"Die Natur muss durch das Herz hindurch, um zur Kunst zu werden": zum 50. Todestag des Marinemalers Cornelius Wagner (1870-1956)

Abstract

Cornelius Wagner, one of twentieth-century Germany’s most important marine painters, died fifty years ago. Unfortunately, his life and work have been neglected by research to the very present. In 1986/87, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the painter’s death, the German Maritime Museum devoted itself to his oeuvre by presenting an exhibition of the estate. The project did not succeed in eliminating the inadequate state of the research. The museum was able, however, to acquire so many pictures that it can meanwhile call the largest publicly owned collection of the painter’s works its own. The monographic study of marine painting in Germany has been a focus of the museum’s research programme for many years. Within that framework, the first attempt has now been made to carry out an investigation of this artist and his oeuvre on the basis of the museum’s own holdings. Wagner was from an artistic family which settled in Düsseldorf in 1873, and it was at the art academy of that town that he received his training. He had become acquainted with the sea already as a child, and as a painter was lured to it again and again his whole life long. He took study trips to England, Scotland, Belgium and Holland and travelled to the Caribbean and South America. In 1906 he settled in Kaiserswerth near Düsseldorf, where he would remain until his death. The lives of the fisherfolk in Polperro and Whitby, the hustle and bustle of the Hamburg harbour, the Lower Rhenish landscape in the vicinity of Düsseldorf – these were the themes with which Wagner distinguished himself. The oeuvre of this academically trained artist was informed by the conviction that not the finished product but the process of executing a painting was the most wonderful aspect of artistic work.