Alpine Landscapes by Fritz
Engelhardt 2000
Author: Elke
Gennrich/Lehmann-Brauns
Welcome to the exhibition devoted to the Bonn landscape artist Fritz
Engelhardt on the theme of "Portraits of the Alps."
As a title
for his oil paintings and watercolors, one could have just as easily have
chosen "A View of the Alps" or "The Pull of the
Mountains."
This, by the way, is how the Vienna Art Gallery in
collaboration with the Krems Art Gallery dubbed a comprehensive exhibition
project in1997/98 that covered the range of themes from the Romantic to
the contemporary period.
Here it was clearly shown that after 200 years of
conquering the mountains aesthetically, for artists the Alps still
represent or keep representing a challenge that today they confront with
varying approaches, media and techniques.
So Fritz Engelhardt is hardly
plowing a lonely furrow with his painting, and with his natural sense of
the sublime carried over into his art, he belongs to the contemporary
"Romantics."
Biographical details
Fritz Engelhardt, born in 1935, is a self-taught painter. He comes from
Korbach in Hessian and grew up attached to nature.
His father was a
typesetter. His flair for drawing and painting was quickly discovered and
promoted at school.
During his vocational training as a shop window
designer in Kassel from 1951 to 1954, he attended an arts and crafts
school and afterwards worked at an advertising agency for two years.
In
1956, Engelhardt becomes a soldier with the German army in Andernach and
the same year is sent to a course in Sonthofen.
He sees the Alps for the
first time and is so impressed and delighted that from this point on he
spends all his free time, weekends, and holidays in the Alps.
He
undertakes mountaineering expeditions during which he does watercolors and
takes photographs. During the 1960s, Engelhardt starts painting mountain
landscapes in oil as well. In the meantime the Hardthöhe (Ministry of
Defense) has become his workplace. He has lived in the Bonn area since
1961 and since 1982 in Bad Godesberg.
Watercolor paintings
After his retirement in 1988, Engelhardt devotes his exclusive
attention to painting and takes courses in painting nudes and portraits at
the Bonn adult education center.
In 1996, he has his first exhibition of
watercolors, which can also be seen here. Peaks are moved into the
foreground.
We have monumental blocks, cones or points, whose contours are
sharply set off against the sky and whose massiveness is structured with
linear brush strokes in the alternating rhythm of exposed layers of rock.
The mountain behemoths or clusters of peaks isolated in one section of the
picture, placed in the middle or slightly moved from the middle, display
the essence of the portrait. They achieve depth of expression through the
spontaneous style of painting, the powerfully established structures over
the spatially illustrated mountain forms and a vividness of color that is
intensified in relation to the natural model.
The intensive light of the
rising or setting sun colors the sky violet, turquoise or deep blue and
makes the mountains appear in shades of ochre and orange. Sometimes in the
watercolor paintings, the valleys, slopes or meadows in the foreground
soften the harshness of the distant towering mountains. That is when the
painting style comes closer to the natural model.
Oil paintings from the year 2000
In the large format oil paintings that are produced suddenly and in
rapid succession in 2000, the expressionist painting style of the
watercolors gives way to stylization, and in the compositions the colossal
mountain peaks often move into the background.
In front of them are
arrayed the horizontal layering of rock masses, rocky beds, fissured
precipices, the icy deserts of the glaciers, debris.
Sometimes a quiet
stretch of water forms the foreground as a reflective surface; once we
find a strip of grass full of yellow globe flowers.
The very wide
landscape formats convey a panoramic impression of the expansiveness
combined with the majestic size of the mountains. It is important to
stress that when the natural mountain landscapes are rendered in stylized
forms and brush stroke technique, the topography of each landscape is
precisely preserved.
Through the stylization of the structural elements,
nature as found in the mountains is contrasted with the real world,
idealized.
Among the painters Engelhardt modeled himself on, above all the
great alpine painter Edward Theodore Compton, Ferdinand Hodler is given
great importance after Giovanni Segantini.
He says he is particularly
interested in Caspar David Friedrich’s "The Ice Sea," a
veritable mountain range of enormous ice floes whose bizarre turquoise
forms in front of the dark blue sky have a powerful suggestive effect.
Magic and sublimity
Engelhardt’s large format Alpine landscapes achieve a magical aspect
with stylization and strong colors.
Pervaded by crystal clear thin
mountain air, they usually display a perfectly clear sky, against whose
strong or deep blue the contours of the mountain peaks and crests stand
out in glistening snow white or intensive blue-green or glowing
brown-orange.
No living creature can be seen, no human, no skier, no ski
lift, no garbage, no environmental pollution.
Engelhardt has wiped out all
traces of tourism, driven by the Rousseauian yearning for closeness to
nature in the solitude of the mountains.
The artist has allowed the Alps
to become frozen in their clear beauty, to lock their sublimity in
timelessness in the light of an eternal summer and to return to them back
their lost, original seclusion.
Raised to the level of the still life,
"nature morte," like gigantic pieces of jewelry the gleaming
peaks of the Great Litzner and Great Seehorn rest under a white sky,
doubling their ornamental beauty in the lake’s mirror.
Painting style and colors
If one looks at the oil paintings from up close, their still life
nature fades and the structures of spellbound, motionless nature emerge as
wildly turbulent, dense, overlapping spontaneously applied brush strokes
that lead in one direction like the lines of force in a magnetic field.
Their variegated, fine-tuned colors strike a chord with which the crowning
sky blue, painted as a clear expanse, finally harmonizes powerfully.
Engelhardt prepares color sketches for every painting. That is, in a
pencil sketch he notes which colors he has chosen.
For instance, for the
sky a mixture of cobalt blue, Prussian blue and coelin blue. For the
zenith a little cobalt violet; then for the mountain massif reddish Naples
yellow, light English red and medium cadmium yellow and so on.
The long road to the painting
The creation of an easel painting in the studio is preceded by a
direct, stirring impression of nature.
Before Engelhardt starts off on a
mountaineering tour – sometimes stimulated by pictures he has seen on
television or from reading a book - he has studied the literature, guide
books and maps of the particular Alpine region, whether it is located in
Germany, Switzerland, Italy or Austria.
He also receives information from
the Alps Association, of which he is of course a member.
In his rucksack,
which is always within easy reach in the cellar and is always completely
packed, there are a sketchbook, watercolors and a camera.
On the mountain
hikes planned with military precision, Engelhardt prefers routes that head
in the direction of the sun.
Then as soon as the eagle-eyed observer of
nature is gripped by a view, a mood, a certain light or motif, he captures
this intensive impression and occasionally takes a photograph.
At home
then, from the many sketches that preserve the freshness of the stirring
moment and which can bring back the felt fascination, he carefully selects
the visual motif, using a photograph as a memory aid.
The long road of the
preparation process now opens up into the decisive phase that Engelhardt
has been waiting for with great excitement – his interpretation of the
experience of nature with oil on canvas.
Fritz Engelhardt found his own
path to art described in a recent comment by Günther Uecker:
"Yearning gains power over me and drives me on. But for me,
homecoming is the actual goal."
Elke Gennrich/Lehmann-Brauns
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