Wilhelm Heinrich Focke
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Wilhelm Heinrich Focke (born July 3, 1878 in Bremen; † December 15, 1974) was a German painter, sculptor and poet. He was also an aviation pioneer, a prolific inventor and the co-founder of FC Bayern Munich.
Biography[edit]
First son of Johann Focke, councilor in the Senate of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen and founder of the Focke-Museum, and his wife Louise, born Stamer (1853-1926, cousin of the German painter Paul Souchay[1]), Wilhelm Heinrich Focke was born in Bremen in 1878.
Although posterity has retained the name of his brother, Heinrich Focke, 12 years his junior, as an aeronautical engineer and inventor, in particular, of the helicopter, Wilhelm's role and creative influence have long been forgotten, until that his estate be rediscovered and exhibited in Bremen.
Wilhelm, who considered the wind as his "friend", according to his own expression, spent his life exploring this element in all its aspects, whether by inventing or perfecting flying or wind-powered machines, or by painting nature, movement and bodies.
After finishing high school, he began his artistic education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf (with Peter Janssen), before joining the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (with Heinrich Marr). It was during his studies in Munich that Wilhelm joined MTV Munich 1879, the municipal multi-sport bodybuilding club. When on February 27th, 1900, the administrators of MTV Munich 1879 forbade its footballing members to form a team and join the German Football Federation, he took the lead of a dissident group which decided to leave the club and founded the same evening, Franz John and Paul Francke, FC Bayern Munich. He will be the second captain[2] before leaving the club in 1903, having to go to Berlin to continue his studies at the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Art in Weimar and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, with of Ludwig von Hofmann, then the University of Berlin in the department of painting and sculpture, with Arthur Kampf.
During these years in Berlin, he took an active part in meetings with artists, notably those with his friends Oskar Kokoschka, Max Slevogt, Hans Thoma and Olaf Gulbransson.
It was during this period that his style asserted itself, and that the themes that would become recurring throughout his work - the force of nature, of the wind, of horses, of young men - emerged.
His first major exhibition was held at the Tiergarten in Berlin, between 1909 and 1910, where the art dealer Paul Cassirer presented a set of paintings and drawings by Wilhelm, through his friend Max Liebermann. At this time, he also took an active part in the quarrels surrounding the Berlin Secession movement. His closeness to painters from the Die Brücke Group, such as Max Pechstein, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff or Otto Mueller, is clearly seen in his paintings, which at the time still had strong impressionist traits. Like his friends and mentors, he distances himself from academic painting and turns to the representation of the naked human body in nature.
At the same time, he developed a passion for aviation, at the time just emerging. Clément Ader achieved the first powered takeoff in history in 1897, and the Wright brothers managed to make a first powered flight, 284 meters long and 59 seconds long, on December 17, 1903. He began by drawing many sketches of flying machines, and ended up embarking on their realization.
He gets closer to the engineer Edmund Rumpler, in whose workshop he builds a first plane entirely of his invention, the Duck. It was with this aircraft that he accomplished his first aeronautical major feat in 1909, when he was the first German to successfully fly from the Bornstedter Feld airfield in Potsdam. At the same time, he helped his brother Heinrich, who had just graduated, to build his first plane, the Bremen ENTE, with which flight tests began in 1910 on the Neuenlander Feld in Bremen, but without success. Heinrich then continued to work on his concept, and it was during a test flight, at the controls of an advanced version of his aircraft, the F 19 Ente, that Georg Wulf, co-founder in 1924 with Heinrich of the Focke-Wulf-Flugzeugbau AG aeronautical factories died in 1927. Despite this tragedy, the plane was mass-produced and flew until the Second World War without encountering any other technical problem. It was the first aircraft certified for passenger transport in Germany.
During the First World War, Wilhelm fought first in Turkey in the Dardanelles against the English landing attempt. After sustaining a serious injury, he was redeployed in 1916 as a reconnaissance and rescue pilot over the North Sea. During this time, he continued to constantly invent new types of aircraft, in particular seaplanes, of which many sketches have been preserved, an area in which France was then ahead of Germany. It was during this period that he met the painter Poppe Folkerts, who was then residing in a nearby studio in Norderney, and who would remain his friend throughout his life. Recognized for his art of naval paintings, Poppe Folkerts had been at the beginning of the 20th century the drawing teacher of the son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Prince Adalbert of Prussia, until his links with Christian Wilhelm Allers, with whom he had resided during a stay of a few months in Capri, did cause him to be removed. In 1902, Christian W. Allers had indeed been linked to the scandal affecting the industrialist Friedrich Alfred Krupp, accused of having engaged in homosexual relations, then liable to prison in Germany under Paragraph 175, during his frequent stays on the island in the Bay of Naples.
