Werner Gilles
Werner Gilles ( born August 29, 1894 in Reydt / Rhineland (now Mönchengladbach ), † June 23, 1961 in Essen ) was a German painter.
Life
Werner Gilles was born as the fourth of nine children in Moenchengladbach Rheydt as the son of an elementary school teacher William Gilles and his wife Catherine. 1901 the family moved to Mülheim on the Ruhr. In 1913, as a schoolboy, he went on a study trip to Holland with his friend Otto Pankok. 1914 Gilles received a scholarship from the Leonhard- Stinnes Foundation to study at the art school in Kassel at Hans Olde and Rudolf Siegmund. He was a volunteer soldier and up to 1918 in Russia, Serbia and France. In 1919, after the First World War, he studied art at the Academy in Weimar as a student of Walther Klemm, moved in 1921 to the newly established Bauhaus in Weimar and was inducted into the class of Lyonel Feininger. In 1921 he first visited Italy. At the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he studied until 1923, he became friends with the artist Gerhard Marcks and Oskar Schlemmer. In 1923 he undertook another trip to Italy. It works according to the study in Berlin, but goes back to Italy. In 1926 he moved to Dusseldorf, but goes to Paris soon. More tours to France and Italy. In 1930 he received from the Prussian Academy of Arts, a scholarship for a study stay at the Villa Massimo in Rome. Then he first visited the fishing village of Sant'Angelo Ischia. In the era of National Socialism, his works were ostracized and in 1937 presented Degenerate Art in the Nazi exhibition. 17 of his works were confiscated.
As of 1951, Gilles lived alternately in Munich ( in winter) and in the summer on Ischia. Here he was also in contact with the painter Werner Heldt, who died during one of his visits to the home Gilles ' 1954. In the same year he was awarded the Grand Art Prize of North Rhine -Westphalia. Werner Gilles died on 23 June 1961 in Essen.
1996 a road was in Mülheim an der Ruhr named after him ( Gillesweg ).
Work
The stays on the island of Ischia have influenced his painting crucial. The tension between the pagan classical antiquity on the one side and the occidental Christian culture in the southern landscape of the Italian island on the other hand, was to be a central pictorial theme. He painted oil paintings and watercolors and dealt with in ever new variations in both the gay and the threatening aspects of such areas in his landscapes. Has His painting of the 1920s and 1930s, while echoes of the works of the artists of Der Blaue Reiter.
The painting in the 1950s and the later works of Gilles characterized by stylizations of motifs and a rather flat image composition.