Exhibit in the White Villa

November 19, 2022 by joachim

UNCLE HERMANN

Some of my uncle Hermann’s paintings are exhibited in the Weisse Villa in Kreuztal, Germany. I had never heard about the Weisse Villa — the White Villa, which could be our regional version of the White House. It turns out to be a grand mansion in a park of Kreuztal, a little town perhaps 10 kilometers north of Weidenau (now part of Siegen) where I grew up. It is an event space for weddings and other big parties, and is apparently owned by Kreuztal’s municipality. The name Kreuztal, or Cross Valley, refers to the crossing of two valleys, one going in South-North direction, the other perpendicular to that. Here the Ferndorf river arrives from the east, takes a turn to the south to pass by my high school, the Fürst Johann Moritz Gymnasium in Weidenau, to flow into the Sieg river at some point further south in Siegen.

The point is, my uncle’s paintings are still being appreciated. They depict the unique landscapes of the Siegerland with low growth of oak trees, which are linked to two aspects of the traditional local economy: tanning (the bark of oak) and iron mining (charcoal from young trees, used for smelting iron). Both are no longer practiced now; the landscape has changed; some of the hills we see on the paintings are now covered with houses.

Hermann Manskopf, a younger brother of my mother, was born in 1913 and died in 1985. He was a regional painter of some renown and earned his living as an arts teacher in Siegen’s Gymnasium. I loved him since he was iconoclastic, cutting through the niceties of social conventions, to the hard raw facts. He was very witty and drove a motorcycle, too. He died too young, before I could have really meaningful conversations with him. He once painted the irrigation system in the Saudi Arabian desert on commission by the Saudi king, and his painting was subsequently featured on the Saudi 5-riyal bill in millions of copies. How it came to that is another story.

I heard about Kreuztal’s Manskopf collection through my classmate from high school, Horst Schmidt-Böcking, who got word from a friend. The only painting of Uncle Hermann I own is a gift of Horst a few years ago. It is depicted below: a summer day in a typical Siegerländer landscape with unobstructed view of the distant blue mountains. (Horst at one point got wind of a whole batch of Hermann’s paintings for sale, and had bought the lot).

THE KREUZTAL COLLECTION

Three of the paintings are of landscapes, two are sketches of ironworkers — smelters — working in the extreme heat with liquid iron, a craft still practiced at some places when Uncle Hermann was alive. One painting is his rendition of a historic painting of Siegen’s cityscape, which might be from the 18th century.