UMGEBUNGSENTDECKER
TRAVEL IMPRESSIONS OF AN ART AND HISTORY LOVER
and my experiences as a teacher in China
Worpswede
The artists' village in Teufelsmoor
"Worpswede is a flat country with birch avenues, old farmhouses, rose bushes and rowan trees. The ground is divided between red heather, which smells wonderful, and the strange one cut by canals Moorland. Worpswede is famous for the clarity and color of its atmosphere and for the splendor of its clouds,"
This is what Rainer Maria Rilke wrote at the time, who came to Worpswede at the invitation of Heinrich Vogler and stayed there from 1900 to 1902.
The artists of the first generation
Fritz Mackensen discovered the moor village and in 1889 invited his friends Otto Modersohn and Hans at the end, who had similar impressions there as Rilke. They stayed the entire autumn of the year and the winter as well in the melancholic landscape of the North German Plain.
That was the birth of the artist group. Modersohn, Mackensen and am Ende were the founding fathers, Fritz Overbeck and Heinrich Vogeler followed in 1892.
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Out of cultural criticism, the young artists left the academy in Dusseldorf and sought the unadulterated life in the remote tranquility of the Teufelsmoor. It contained a lot of what Millet, van Gogh, the artists in the French Barbizon or Pont Aven were doing. The search for the origins of being human, the search for the answer to the question of what constitutes being human - work, food, the land, nature. In Worpswede, as in Barbizon, the life of the pious peasants took on a monumental form, which was seen as a counter-model to the internationalism of the big city and industrial capitalism. This almost inevitably leads to idealization and consternation , in the case of Worpswede also the search for the Nordic-Germanic life, which was regarded as a pre-industrial way of life.
The landscape and the place had a strong inspiring effect on the artists, the braune peaty moor, the blue skies, the white birch trunks, the simple farmhouses or the moor canals became the motifs mainly of Otto Modersohn and Hans at the end.
Success was not long in coming either. With the exhibition in Munich's Glaspalast in 1895, the unknown artists became famous at a stroke, especially Fritz Mackensen, who received the Great Golden Medal for his painting "Worship in the open air".
Detail from the painting "Service in the open air by Fritz Mackensen
The painting "Worship in the open air" is now part of the inventory of the "Historic Museum" Hanover. With its large dimensions of 264 cm x 406 cm, it will not be exhibited there for reasons of space. In Worpswede you can find a copy of it on advertising banner foil on the outside wall of the church. The detail above shows the women of the village in their traditional costume, which is introverted, follow the service. The pious atmosphere and the life of hardship in the moor speak from this picture .
The size of the painting does the rest. Mackensen often painted people and their simple lives in large formats.
His picture "The Sod" also corresponds more to history painting in its huge format. The motif and the composition are extremely simple: Two women and a man are shown working in the field. The women are wearing starched bonnets, their faces are not recognizable underneath and they are pulling a harrow across the field with bulky, heavy wooden shoes. 5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ . Above the cloudy sky in the afterglow.
Monumentality and simplicity come together here. This picture is almost a symbol for the appreciation of hard work and life full of deprivation. Es hangs in the large hall of the museum at the Modersohn House.
The Barkenhoff by Heinrich Vogeler
In 1895, Heinrich Vogeler bought the Barkenhoff from his parents' inheritance and turned this farm into a total work of art.
The building became a center of the artist colony, where Worpswede artists met regularly. Many who did not belong to the local artist community came as guests, including Otto Julius Bierbaum, Richard Dehmel, Gerhart Hauptmann, Max Reinhard and many more.
Vogeler's painting "Summer evening on the Barkenhoff", which can be viewed in Worpswede in the Große Kunstschau, shows some of the Worpswede artists meeting in front of the house . The painting looks a bit Scandinavian with its Art Nouveau style and cool colors.
It is often interpreted that the unrelatedness of the figures in the picture can be seen as a sign of the fragility of the artists' colony, which actually occurred later.
In the middle at the gate stands Matha Vogeler, the wife of Heinrich Vogeler.
"Summer evening on the Barkenhoff", painting by Heinrich Vogeler, 1905
Source: https://www.kettererkunst.de/kunst/kd/details.php?obnr=411100319&anummer=379
Vogeler worked as a graphic designer for Insel magazine, which later became Insel-Verlag. He adorned texts by Rilke, Oscar Wilde, Jacobsen, Dante Ferguson, Huch, de Musset.
Double title to Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Emperor and the Witch. by Heinrich Vogeler
https://www.kettererkunst.de/kunst/kd/details.php?obnr=411100319&anummer=379
Heinrich Vogeler: Illustrations to the fairy tales by Oscar Wilde
He also designed interior and exterior architecture, cutlery, crockery, furniture and founded a furniture factory in Tarmstedt with his brother. He received the most unusual assignment with the design of the Güldenkammer in the upper hall of the Bremen City Hall, which he executed as a complete Art Nouveau interior.
The Güldenkammer in the upper hall of the Bremen City Hall
Detail of the Art Nouveau wallpaper in the Güldenkammer, which resembles baroque leather wallpaper
Vogeler designed a rose service for young women's dressing tables, a masterpiece made of porcelain, which was manufactured by the manufacturer in Meißen. As an architect, he designed the Worpswede post office and the train station in Worpswede, Osterholz and Weyermoor.
He was an entrepreneurial type who successfully executed many large projects.
He planted a small grove of birch trees in the grounds of his house, after which he named his farm, Birkenhof, in Low German Barkenhoff . The birch - the recurring motif in the pictures of the Worpswede artists, the defining tree of the moorland, the slender, white trunks that have something ethereal, almost like the slender women in the paintings_cc781905-5cde -3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ by Botticelli or Edward Burne-Jones, the light bark with the black lines and the light crown of leaves - hardly any tree is more suitable as a motif for Art Nouveau than the birch. It is also the tree of cold, barren Nordic regions and of Russia, and that's where Vogeler, who later became a communist, went.
He returned from the First World War as a pacifist and revolutionary .
The Barkenhoff became an experimental field for a new society, a commune, a self-sufficient work school. In 1931 Vogeler emigrated to the Soviet Union, where he was finally forcibly deported to Kazakhstan after the invasion of German troops at the beginning of the war. The Wehrmacht had him on the execution list and were looking for him. In Kazakhstan, Vogeler died of bladder disease and exhaustion. His grave is unknown to this day.
The house in the gorge
Martha Vogeler had separated from Heinrich Vogeler and left Barkenhoff with their three daughters. She moved into Haus am Schluh, an old moor cottage that she had Vogeler's financial support move from the village of Lüningsee to Worpswede and rebuild there. Vogeler left her a lot of the furniture with which she furnished her house.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, who came to Worpswede in 1897, often painted still lifes and people. In her pictures, the self-evident objects of simple life acquire a quiet, poetic monumentality. An earthenware pot, a milk scoop, a vase with flowers or a bowl with fruit also reflect respect for the life of the moor farmers in their pictures and radiate warmth and security.
