Buried Treasures by Jack Zipes;

Author:Jack Zipes;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

6

Christian Bärmann

THE DELIGHTFUL ARTIST NOBODY KNOWS

The Giant Ohl takes charge. (Illustration by Christian Bärmann.)

VIRTUALLY NO ONE in Germany or the rest of the world knows anything about the brilliant painter and storyteller Christian Bärmann (1881–1924), who died at the young age of forty-three. A short synopsis of his life reads like a fairy tale with an open ending.1 But it is a somewhat sad fairy tale as well, for he died in the prime of his life, and most of his paintings and drawings were destroyed in a fire at the Glaspalast in Munich on June 6, 1931. During a British bombardment in 1945, more of his works were eradicated at the Martin von Wagner Museum, part of the University of Würzburg.

Born in Würzburg to a poor baker’s family, Bärmann was trained at a young age to become a tailor because he was never successful at school. However, he rebelled against his family in 1896 and went to Hamburg, where he began working on ships, and traveled to South America a few times. In 1898, he returned to Würzburg, where his mother, now a widow, encouraged him to become an architect. With his mother’s help, he mustered enough money to attend a school for architecture and art in Munich. Once there, however, he was rejected by the Academy of Art and was compelled to turn to a private school directed by a prominent Slovenian painter, Anton Ažbe (1862–1905), who recognized Bärmann’s great talent for painting and illustration. A generous but strict brilliant teacher of fundamentals, Ažbe allowed Bärmann to study at his school without paying tutition. It was there, among many modernist painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Ivan Bilibin, Leonard Frank, Igor Grabar, and other notable artists, that Bärmann was encouraged to give free rein to his imagination while learning from Ažbe’s method using the Main Line and the Ball Principle. Thanks to Ažbe’s rigorous training in human anatomy, Bärmann gradually became a master of figure drawings while exploring aquarelle and oil painting.

During the twentieth century, Bärmann also served as an apprentice for various painters in Munich and became known not only for his use of unusual colors but also for realistic paintings of Würzburg. In addition, Bärmann demonstrated a gift for sketching and drawing animals of different kinds, especially strange, fantastic creatures. He began publishing his graphic work in two of the major magazines of that time, Simplicissmus and Die Jugend. By 1905, he had won many awards for his drawings and sketches, including the Rome Prize, which enabled him to travel to Italy to study the great Italian painters and improve his techniques and understanding of classical art. After spending about four years in Italy, he returned to Munich in 1910, where he spent a good deal of his time studying animals and nature. He had a special fondness for illustrating frogs, rabbits, birds, and insects. This was one of the reasons the prominent writer Waldemar Bönsels asked him to contribute sixty illustrations to his famous children’s book, Die Biene Maja (Maja the Bee, 1912).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.