Hermann Stenner
Hermann Stenner (* March 12, 1891 in Bielefeld; † December 5, 1914 at the Eastern Front in Iłów) was a German painter and graphic artist.
Stenner is regarded as one of the outstanding artists of the early 20th century, despite having only a brief creative period of five years due to his early death in World War I. During this time, the young artist produced a substantial body of work: nearly 280 paintings and well over 1500 works on paper are known. After starting with Impressionism around 1909, Stenner's painting style became increasingly expressive from 1911 onward, characterized by strong contours and vibrant colors. This shift towards Expressionism was influenced by Kandinsky, but from 1912/13 onwards, it was primarily shaped by his teacher Adolf Hölzel.
Even during his secondary school years, the son of Bielefeld painter Hugo Stenner painted copies of old masterpieces. He then attended the Handwerks- und Kunstgewerbeschule in Bielefeld starting in 1908. In April 1909, he was admitted to the entrance examination for the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and joined Heinrich Knirr's drawing class. Stenner spent the summer of 1909 at Hans von Hayek's painting school in Dachau, where he made significant progress in his painting. Following this, both Hayek and Knirr recommended that he study under Christian Landenberger in Stuttgart instead of Hugo von Habermann, who was teaching in Munich.
At the end of March 1910, Hermann Stenner moved to Stuttgart, where he was accepted into Landenberger's painting class at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In October 1911, he switched to Adolf Hölzel's composition class, whose lectures were completely different from those of Landenberger and Hayek. Initially, Stenner followed them with great enthusiasm, as they opened up a new world for him and presented painting as a kind of science. Later, he distanced himself from the strong influence of the lectures and further developed his own style. After just one semester, Hölzel offered Stenner the opportunity to move into one of the coveted master student studios in the garden of Stuttgart Castle, which he happily accepted in March 1912. During the summer semester, Stenner participated in a longer excursion to Monschau with Hölzel, where he created several paintings with an increased degree of futuristic synapse as well as a large number of drawings.
In August 1912, he spent four weeks in Paris with his friend Hans Hildebrandt, an art historian, and his wife Lily. In 1913, he was invited to the First German Expressionist Exhibition in Dresden. That same year, Adolf Hölzel commissioned Stenner, Oskar Schlemmer, and Willi Baumeister to create wall paintings for the foyer of the main building of the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition 1914. The wall frieze attracted significant attention and elicited a wide range of reactions, from enthusiastic praise to outright rejection.
On August 7, 1914, Stenner enlisted as a volunteer alongside Oskar Schlemmer and joined the Grenadier Regiment No. 119. After two months at the Western Front, he was transferred to the Eastern Front with his regiment "Königin Olga" at the end of November, where he fell in the early morning hours of December 5, 1914, in Poland during an attack on the city of Iłów in today's Powiat Sochaczewski in the Masovian Voivodeship.
In five years, he created around 300 paintings and more than 1500 watercolors and drawings.
Willi Baumeister wrote in a letter dated June 15, 1950: "Stenner was a fresh, cheerful person and artist. His achievements were outstanding... I greatly appreciate Stenner's paintings, as does Oskar Schlemmer. He would have become one of the best painters in Germany if not for the senseless, criminal war that claimed its victims." In 2015, it was announced that a foundation would enable the operation of a Stenner Museum in the Bielefeld Villa Weber. The museum will house, among other things, the collection of the lawyer Hermann-Josef Bunte as a permanent loan.