2021-04-26
Alfons Klühspies donation – an early advocate of non-figurative painting
Non-figurative, dynamic, lyrical – these words describe the work of the early abstract painter Alfons Klühspies. The Würzburg artist’s estate has been managed by his daughter since his death in Wiesbaden in 1975. When the decision was made to build the Reinhard Ernst Museum several years ago and that an exhibition centre exclusively for abstract art will be located in Wiesbaden, the artist’s daughter approached the Reinhard & Sonja Ernst Foundation. She drew the sponsors’ attention to the painter’s extensive work.
Finally, in March 2021, a donation was made to the foundation. One of the main works by Alfons Klühspies from his strong creative phase in the 1950s – his Composition from 1958 – is now part of the Reinhard Ernst Collection. The painting aroused a lot of attention in the artist’s exhibitions and was published, among other things, as an art supplement in the 1991 yearbook of the Federal Statistical Office with a print run of 18,000.
Alfons Klühspies, born and raised in Birkenfeld near Würzburg in 1899, studied at Frankfurt’s Städelschule from 1920 where he received training in classical painting. But even at this time, the young artist pursued a non-representational, abstract style based on his own motivation. This was noteworthy to the extent that non-representational painting only arrived in Germany in 1910 with Wassily Kandinsky and later Alexej von Jawlensky – to mention only two prominent pioneers of abstraction. Training at the universities was largely of a traditional nature. Even when the Weimar Bauhaus was established, free teaching of the arts was by no means generally recognised.
After completing his studies, Klühspies spent a year in the art metropolis of Paris and then moved to Berlin. He continued to work productively in his studio apartment, even though historical events at the time restrained his activities and robbed him of his freedom to develop. In 1944 his studio was completely destroyed in an air raid. Almost all the artist’s early work fell victim to the flames. Klühspies was detained as a prisoner of war until 1946.
On his return to his place of birth, he built a new existence for himself. Since then, Klühspies worked as a freelance painter in the Main-Franconia region. Even though he was usually considered something of an artistic loner and maintained no fixed connection with the contemporary art scene, he did exchange ideas with several like-minded people. In the 1960s, for example, he established contact with Otto Ritschl, who was in Paris at the same time in the 1920s and who Klühspies finally got to know personally.
Always connected to abstraction, Klühspies became receptive to experiments in his own style and looked for various methods of applying paint and colour schemes. His work includes a connection with the dynamic, musical and even lyrical. The meandering shapes of his pictures produce force fields for Klühspies that permanently “detect the vibration of a universal harmony”.
The Reinhard & Sonja Ernst Foundation would like to thank the artist’s estate administrator for the fact that another painting by an early advocate of abstraction has found its way into the art collection of the Reinhard Ernst Museum.