Hermann Obrist
Hermann Obrist ( born May 27, 1862 in Kilchberg near Zurich, Switzerland, † February 26, 1927 in Munich) was a draftsman, designer of furniture and embroidery as well as a sculptor. He is considered one of the founders of German Jugendstil.
Life
Obrist was born the second of four children of the Swiss physician Carl Kaspar Obrist and the Scottish nobles Alice Jane Grant Duff of Eden. 1876 parents separated and Obrist moved with his mother to Weimar. In 1885 he began studying medicine and natural sciences in Heidelberg, but he gave up in 1887.
On a trip in 1887 to England and Scotland Obrist learned early on the Arts and Crafts Movement know. On his return he learned the production of ceramics in Jena, which led to a break with the mother because he his - works exhibited and sold - recently rediscovered. Then Obrist studied at the School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe. In 1889 he attended the World Exhibition in Paris and moved in the subsequent year all there to study at the Académie Julian sculpture. During this time he became acquainted with the works of Auguste Rodin know. First portrait busts and wall fountains originated.
In 1892 he moved to Florence, where he worked as a sculptor. The works have been preserved only in photographs. In Florence he met the American art historian Bernard Berenson and his partner and later wife, the art critic Mary Smith Costelloe know. Under the guidance of his mother, Berthe Ruchet society lady, he founded an embroidery studio with Italian art embroiderers, which he did in 1895 to Munich.
In 1896 the construction of his studio building in the Carl -Theodor -Straße 24 (now 48) in Schwabing, the first ensemble of the Munich Art Nouveau furniture of his own design, as well as by Bernhard Pankok and Richard Riemerschmid. The furniture are now in museum collections, the house exists after the fire of 1944 only in converted form.
Attracted international attention Obrist then with the exhibition of his embroidery in the Art Salon Littauer in Munich, which established his reputation as an exponent of Art Nouveau. In the same year he exhibited for the first time a tomb Design at the annual exhibition at the Munich Glass Palace.
In 1898 he founded with August Endell, Richard Riemerschmid, Bernhard and Peter Behrens Pankok the United Workshops for Art in the crafts, to promote the production and sale of the new art direction. In the same year he married Marie -Luise lamp from Leipzig (1867-1952); 1900, the daughter Leila was ( December 22, 1947 lost) and in 1901 the daughter of Amaranth born († 1944 while trying to save a burning home studio ).
In 1902 he founded, together with William of Debschitz the teaching and experimental workshops for applied and fine arts, in professional circles today shortly called Debschitz School, where he was involved until 1904. Your curriculum that had the combination of craft and artistic training to the target, is now viewed as a precursor of the Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius.
Because he heard worse and worse, he was finally numb, to Colonel in 1904 moved back from the teaching and worked in the following years his designs for tombs and fountains. 1914 invited him to Henry van de Velde, to participate in the theater building at the Cologne Werkbund exhibition of reliefs and free-standing fountain. During the First World War, Colonel moved increasingly into private life and became seriously ill. The last public appearance of his works took place during the exhibition Unknown architects of the Labour Council for art in the gallery of IB Neumann in Berlin in 1919 instead.
Work
Obrist works are marked by intense involvement with nature and their by Ernst Haeckel newly discovered microscopic structures. His plant ornaments are full of both by accurate study of nature as a dynamic revival in form. In sculpture Obrist also sought entirely new forms. The decorative tasks of the tomb and the fountain offered him thereby the ability to create almost abstract shapes in this really conservative art form before the abstraction in Germany found public recognition. But Obrist 's reputation remained largely denied and his work came up in the 1960s into oblivion.
The graphic work and a part of the literary estate is now in the National Print Munich. A significant portion of the designs for wells and grave times survived the fire of the studio building, since it succeeded the daughters Obrist, which works to bring about the early 1940s, the city of Zurich. They are now preserved by the Museum of Design in Zurich. Embroideries are ibid and in the Neue Sammlung in Munich and the Museum of Applied Arts (Vienna).
Awards
Own writings
- Collected Essays and Lectures: New possibilities of visual art. Leipzig: Diederichs Verlag, 1903.
- A happy life, first published in: Hermann Obrist. Sculpture / space / abstraction around 1900, pp. 99-143.