Peter August Böckstiegel 1889-1951

Artist: Peter August Böckstiegel 1889-1951

Die Mutter ( The Mother ) c. 1915 

Peter August Böckstiegel

Born is Westphalia in 1889, Böckstiegel moved to Dresden in 1913 to pursue his studies at the academy.

Back from the war in 1919 he became a founding member of the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919.

His work shows him to have been a painter whose temperament kept him close to Nature Basing his work on the central experience of his encounter with Van Gogh, he used a heavy impasto and sweeping brush strokes to evoke the lush landscape and the looming figures of the people of Westphalia.

Whatever he touched - painting - printmaking or terra-cotta sculpture - bears witness to the elemental vitality of his creative impulses.

In his woodcuts he deployed a simple, powerful line.

Böckstiegel divided his working time between Westphalia and Dresden.

He remained close to the agricultural landscape all is life, and he was not enough of a townsman to succumb, during the one year he spent as a member of the Secession, to the intellectual communism of his brother-in-law 

Felixmuller and his painter friends.

Even so in 1921 he designed a poster for IAH ( Internationale Arbeiterhilfe , International Workers' Aid ), a body promoting solidarity with the cause of labour.

Only one work from 1919, done after Böckstiegel joined the Secession, is still known to us: a figure group titled Singende Kinder am Meer ( Children Singing   by the Sea), largely executed in the Secession style, with a background dominated by the moon and stars.

A second painting, Offenbarung ( Revelation), is known only by its tittle.

Also lost are woodcuts with the highly characteristic period tittles do Die Wanderer des Lebens ( The Wanderers of Life), and Klage deer Frauen ( The Women's Lament), his major graphic statements belong to the ensuing Years.

MMaxi10