painter. Shortly after marrying Margarete Starck, he was awarded the Julius Helfftschen Prize for his painting Märkischer See , which established his subsequent series of successes. The same picture was awarded the Great Golden Medal at the international art exhibition in Munich in 1913, at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1914, and finally at the 1915 world exhibition in San Francisco . Ter Hell joined the Märkischer Künstlerbund , which included Hans Hartig , Ernst Kolbe , Carl Kayser-Eichberg and Hans Licht . With them he worked on the painting of the Brandenburg Hall in the Schöneberg Town Hall , which contains 30 frescoes with predominantly topographical representations from the Mark Brandenburg. In 1914, at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, ter Hell were awarded three gold medals for the pictures Waldwiese , Vorfrühling am Scharmützelsee and Märkische Landschaft . In 1917 the Berlin National Gallery acquired the pictures of the Hessian Landscape and Forest Meadow in Hesse , both of which were destroyed in the Second World War , but were reproduced in Westermann's monthly magazine in 1922 .

During the First World War , Willy ter Hell served as a front-line soldier in Flanders and Russia from 1915 to 1918 , but he was still able to help organize the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in 1915. After the end of the war, he went on major study trips in the first half of the year, the results of which he then processed in his Berlin studio in winter. He traveled by train to West Prussia , Hesse , the Rhön , the Harz , the Sudetenland , the Giant Mountains , the Black Forest and the Mark Brandenburg . In 1921 he traveled to South Tyrol and the Alps for the first time , but he opposed the then trend of Alpine painting and continued to focus his work on the low mountain range.

Ter Hell joined the NSDAP early on. As a strongly conventional artist, he was very welcome to the National Socialists; at the time he was considered one of the best German landscape painters. He became a volunteer employee of the Reich Chamber of Culture , and in 1938 the Main Department of Fine Arts arranged a Willy ter Hell exhibition in the office of the Führer’s representative for all intellectual and ideological education in the NSDAP . At the Great German Art Exhibition in the House of German Art in Munich, ter Hell was represented with 24 works, several of which came into the private possession of Adolf Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrops . The picture Auf der Schwäbische Alb , which was shown in Munich in the summer of 1940, was bought by Hitler for the Reich Chancellery, which was just one of his numerous pictures that were exhibited in German ministries and offices. 1943 he was at the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich the title of professor honoris causa awarded.

In 1943 ter Hell's studio in Berlin-Grunewald , where he also lived, was bombed out, which also destroyed a large part of his work. In March 1945 he wrote to his cousin Poppe Folkerts in Norderney that he had had his remaining works sent to Carolath Castle in today's Siedlisko in 1943 , and that he himself had moved to Turek that year . In 1945 he finally moved to Hofgeismar in northern Hesse with his wife Margarete, daughter Ina and his granddaughter without any possessions , where he died of severe pneumonia in the summer of 1947.

Ter Hell remained very attached to his East Frisian homeland throughout his life. Until 1945 he read the Norder Ostfriesischer Kurier regularly and remained a member of the Berlin Ostfriesenverein all his life. His later artistic breakthrough and the subsequent destruction of a major part of his works in World War II, however, no longer allowed exhibitions in East Frisia. It was not until 2008 that a Willy ter Hell exhibition was shown for the first time in East Friesland in the Heimatmuseum Norden; around sixty works were shown here.

Awards

literature

Web links

Commons : Willy ter Hell  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME ter Hell, Willy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES ter Hell, Wilhelm Reemt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH December 2, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH North (East Frisia)
DATE OF DEATH July 1, 1947
Place of death Hofgeismar