The museum for mining folk art in Schneeberg honors the impressive work of the 1929-born artist in a special exhibition under the motto “Preserving from oblivion”.
This “Schwarzenberg market woman” and the “observation of a lace girl” are actually reminiscent of Ernst Barlach. How the market woman sits there, smiling kindly at the little boy who stretches for the gingerbread hearts on her sales table, his head covered by a cloth, the lifelike figure wrapped under thick, unspecified winter clothes. Or the old man, slightly stylized like the girl making lace, whom he watches curiously, but also a little distracted because he certainly still has work to do himself, which the work clothes indicate. That’s how it is, full life. Not always graceful and elegant, not rich and beautiful, but defied the circumstances, the experiences of half a century etched deep in your face.
Gotthard Richter, sometimes called “Ernst Barlach from the Ore Mountains”, created these figures. Now they can be seen along with many others in the Schneeberg Museum of Mining Folk Art. But Gotthard Richter isn’t really a people’s artist, he didn’t see himself as a “blunderer,” says museum director Regina Krippner.
The art of carving is still very popular in the Ore Mountains. And in every generation, artists emerge from this centuries-old tradition, who go beyond the folk art and give new impetus to wood art in the Ore Mountains. Hans Brockhage and his son Peter Paul, Jörg Beier and Christoph Roßner are examples of this – and so is Gotthard Richter.
There is no getting around carving in the Ore Mountains
If you were born and grew up in the Ore Mountains almost 100 years ago, and your father also ran a small stonemason’s business, then you could hardly avoid carving, sculpting. Gotthard Richter must have felt the same way. Born on March 29, 1929 in Pöhla, today a district of Schwarzenberg, as the son of the couple Johanne and Arthur Richter, he worked from 1945, after training as a technical draftsman in the Schwarzenberg Krauss works, in his father’s stonemasonry “Grabstein-Richter ” With. Arthur Richter was interested in art himself and also carved. As a child, he captured his son in linden wood and painted watercolors with landscapes from the surrounding area.
Gotthard Richter completed his studies at the State Academy for Graphic Arts and Book Trade in Leipzig in 1947. In 1953 he passed the journeyman’s examination and in 1956 the master’s examination as a stone sculptor. His masterpiece: a perfectly formed girl’s head made of sandstone, figurative, friendly, looking openly into a future that should at least not be burdened by war like the past. He made tombstones, but also carvings and sculptures. At the age of 50, Richter studied again, now in evening classes at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, also continued his education in Karl-Marx-Stadt with the sculptor Harald Stephan, and became a circle leader for plastic in the district cabinet for cultural work. Around this time his artistic work began to be recognized; in 1980 he was allowed to take part in the district art exhibition in Karl-Marx-Stadt.
In addition to earning a living as a stonemason, he has also worked artistically before, happily experimenting with various materials. Drawings from his undergraduate studies prove his talent. At the Academy in Leipzig, the predecessor of today’s Academy of Visual Arts, he had applied with a pair of carved ducks, among other things, which go their way proudly and very realistically. He also later carved animals again and again, but he was particularly interested in people. His figures only partially follow the Erzgebirge carving tradition, often going beyond it. Like many men (and also a few women) in the Ore Mountains, Richter carved miners and other traditional Ore Mountain figures such as forest farmers and woodwomen. But only a few achieve the fullness of life, radiate as much wisdom and goodness as the figures by Gotthard Richter. You can literally hear them talking, laughing, complaining, the women and men with backpacks or wooden boxes, sticks and aprons, the serious miners in traditional habit, who still lived the real mining. The nude figures that he created in the 1960s to 1980s show self-confident, often somewhat thoughtful people, as they correspond to the time, which was a time of only faint hope, of never-ending work in the world of the Cold War, in which happiness often lay only in the personal. In the 1980s he also had his first exhibitions and was able to carry out public commissions.