After the war, he taught painting of nudes, animals and landscapes at the School of Applied Arts in Bremen for ten years, until 1929. During these years he continued, in parallel with painting, to design and develop many machines, such as sand-sailers (which he himself called "Segelroller", i.e. "sail rollers") or iceboats, on the island of Juist, located in East Frisia of Germany, or in the region of Bremen. We find in his sketches the first drafts of double-hulled boats (catamarans), tidal power stations and wind turbines, proof of his curiosity and his abundant creativity.
Not liking teaching and feeling constrained by it, Wilhelm Focke decided to devote himself solely to his painting and became an independent artist from 1930, which he remained until the end of his life in 1974. .
The coming to power of the National Socialists in January 1933 disrupted his life, like that of millions of Germans. Indeed, many of his friends, such as Max Liebermann, were Jewish or close to homosexual circles. From 1933, his brother Heinrich, whose company was flourishing at the time, was removed from the management, before being forced to sell his shares in 1936, the Nazis not considering him sufficiently "politically safe" and likely to contradict their desire to put his company at the service of German rearmament, initiated by Chancellor Adolf Hitler in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Heinrich nevertheless had time, during these three years, to design and develop the FW 61, considered the first helicopter in history.
For his part, Wilhelm embarked on internal emigration, spending more and more time in the countryside, avoiding the cities as much as he could.
He spent many of those years in Mechow, Mecklenburg, where his mother owned an estate with a lake. He finds there the ideal conditions to explore his favorite subjects - the force of nature, horses, young men. His depictions of landscapes and animals became more expressive, and continued to sell well to his network of friends and supporters, primarily in northern Germany.
Despite his commercial success as a freelance artist, his voluntary estrangement made his living conditions difficult, and this same circle of friends helped him survive and provided him with food during and immediately after World War II.
On December 31, 1949, his friend Poppe Folkerts died at the age of 74. He will have had from his wife Julie, a captain's daughter from the island of Juist whom he had married in 1917, at the age of 43, 4 children.
After the war, he continued to paint constantly, learned to ski at the age of 70 and went every winter to ski in the Black Forest, painting the landscapes of the Upper Black Forest.
He also continues to develop his many inventions such as his double boat, the ancestor of the catamaran, as well as many of his other sailing devices.
At this late stage of his career, he still has many exhibitions and special commissions that allow him to earn a living.
He died peacefully on December 15, 1974, at the age of 96. He had never been married and had no children.
Web links[edit]
- Literature by and about Wilhelm Heinrich Focke in the German National Library catalogue
- Biografie (Memento vom 29. September 2007 im Internet Archive)
- Biographie auf artefact.kunsthalle-bremen.de
- Der Nachlass von Wilhelm Focke in der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen
References[edit]
- ↑ Otto Döhner: Das Hugenottengeschlecht Souchay de la Duboissière und seine Nachkommen. (= Deutsches Familienarchiv 19) Neustadt a.d. Aisch: Degener 1961, S. 145
- ↑ Otto Döhner: Das Hugenottengeschlecht Souchay de la Duboissière und seine Nachkommen. (= Deutsches Familienarchiv 19) Neustadt a.d. Aisch: Degener 1961, S. 145
Sources et literature[edit]
- Archive Focke-Museum Bremen, Archive Kunsthalle Bremen, Archives d'État de Brême, domaine W. Focke.
- Henrich Focke : Mon mode de vie. Société allemande pour l'aéronautique et Vol spatial, Cologne 1977 ( aérospatiale allemande. Avis 77, 01, ISSN 0070-4253 ), (réimpression étendue : Kurze-Schönholz et Ziesemer, Brême 1996, ISBN 3-931148-91-2 ).
- Helmut Hadré (éd. ): Wilhelm Heinrich Focke. Peintre nord-allemand, pionnier et inventeur d'avions. Schuenemann Verlag, Brême 2006, ISBN 3-7961-1882-8 .
- Enno Springmann : Focke. Avions et hélicoptères par Henrich Focke 1912–1961. Aviatic-Verlag, Oberhaching 1997, ISBN 3-925505-36-9 .
- Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling : Les Bavarois. L'histoire du champion du record. 3. édition. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89533-534-1 .
- Août 2012.pdf Karl Welbers, Norderney Kurier, série Poppe Folkerts, partie 54, 17. Août 2012 : Artiste, pionnier de l'aviation et footballeur (PDF; 266 Ko)
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