Georg Klusemann
Encyclopedia
Children's literature
Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...
author.
Although he died at only 38 years of age, Georg Klusemann left behind an extensive body of deeply original work.
Georg Klusemann belongs to a group of artists such as Werner Gilles
Werner Gilles
Werner Gilles was a German artist.Gilles was born in Rheydt/Rheinland He found his artistic calling while at the academies of Kassel and Weimar, studying under Lyonel Feininger of the Bauhaus school. He later moved after 1921 to Istria, Italy...
, Eduard Bargheer or Gerhard Hoehme, whose work reflects their adoption of Italian culture. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, formerly Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, is the Arts Academy of the city of Düsseldorf. It is well known for having produced many famous artists, such as Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Thomas Demand, and Andreas Gursky...
under Teo Otto
Teo Otto
Teo Otto was a Swiss stage designer. He trained in Kassel and Paris and in 1926 taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar. In 1928 he became an assistant at the Berlin Staatsoper...
, from 1962 to 1968, with Katharina Sieverding
Katharina Sieverding
Katharina Sieverding is a photographer known for her self-portraiture. Sieverding lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf. She is a professor at the University of the Arts, Berlin.- Early life and education :...
and Jörg Immendorff
Jörg Immendorff
Jörg Immendorff was one of the best known contemporary German painters; he was also a sculptor, stage designer and art professor.- Life and work :...
. After extensive travels to Spain, the Orient and Latin America, his work gained a clear original profile (Hans M. Schmidt). Impulses from contemporary European Art can be traced to Joan Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
, Victor Vasarely
Victor Vasarely
Victor Vasarely was a Hungarian French artist whose work is generally seen aligned with Op-art.His work entitled Zebra, created by Vasarely in the 1930s, is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op-art...
, Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still life. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting apparently simple subjects, which were limited mainly to vases, bottles, bowls, flowers, and landscapes.-Biography:Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna...
or Domenico Gnoli, to Surrealism or OpArt. But the impulses are transformed and integrated into a unique concept that cannot be associated to any known current in Art. Critics have called him "Baroque" (Joachim Burmeister), "Indefatigable and fantastic" (Vittorio Sgarbi
Vittorio Sgarbi
Vittorio Umberto Antonio Maria Sgarbi is an Italian art critic, politician, cultural commentator and TV personality.He was appointed curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale...
), "Arcimboldesque" (Heiner Stachelhaus), "an oscillator between abstraction and realism, narrative and representation, elusiveness and application" (Dieter Ronte), or a "legitimator of computer art" (Giampiero Pavanati). Patrick Waldberg, the major biographer of surrealism, wrote of Klusemann's work that it is "full of waving drapes, flying boxes, objects coming up in the air, swelling balloons, windows bursting open, instruments coming to life and all this according to a harmony beyond logic". Georg's biographer Hans M. Schmidt called him an "individualist and a loner of unusual capacities." "The things recognized become uncertain, the apparent truth becomes deception," Hannes Hardering writes of Klusemann's paintings. Klaus Honnef wrote about looking at his works: "The viewer is forced to question his viewpoint, to change it. To decipher the intricacies of these images one must learn to accept ones judgement as always temporary and never ultimate."
Georg Klusemann worked as a painter, drawer, etcher, and author of children books. His oeuvre comprises at least 350 canvases, 330 etchings, hundreds of drawings, gouaches and water colors, as well as poems and fables. His children books were published by Beltz & Gelberg and Peter Hammer Verlag and are still part of school curricula in German elementary schools because of their playful and imaginative approach to intercultural communication
Intercultural communication
Intercultural communication is a form of global communication. It is used to describe the wide range of communication problems that naturally appear within an organization made up of individuals from different religious, social, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. Intercultural communication is...
. After several monographies about his work and more than 20 catalogues, the complete works were published in two volumes by Hatje Cantz Verlag in the year 2000.
Georg Klusemann's paintings and etchings have been the object of more than 40 exhibitions in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Venezuela and the U.S.A. The major retrospectives have taken place at the Museum Folkwang
Museum Folkwang
Museum Folkwang is a major collection of 19th and 20th century art in Essen, Germany. The museum was established in 1922 by merging the Essener Kunstmuseum, which was founded in 1906, and the private Folkwang Museum of the collector and patron Karl Ernst Osthaus in Hagen, founded in 1901.The term...
in Essen, the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, at the Goethe-Institut
Goethe-Institut
The Goethe-Institut is a non-profit German cultural institution operational worldwide, promoting the study of the German language abroad and encouraging international cultural exchange and relations. The Goethe-Institut also fosters knowledge about Germany by providing information on German...
New York, at the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum
Bagatti Valsecchi Museum
The Bagatti Valsecchi Museum is a not-for-profit historic house museum in the Montenapoleone district of downtown Milan, northern Italy. The Italian Renaissance art and decorative arts collections of the barons Bagatti Valsecchi are displayed in their home, as they wished them to be...
in Milan and at the Museo d'arte contemporanea Villa Croce in Genua. His works are part of the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
in New York, the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in New York, the Albertina
Albertina, Vienna
The Albertina is a museum in the Innere Stadt of Vienna, Austria. It houses one of the largest and most important print rooms in the world with approximately 65,000 drawings and approximately 1 million old master prints, as well as more modern graphic works, photographs and architectural drawings...
in Vienna, the Rheinische Landesmuseum in Bonn, the Museo d'arte contemporanea Villa Croce in Genua and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, as well as of numerous private collections.
In 1994, a children's opera based on his Die wundersame Reise nach Esmir was first played at the Ruhrfestspielhaus in Recklinghausen.
He is the protagonist of the personal documentary "Georg" by his daughter Caterina Klusemann
Caterina Klusemann
Caterina Klusemann is an independent filmmaker and documentarist.Born in 1973 in Italy to the German painter Georg Klusemann and the Venezuelan sociologist and photographer Elena Hochmann-Klusemann, she grew up in Germany and Venezuela...
, completed in 2008 for Arte
Arte
Arte is a Franco-German TV network. It is a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts...
/ZDF. In the film several friends and fellow artists like the painter Ulrich Erben, the writer Ingrid Bachér
Ingrid Bachér
Ingrid Bachér is a German writer, a former member of the Gruppe 47 and former president of the PEN Germany.- Biography :...
(who had written "There was something magnificent about him, nothing small, narrow, he overflowed with life"), the writer Hermann Schulz and his publisher Hans-Joachim Gelberg as well as his wife, the sociologist Elena Hochman-Klusemann reconstruct his brief but intense life.