Retirement boost
After Gotthard Richter gave up the stonemason’s business in 1995, his artistic work again took off. In watercolors and drawings, he devoted himself to studying nudes and portraits. He paints wonderfully lively images of people that sometimes seem like a piece of youth and joie de vivre that has been caught up, since his own youth was shaped by National Socialism and war, and the years of hunger that followed. He also works on Christian motifs again, such as a “Holy Family with the Adoration of the Shepherds” 2011, which does not idealize the protagonists, but gives them the traits of contemporary people. In addition, Gotthard Richter passed on his knowledge and skills to young people in numerous courses. At the same time he sometimes promoted the imperfect: “The carving tool doesn’t always have to be polished,” he is quoted as saying in the exhibition. “Blunt tools bring structure and life to the work.”
Gotthard Richter also found recognition when he took part in the Schwarzenberg Art Figura Competition in 2009. He submitted a life-size figure of a girl, which caught the attention of the sculptress Anna Franziska Schwarzbach. “It reminds me of the … young standing girls by Aristide Maillol,” she writes in the catalog for the Schneeberg exhibition: “It’s classic sculpture. It’s a girl figure that’s hardly ever formulated anymore. The human language of sculpture is for everyone understandable … It is unmistakable. Gotthard Richter moves with his sculpture in this ancient canon of forms and he moves unpretentiously, self-confidently and with quiet restraint. He is wonderfully conservative. That does not mean old-fashioned, but rather to protect, observe, preserve, save. “
“Preserving from oblivion” is the name of the special exhibition in Schneeberg, and thanks are due in particular to Johannes Düring, a young carpenter who tried his hand at many areas of carving, sculpture and design. He met Gotthard Richter two years ago, he recalled in an interview with the “Freie Presse”. “In Johanngeorgenstadt there was a wooden miner that had rotted and had to be secured and repaired,” says Johannes Düring. So he researched and asked – initially without success. “No one knew who the miner came from.” He asked the grandchildren of the wood designer Hans Brockhage, but only the Schwarzenberg wood sculptor Hartmut Rademann was able to help. He referred to Gotthard Richter – now with success. Düring contacted Gotthard Richter and obtained permission to replicate the miner, who was soon to be set up again in Johanngeorgenstadt.
“The Ernst Barlach of the Ore Mountains”
In the past two years, Johannes Düring often sat with Gotthard Richter and got to know his impressive life’s work, almost all of which is at home with the artist’s family. This is how the idea for the exhibition in the Schneeberger Museum came about. Because Gotthard Richter’s work – “simplified, expressive; I like to call him the Ernst Barlach of the Ore Mountains, with Erzgebirge themes,” says Johannes Düring – is definitely worth being shown to the public. Düring collected 65 works, “everything that I could get hold of, including a few items on loan.” And at the opening of the exhibition, in which the now 93-year-old Gotthard Richter was able to take part with his wife Anneliese, he met some colleagues who once took part in his courses. The Schwarzenberg wood sculptor Hartmut Rademann is quoted in the small, informative exhibition catalogue: “Gotthard Richter has influenced many young artists in the region… His works have a powerful, natural expression.”
A number of works by Gotthard Richter are in public space, often without the creator being known, and some in a deplorable condition, because even the hardest wood suffers from the weather over time. Johannes Düring is therefore in the process of researching the locations of the sculptures and restoring some. The “Family” ensemble was restored in Tellerhäuser, and casts are being made of other works in order to preserve them for posterity. An example of this can also be seen in the exhibition. In addition, according to Düring, a film about Gotthard Richter is to be made together with the journalist Katja Lippmann-Wagner, “but its completion is still failing at the moment due to financing”. With all these activities, Düring wants to keep the Erzgebirge tradition of carving and sculpting alive. “It’s a great asset,” he says, “I want this craft not to die out.” Many works in the public space are no longer there, are not maintained enough – “there is still a lot of work”.
The exhibition “Preserving from oblivion – the life’s work of the sculptor Gotthard Richter” in the Museum of Mining Folk Art in Schneeberg can be seen until February 26th. It is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. »