THE artist Egon Altdorf, who died in 2008, was born in East Pomerania in 1922. His family moved to Berlin in 1924, and in 1941 he was conscripted to serve in Rommel’s Afrika Korps. After the war, he moved back to Germany and lived in American-controlled Wiesbaden, where he taught for thirty years.
Although he is little known in Britain, the centenary of his birth was marked by an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which moved to the Memorial Chapel, University of Glasgow, last year, largely thanks to Canon David Jasper.
Jasper’s insightful exploratory chapter on symbolism and spirituality is the real strength of this collection. These ten interdisciplinary essays that first appeared in German in 2022 were translated into English to serve alongside those exhibitions. The volume is beautifully illustrated throughout.
In 1952, Altdorf was selected as one of three German artists for an international competition to design the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner. The follow-up exhibition at the Tate brought him, the following year, to London, where the work of Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Henry Moore, and Barabara Hepworth helped to steer his artistic development, which came to embrace both sculpture and woodcuts and, later, glass design.
He regarded his visit to London as his most important artistic inspiration, marking a change from making art “behind the wire”, as he described his time in an American internment camp in Texas, where he had studied art.
Altdorf was responsible for the stained-glass windows and interior furnishings of the Orthodox synagogue in Wiesbaden (1966) that replaced one in the Friedrichstraße. Designed by the architects Ignaz Jakubowitz and Helmut Joos, the new synagogue replaced a late-19th-century building that, unlike the Michelsberg Moorish-style Reform synagogue of 1869, which was destroyed in 1938 on Kristallnacht, had survived the Third Reich. Only in 2020 has a progressive Jewish community been formed in Wiesbaden after eighty years.
Patrick Bäuml, WiesbadenSome of Egon Altdorf’s design work in the Wiesbaden Synagogue, in an illustration from the book
Altdorf continued designing windows for the synagogue until 1983. Whether he knew the work of Patrick Reyntiens and John Piper, at Coventry, for instance, is not discussed, but it is difficult to read them without being aware of significant English post-war developments. The synagogue is something of an iconographic Gesamtkunstwerk. While not on the same artistic level as Matisse’s great oratory at Vence, it should be on any traveller’s list in Hesse, despite its restricted access.
We are reminded how Jürgen Moltmann’s influential books The Crucified God and Theology of Hope sit alongside Altdorf’s vision in the immediate aftermath of his return to Germany. His woodcuts, such as The King of Kings, Eve, and Descent from the Cross, from the 1950s, offer visual scripture much as the synagogue windows do.
Altdorf was also something of a poet from his time in an internment camp. Initially, he wrote in response to art that he saw or knew, but two chapters suggest how he later versified in dialogue with his own graphics.
Canon Nicholas Cranfield is the Vicar of All Saints’, Blackheath, in south London.
Into the Light: The art of Egon Altdorf — sculpture, woodcuts, glass design, poetry
Judith Le Grove, Graham Ward, Deborah Lewer, Dorothea Schöne, Julia Kelly, et al.
Samson & Company £35
(978-1-915670-08-3)
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