Gerda Frömel a Biography and Overview of Works 1955–75
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A biography and overview of works 1955–75 Gerda Frömel was born in Schönberg [Šumperk] in the former Czechoslovakia in November 1931. Her father was a teacher of German extraction and her mother was from Vienna in Austria. She was the eldest of four girls: Gerda, Ingrid, Heide and Elke and her younger sisters ‘idolised her for her daring exploits and Seán Kissane her ability to go her own way – but somehow [obtaining] her parents’ consent’.1 Frömel enjoyed art and spent many long hours drawing, painting and making Gerda Frömel children’s books and toys, although none of these pieces survive. While her childhood was uneventful in the sleepy town in the Sudetenland, ethnic tensions were rising steadily through the mid-1930s under the increasing influence of the A biography and overview Nazi Party.2 The status of ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland was complicated by shifts in political allegiances in the first decades of the 20th century. It had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 when it became part of the newly of works 1955–75 created Czechoslovakia. The new leaders politically discriminated against ethnic Germans so when Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in 1938, many welcomed the Nazis as liberators.3 At the end of the Second World War the Czech government claimed German-speakers were ‘passive war criminals’ who should be expelled without compensation, a policy met with little opposition from the Allied powers.4 Journalist Derek Scally describes the first wave of ‘wild’ expulsions that began in the Sudetenland where German-speakers were marched by the Czechs into 15 the wilderness and dumped across the border; others were shot.5 The ‘Official’ wave regulated by the Allied Potsdam Agreement, urged ‘orderly and humane’ expulsions but varying levels of reprisals were taken against German refu- gees. Eyewitness accounts describe harrowing scenes of cruelty and how some refugees were forced to wear armbands with white swastikas printed on them, an ironic inversion of the Nuremberg laws. Some estimates suggest that twelve million ethnic Germans were expelled from their homes in the post-war years, with an estimated one and a half million losing their lives.6 The author Ray Douglas describes how Germans are uncomfortable remembering the episode for fear of being seen as revisionists by drawing parallels with the terrible crimes that went before and argues that ignoring the expulsions is preferable to admit- ting responsibility for one of modern history’s greatest human rights abuses – one with uncomfortable parallels to Nazi crimes.7 Being Czech-German the Frömel family also lost their home. They made their way over land with some of their belongings to the German border but were turned away.8 They were often in grave danger; on at least one occasion they were held at gun-point and Photographs from Frömel family 1. Michael Morrow, ‘An 4. See ‘The expulsion of Sudeten Germans after the Second World archive, 1930s-40s Appreciation’, Introspect, vol. 1, Germans is still raw’, The War (London: Yale December 1975, p.20. Economist, 7 May 2013. University Press, 2012). 2. See BBC news http://news.bbc. 5. Derek Scally, ‘Back In Bohemia: 8. Interview with Ingrid Buckley co.uk/2/hi/europe/3466233.stm the sun shines on a return to the (née Frömel), 21 May 2014. accessed 17 February 2015 Sudetenland’, The Irish Times, 9. Interview with Wenzel 3. The German annexation of the 21 July 2014. Schürmann, 28 January 2015. Sudetenland was unopposed by 6. Ibid. other foreign powers under a policy 7. R.M. Douglas, Orderly and of appeasement. Humane: The expulsion of the Seán Kissane threatened with execution.9 They continued on to Austria where they were given shelter in Vienna by the family of Frömel’s maternal grandmother. They remained in Austria for a year until they settled in Lorch, near Stuttgart in Germany in 1946.10 It may seem egregious to begin a discussion of Gerda Frömel’s artistic career by foregrounding such traumatic events as these, but it places her within a group of German artists whose work emerged from, and was informed by, their early life experiences in a newly-divided Germany. These include Joseph Beuys (1921-86), Frank Auerbach (b.1931), Eva Hesse (1936-70), and Georg Baselitz (b.1938). Post 1945 Germany was a country trying to come to terms with its recent traumatic past physically, economically and spiritually. Many artists who had gone into exile chose not to return ‘home’ to Germany after the war, finding more economic possibilities in the booming American economy. The division of Germany into East and West in 1949 and the further division of Berlin – the centre of cultural activity - also discouraged cultural resettlement. In addition Germany became the cold-war battle ground between the opposing political ideologies of Western Capitalism, and Eastern Communism. Much work made in the 1950s addressed the sense of collective guilt with which the German people were burdened. 