Heinrich Maria Davringhausen

Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (October 21 1894 – December 13 1970) was a German painter associated with the New Objectivity.

Davringhausen was born in Aachen. Mostly self-taught as a painter, he began as a sculptor, studying briefly at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts before participating in a group exhibition at Flechtheim's gallery in 1914. He also traveled to Ascona with his friend the painter Carlo Mense that year. At this early stage his paintings were influenced by the expressionists, especially August Macke. [Michalski, 1994, pp. 81-82]

Exempted from military service in World War I, he lived in Berlin from 1915 to 1918, forming friendships with George Grosz and John Heartfield. In 1919 he had a solo exhibition at Hans Goltz' Galerie Neue Kunst in Munich, and exhibited in the first "Young Rhineland" exhibition in Düsseldorf. Davringhausen became a member of the "Novembergruppe" and gained some prominence among the artists representing a new tendency in German art of the postwar period. He was asked to take part in the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) exhibition in Mannheim which brought together many leading "post-expressionist" artists, including Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Alexander Kanoldt and Georg Schrimpf.

Davringhausen went into exile with the fall of the Weimar republic in 1933, first going to Majorca, then to France. In Germany approximately 200 of his works were removed from public museums by the Nazis on the grounds that they were degenerate art. Prohibited from exhibiting, Davringhausen was interned in Cagnes-sur-Mer but fled to Côte D' Azur. In 1945 however he returned to Cagnes-sur-Mer, a suburb of Nice, where he remained for the rest of his life. He worked as an abstract painter under the name Henri Davring until his death in 1970. [Michalski, 1994, p. 84]

Perhaps the best-known painting from Davringhausen's New Objectivity period is "Der Schieber" ("The Black-Marketeer") of 1920, which is in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf im Ehrenhof. It shows a man in a suit glowering behind a desk in a modern office suite that foreshortens dramatically behind him. This work is in his early, Magic realist style, while the works Davringhausen produced after his emigration were abstract. Much of his work was deposited in 1989 in the Leopold Hoesch museum in Düren, which has organized since then several exhibitions of his pictures, above all those from the later period.

Notes

References

*Eimert, Dorothea (1995). " Heinrich Maria Davringhausen 1894 - 1970." Cologne.
*Michalski, Sergiusz (1994). "New Objectivity". Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-9650-0
*Schmied, Wieland (1978). "Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties". London: Arts Council of Great Britain. ISBN 0-7287-0184-7

External links

*http://www.davringhausen.com