Carl Georg Heise

Carl Georg Heise (28 June 1890 – 11 August 1979) was a German art historian. From 1945 to 1955 he was director of the Kunsthalle Hamburg.

Biography

Heise was born into a Hamburg mercantile family with artistic interests. In about 1906 Aby Warburg became his mentor, and recommended to him a period of studying art history with Wilhelm Vöge in Freiburg. Subsequently he went to Adolph Goldschmidt in Halle and—against Warburg's advice—to Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. In 1910 he travelled to Italy with Wilhelm Waetzoldt and Warburg, visiting Venice and finally Ferrara, where Warburg was researching the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia. In 1912 Warburg travelled with him to Rome to the art historians' congress. In 1914 he was rejected as a volunteer for military service, then studied in Berlin and Kiel where in 1915 he obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Count Vitzthum von Eckstädt with a thesis on North German painting in the Middle Ages, which he dedicated to Warburg. In 1916 Heise worked at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, where he compiled a catalogue under Gustav Pauli of the museum's older paintings.[1] From 1919 to 1921 together with Giovanni Mardersteig and initially also Kurt Pinthus he edited the newspaper Genius. Zeitschrift für werdende und alte Kunst.

St. Anne's Museum, Lübeck
Kunsthalle Hamburg, Old Building

On 1 May 1920 he began work as museum director of St. Anne's Museum in Lübeck. In 1926 he came up with the Jubelkugel (a type of sweet) sold in connection with a lottery for the private financing of the festivities for the 700th anniversary of the city of Lübeck,[2] which with the exhibition Lübeckische Kunst außerhalb Lübecks ("Lübeck Art outside Lübeck") became a great presentation of the significance of Lübeck in art throughout northern Europe. Heise initiated in 1929 one of the first photographic exhibitions, displaying photographs by Albert Renger-Patzsch, Emil Otto Hoppé, Hugo Erfurth and Wilhelm Castelli, then a young Lübeck photographer. In 1931 he curated an exhibition in the Overbeck Society on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the Katharineum zu Lübeck together with the drawing teacher Hans Peters and the works of pupils.

During his time in Lübeck Heise acquired works by Expressionists such as Ernst Barlach (for St. Catherine's Church), Franz Marc and particularly Edvard Munch as well as photographs of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement by Albert Renger-Patzsch. On Heise's initiative the building now known as the Behnhaus was acquired for the city in 1921 and equipped as a museum. He also prepared the way for the museum church of St. Katharine's, for which he had a vision as a sculpture hall of Lübeck art for the entire Baltic region; the plaster cast of Bernt Notke's "St. George's Group" (Sankt-Jürgen-Gruppe) is still reminiscent of this. Many of his acquisitions were later shown in the context of the "Entartete Kunst" exhibitions of 1937 onwards.

Because of his passionate advocacy of modern German art Heise was dismissed from his post during the Gleichschaltung, on 29 September 1933, although he remained in it until 1 January 1934. Between 1928 and 1933 he lived in the Zöllnerhaus ("Tax or customs collector's house") at the Burgtor in Lübeck, previously the residence of the author Ida Boy-Ed.

After the war he was the director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle from 1946 to 1956, and held a professorship at the University of Hamburg. The art-historical "Heise Collection", containing 9,000 titles, is today in the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen ("State and University Library of Bremen"). He is counted as a significant champion of German classical modernism (Klassische Moderne).

Writings

Notes and references

  1. ↑ Peter Betthausen, Peter H. Feist and Christiane Fork: Metzler-Kunsthistoriker-Lexikon. Metzler, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-476-01535-1, p. 167
  2. ↑ Abram Enns: Kunst und Bürgertum, pp. 95 ff.

Bibliography

External links

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