Architecture

Buchwieser, Helene Elisabeth Leopoldine

acolono — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 14:40:39 +0000

Buchwieser, Helene Elisabeth Leopoldine

Leonhard Weidinger Tue, 02/09/2021 - 21:46

Helene Buchwieser

26 November 1912 Vienna – 13 March 2008 Hinterbrühl

from 23 December 1939 Helene Kitschelt-Buchwieser, from 1947 Helene Koller-Buchwieser

Helene Buchwieser, daughter of the architect and master builder Bruno Buchwieser, studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna from 1932. During her studies she gained practical experience as a mason, building engineer and supervisor on her father's building sites. She graduated in April 1937 and went on a study trip to Britain, where she prepared a dissertation on the development of universities in the Middle Ages, which she hoped to write under the supervision of building historian and cathedral master builder Karl Holey, but was unable to complete it following Holey's resignation as rector of the Technische Hochschule in 1938. After Fritz Dworschak, temporary director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) in Vienna applied successfully to department III of the Reichsstatthalterei in Austria for the recruitment of an assistant for architecture, building and interior design questions, Helene Buchwieser was appointed head of the new building department in the KHM. In this position, she organized the restoration and redesign of the Secular and Ecclesiastical Treasury, the interior design of the Neue Burg and the work required to install the Collection of Historic Musical Instruments in Palais Pallavicini in the centre of Vienna. She planned the installation of the busts of Hitler by Edwin Grienauer and Wilhelm Fraß in the vestibule of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Neue Burg and was responsible for the decorations in preparation for the visit by the "Führer" in March 1939. She never applied for or was accepted as a member of the NSDAP. She worked freelance on payment of a half-salary, but already by November 1939 war economies forced Dworschak to close down the building department and terminate Buchwieser's position in the museum. She remained in contact privately with the KHM after marrying the art historian and Treasury assistant Lothar Kitschelt in December 1939. In 1940 she took over temporary management of her father's company and passed the master builder examination. Kitschelt was conscripted into the army and reported missing in November 1944. Thereafter Helene Kitschelt-Buchwieser's name still turned up occasionally in the museum files, having provided her signature in the place of her absent husband.

In 1945 she deputized for the cathedral master builder Karl Holey, supervising the securing and reconstruction of the burned-out St Stephen's Cathedral. In September 1945 the Staatsamt für öffentliche Bauten, Übergangswirtschaft und Wiederaufbau (State Office for Public Buildings, Transitional Economy and Reconstruction) awarded her the title of Zivilingenieurin für Hochbau (civil engineer for building construction). In 1946/47 she received a six-month bursary from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to study new building materials and methods and residential building and housing development in the USA. In 1947 she married Josef Koller, who worked at the Bundesministerium für Volksernährung (Federal Ministry of Popular Nutrition). In subsequent years, under the name Helene Koller-Buchwieser, she was responsible for a number of public buildings and churches in Austria, including the Jungarbeiterdorf Hochleiten in Mödling, the Viktring-Klagenfurt estate, the estate An den langen Lüssen in Vienna's 19th district, the Töchter des göttlichen Heilands (Daughters of the Divine Saviour) boarding school in the 7th district, the Pfarrkirche zur Kreuzerhöhung (Exaltation of the Cross parish church) in Kittsee and the Evangelical-Catholic twin church in Giesshübl-Hinterbrühl. The Archbishop of Ouagadougou in Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, commissioned her around 1970 to build a juvenile training centre in Ouahigouya and a centre for disabled persons in Ouagadougou as well as St Pierre's church in Ouagadougou. She received numerous awards as an architect and member of the International Union of Women Architects and examiner of subsidized building projects in the Vienna provincial government. She remained active until 1995.

Keywords

Architecture

Museum employee

Susanne Hehenberger

29 July 2019

Publications about the person / institution

Ute Georgeacopol-Winischhofer, Koller-Buchwieser, Helene, geb. Buchwieser, in: Brigitta Keintzel/Ilse Korotin (Hg.), Wissenschafterinnen aus und in Österreich. Leben, Wer, Wirken, Wien-Köln-Weimar 2002, 396–399.

Herbert Haupt, Das Kunsthistorische Museum. Die Geschichte des Hauses am Ring. Hundert Jahre im Spiegel historischer Ereignisse, Wien 1991.

N. N., Eintrag zu Koller-Buchwieser, in: International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), Biographical Database, URL: iawadb.lib.vt.edu/view_all.php?person_pk=26 (3.12.2020).

