Sunday, December 4, 2016

Three early paintings by Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann


Jünglinge im Gartenpavillon (young men in a garden pavilion), 1904.
Self-portrait, circa 1904.
Self-portrait, 1904.

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Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann (17 July 1883, Hamburg - 11 December 1973, Berlin), German painter and art writer. From a merchant family, he studied with the landscape painter Arthur Siebelist from 1899 to 1903; Siebelist surrounded himself with a devoted circle of students, some of would become well-known, including Franz Nölken, Fritz Friedrichs, Walter Alfred Rosam, and Walter Voltmer. Together with Nölken and Rosam, Ahlers-Hestermann went to study and live in Paris in 1907; he remained until 1914. While there, he met his future wife, studied at Matisse's painting school, and was greatly influenced by the work of Cézanne. He also traveled to Italy, England, and Russia during this time. He returned to Hamburg at the outbreak of war and, two years later, married Russian painter Alexandra Povorina. At the end of hostilities, he was teaching at a private art school, and the following year he co-founded the Hamburg Secession. From 1928 he taught at the Art Academy in Cologne, but was dismissed by the Nazis in 1933 due to his previous political activities. He and his wife and daughter moved to Berlin in 1939; in the protective anonymity of the German capital they survived the war. From the end of the war until the year of his death, he was director of the Landeskunstschule (Art School) in Hamburg. And from 1956 to that same year, he was director of the Fine Art Department at the Art Academy in Berlin.

Meine Schüler und ich (my students and I), by Arthur Siebelist, 1902. At far right, Ahlers-Hestermann. Nölken at center with a pink hatband.




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