16 The end of the Second World War also saw a ‘return to order’ in art. Some artists who had worked in an abstract style before the war, returned to a period of figuration as a means to process their need to reassert the primacy of the human body after years of witnessing its destruction. A pertinent example is the British artist Henry Moore (1898-1986), a sculptor who had long worked in a semi- abstract idiom who from 1944 until the mid-50s created several Family Group works; large scale sculptures describing the nuclear family unit – that which had been torn asunder would be put back together in art.11 This political and cultural background marked Frömel’s development as she entered art school in the years immediately after the war. Frömel enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart in 1948 and later went on to study in Darmstadt and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where she studied metalwork and sculpture.12 In her early practice we see a rejection of abstraction and a focus on the figure – both human and animal. Her early career is also marked by the creation of a number of devotional objects made for Christian churches. These include stained-glass windows, crosses, tabernacles and other objects in enam- el and other materials. Germany in the 1950s was undergoing a building boom to reconstruct cities that had been destroyed during the Allied bombardments. 10. Interview with Ingrid Buckley these concerns remained relevant St Wendeler and his wife, 1959 (née Frömel), 21 May 2014. to contemporary art for years to stained-glass window, Germany 11. As late as 1959 the Irish come. Image from family archive Exhibition of Living Art (IELA) would 12. Schürmann Family archive. include an etching by Moore of The Family, an indication that Seán Kissane A biography and overview of works 1955–75 Financing was made available through the Marshall Plan and the pace of building There were also literary connections at was extraordinary. While at art school in Munich, Frömel met the young sculptor Woodtown; W.B. Yeats lived nearby at Werner Schürmann, a skilled metalworker and bronze-caster, whose brother Riversdale, Austin Clarke was another Joachim was a successful architect. Joachim Schürmann won many commissions friend, Louis MacNiece visited when to construct churches in post-war Germany during the 1950s including St Martin, on assignment in Dublin, and later Cologne; and Christ the King, Wupperthal. Joachim suggested that his brother the art critic Harriet Cooke lived at and Frömel should submit designs for elements in these new buildings. Werner Woodtown. Schürmann assisted Frömel in the execution of a number of her designs and In 1956 both Frömel and would continue to do so until the mid-1960s. Schürmann participated in the IELA. It was the first time Frömel exhibited Ireland in Ireland, and it aligned her with Frömel married Werner Schürmann in 1955 and the young couple welcomed the most innovative and vital artists the birth of their first child Wenzel soon after. The couple moved permanently of the time. The IELA had been to Ireland the following year where Schürmann took up a position as a teacher founded by Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, of metalwork at the National College of Art in Dublin. Due to his friendship with Louis Le Brocquy, Norah McGuinness the artist and musician Michael Morrow, Schürmann had visited Ireland periodi- and Jack Hanlon in 1943 and the first cally since 1951 and was part of a circle that included the musicians John Beckett exhibition was held in September [cousin of Samuel Beckett], John O’Sullivan, and the potter John ffrench. In 1953 that year. In 1956 Frömel exhibited Schürmann participated in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (IELA) and Frömel alongside Hilary Heron, Oisín Kelly, 18 also spent some time in Ireland that year.13 In 1956 the sculptor Oisín Kelly Frank Morris and Ion Stuart, artists (1915-81) introduced the couple to Arnold Marsh and Hilda Roberts (1901-82) of who would be her peers for the next Woodtown Park, outside Rathfarnham.14 The Marshs offered the young family an twenty years – and their work forms apartment on their estate and they moved to Woodtown in December 1956. a useful point of comparison when Roberts was an artist with very strong connections to the Dublin art estab- considering her later oeuvre. Frömel entered three works at the 1956 IELA, lishment, in fact Marsh and Roberts first met at a party at the home of Æ [George Horse, Reiter and Little Figure while Schürmann exhibited Kentauros which Russell]. They bought Woodtown Park Estate in 1939 and, as it was so large, set was illustrated in the catalogue.16 Two early images of horses exist in the family about creating apartments within the house which they let out to other families archive so it is tempting to attribute one of these as Horse (c.1956).