Jung, Hubert Wilhelm

acolono — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 14:38:51 +0000

Jung, Hubert Wilhelm Susanne Hehenberger Thu, 11/19/2020 - 11:03

Hubert Jung

4 December 1883 Stuttgart – 8 June 1971 Nuremberg

Hubert Wilhelm Jung was born in Stuttgart in 1883 as the youngest of seven children. After attending secondary school in Ravensburg, he registered in 1904 in the Architecture Department of the University of Technology in Munich. He had a close relationship with his older brother Hugo (born 1877), who had a doctorate in modern languages and was a student for a while at the same time as him. After Hubert completed his studies in 1911, the two brothers moved to Vienna to work with Josef Hoffmann, whom they had met through their friend Adolf Marx (1886–1971). Hoffmann had built the family villa for Marx’s father, the paint manufacturer Hugo Marx (1854–1944), in Hinterbrühl. The Jung brothers were thus members of artist circles that included Hoffmann, Dagobert Peche, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Contact with the last-mentioned is documented in a series of letters, according to which the brothers not only acted as brokers for Hoffmann but also bought works directly from the artist. In a list made by the artist showing the collectors of his drawings is the entry "Dr. Jung, Vienna". It is not clear which of the two brothers is meant. When the First World War started, the brothers were conscripted into the army in Germany. Hugo Jung, a lieutenant and company commander, died on 11 August 1917 in western Moldova. His brother Hubert survived but was seriously wounded. He did not return to Vienna, however, but moved to Gut Abelbeck bei Soltau, near Hannover, to his partner Anna Cassinone (1878–1968), a member of the wealthy Protestant industrial family, who had been married first to the Hannover publisher Max Jänecke (1869–1912) and then to Alexander Cassinone (1866–1931), director of Österreichische Maschinenbau AG Körting. In May 1931 Hubert and Anna Jung—they had married in 1924 in Munich—moved to Salzburg, where they acquired a farm, Erlhofgut, in the municipality of Thumersbach. They were accompanied by the 26-year-old housekeeper Emmy Lohmann, whom they later adopted. After the annexation of Austria in 1938, they sold the farm because they feared, as Hubert later admitted, that Anna could have difficulties later on account of her Jewish origins. Anna's mother Marie Körting (née Matyas, 1850–1880) came from a Hungarian Jewish merchant family. The Jungs subsequently acquired Hof Uhla with an area of around 145 hectares and a lake in the present-day district of Mecklenburgische Seenplatte. As they did not need an agricultural permit, they spent the following years relatively undisturbed, although the Reichssippenamt (Reich Genealogy Office) was aware that Anna was a "half-Jew". Apart from breeding small horses and Great Danes, they lived mostly from their annuities. When the Red Army arrived in May 1945, the animals, equipment, household furnishings and food were plundered. The following year the farm was to be expropriated as part of the "democratic land reform", but Hubert Jung was initially able to resist this action. In 1948, however, their entire property was once again expropriated under Regulation No. 19 of the Mecklenburg State Administration on Land Reform in the State of Mecklenburg of 5 September 1945. Local farmers were forced under police supervision to leave their properties. In May 1949 Hubert Jung managed to store with a friend the household goods deposited until then in a barn. In 1966 he stated that he had been able to send "a few crates and pictures and small household items to relatives in the West". After all attempts to have the expropriation repealed, Anna and Hubert Jung escaped from East Germany towards the end of 1949. They were taken in by Baron Christoph von Tucher at his Nuremberg castle, where they lived the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, the municipal council of the City of Neustrelitz seized the remaining goods stored with a friend. After their flight, the Jungs were always short of money. Their only remaining property was the Tyrolean mountain hut they had had built in 1920 on Bärenbadkogel between Kitzbühel and the Thurn pass and where they subsequently spent many months. It was from there that Jung wrote to Albertina director Otto Benesch in April 1951, offering nine drawings and an etching by Egon Schiele. He also asked for support in the sale of his oil painting The Small Town III, which he had acquired from Schiele in 1914 while working with Hoffmann. The Albertina purchased eight drawings, and the painting was ultimately acquired by Rudolf Leopold.

Among the drawings acquired by the Albertina is one of a boy by Erich Lederer, which was claimed by one of Lederer's legal successors in 2015. In October 2016 the Art Restitution Advisory Board did not recommend the restitution of the work and the five others acquired from Hubert Jung and in the Albertina today, because it was to be assumed that Jung had acquired the works directly from the artist through his work in Vienna.

Keywords

6 January 2019

Publications about the person / institution

Sonja Niederacher, Dossier Provenienzforschung bm:ukk – LMP, Egon Schiele "Die kleine Stadt" II, auch "Kleine Stadt" III, 16.1.2012, URL: www.bmkoes.gv.at/dam/jcr:4bc7568f-54da-4b73-89d5-dead10d0f99c/dossier_schiele_kleinestadt.pdf (3.12.2020).

Beschluss des beratenden Gremiums zur Provenienzforschung in der Leopold Museum Privatstiftung, Egon Schiele "Die kleine Stadt" II (auch "Kleine Stadt" III), 19.6.2012, URL: www.bmkoes.gv.at/dam/jcr:c68943d9-1ffb-489b-a079-e21e6ca382f7/schiele_kleine_stadt_II.pdf (3.12.2020).

Beschluss des Kunstrückgabebeirats, Hubert Jung, 5.10.2016, URL: www.provenienzforschung.gv.at/beiratsbeschluesse/Jung_Hubert_2016-10-05.pdf (3.12.2020).

Leopold Museum, Provenienzdatenbank, Egon Schiele "Die Kleine Stadt" II, URL: www.leopoldmuseum.org/de/Forschung/Provenienzforschung/datenbank/482 (3.12.2020).

Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung, Egon Schiele Datenbank der Autografen, URL: www.schiele-dokumentation.at (3.12.2020).

Kammerer, Marcel

Leonhard Weidinger — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 07:41:08 +0000

Kammerer, Marcel Leonhard Weidinger Wed, 05/05/2021 - 13:09

Marcel Kammerer

4 November 1878 Vienna – 25 December 1959 Montreal or Quebec, Canada

also Marcell Kammerer

Marcel Kammerer studied architecture under Otto Wagner at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Wien (Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna) from 1898 to 1902. After study trips in Europe and Egypt, he was chief draughtsman in Wagner's studio until 1910 and was closely involved in the construction of the Kirche am Steinhof and Post Office building in Vienna. He took private lessons from 1914 with the painter Franz Rumpler and worked until 1919 with his former fellow students Emil Hoppe and Otto Schönthal as a self-employed architect. In 1920 he was awarded the title "Baurat" for his work as an architect. At the suggestion of its vice-president Leopold Blauensteiner, the general meeting of the Zentralverband bildender Künstler Österreichs (Central Association of Austrian Fine Artists) elected Kammerer to the board in 1935.

Shortly after the annexation of Austria, Kammerer became managing deputy of Leopold Blauensteiner, Generalbeauftragter für bildende Kunst (Commissioner General for Fine Arts) of the Landeskulturamt der NSDAP Österreichs (NSDAP Austria Provincial Office for Cultural Affairs), and managing director and deputy head of the Landesleitung Wien (Vienna provincial office) of the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste (Reich Chamber of Fine Arts), answerable to the Reich Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin. All planned art exhibitions were subject thereafter to approval by Blauensteiner or Kammerer. In this function they both had an important influence on artists and also on the development of the art and antiques market and their alignment with the Nazi ideology. They were instrumental in deciding on expropriations and the appointment of temporary administrators and Aryanizers. Landscape pictures by Kammerer were shown at the exhibition Art in the Ostmark, which opened in August 1938 in the Berlin Haus der Kunst. That same month, the Völkischer Beobachter described him as a "model upstanding fighter for the purity of art in the Ostmark" who from 1933 to 1938 had already performed "inestimable groundwork for the success of the Nazi art ideology". Kammerer was described in this article as a "Parteigenosse" ("Party comrade"), although his membership of the NSDAP cannot be confirmed because of the absence of relevant documentation. Kammerer's influence on Aryanizations and development on the art market can be demonstrated from a number of examples. In November 1938 he appointed the art historian Robert Grehs as authorized agent and temporary administrator of the company owned by Ignatz Pick, which was planned for liquidation. Then he supervised the sale of his stocks. Kammerer later approved the takeover of the business by two Aryanizers. The relationship between the Vermögensverkehrsstelle (VVSt) (Property Transaction Office), which was responsible for Aryanizations, and the Reich Chamber's provincial office was not without tensions. For example, Kammerer complained in the case of Galerie Harding in early 1939 that the owner was still operating and that the Reich Chamber, "as the department responsible for the art market", had not been consulted by the VVSt on the appointment of an Aryanizer.

In 1946 he renounced his qualification as an architect for health reasons and because he stated that he now only worked as a painter. A short time afterwards he emigrated to Canada, where he died in Montreal (or Quebec according to some sources) in 1959.

Keywords

Aryanization

Architecture

Artist

Nazi art and culture policy

Nazi asset expropriation

Gabriele Anderl

21 November 2020

Publications about the person / institution

Dr. G., Maler der Ostmark. Marcell Kammerer, in: Der Völkische Beobachter, Wiener Ausgabe, 7.8.1938, 9, URL: anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=vob&datum=19380807&seite=9 (3.12.2020).

Waldemar Hartmann, "Die Kunst der Ostmark". Feierliche Eröffnung der großen Ausstellung im Berliner "Haus der Kunst", in: Der Völkische Beobachter, Wiener Ausgabe, 28.8.1938, 9, URL: anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=vob&datum=19380828&seite=9 (3.12.2020).

N. N., Die Neuordnung bei der bildenden Kunst, in: Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 20.3.1938, 16, URL: anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=nwg&datum=19380320&seite=16 (3.12.2020).

N. N., Generalversammlung des Zentralverbandes bildender Künstler, in: Der Tag, 5.6.1935, 7, URL: anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=tag&datum=19350605&seite=7 (3.12.2020).

Ursula Prokop, Marcel Kammerer, in: Architektenlexikon Wien 1770–1945, URL: www.architektenlexikon.at/de/271.htm (3.12.2020).