Wolfgang Kermer

In 2007 he acquired the artistic estate and personal documents of the forgotten graphic artist and painter Fritz Arnold (Maler) [de] in order to donate them to the Städtische Galerie Neunkirchen. In 2010 he published the catalogue raisonné of the drawings.

One of his specialties is the art and art education of Willi Baumeister: On the occasion of his 100th birthday, Kermer organized in 1989 the first retrospective of his work as typographer and advertising designer (with Catalogue raisonné). The Design Magazine form called the exhibition an ″exciting documentation″. Baumeister's lithographs printed from Erich Mönch at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart he exhibited in 1975, and in 1979 the exhibition "Hommage à Baumeister" has shown the artistic creations from twelve of his most famous students. His art theory and pedagogic views he devoted publications in 1971 and 1992. Some of Baumeister's writings Kermer reedited in 1999 and 2006.

In 1987 Wolfgang Kermer discovered the forgotten artistic heritage of the Stuttgart Jewish painter Alice Haarburger [de], who was murdered in the Holocaust. He succeeded in preventing an unworthy dissolution of the artistic estate. In 2016, he donated two paintings by the artist, which he had acquired in art galleries, to the Museum Spendhaus at Reutlingen, the native town of Alice Haarburger.

His work as rector of the university, which Wolfgang Kermer dedicated to the guiding principle, as he put it, ″that academies only educate tomorrow′s artists if they serve the people of today″, he summarized in a 1984 report on the status and structure of the university, the various departments, their staffing and the workshop equipment as well as the number of students in the diploma courses.

In 1984 Wolfgang Kermer was awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and in 2006 he became Honorary Senator of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart.

Guest events organized by Wolfgang Kermer in the 1980s with artists such as Roland Goeschl, Richard Hamilton, Oswald Oberhuber, Walter Pichler and Arnulf Rainer as well as co-operative exhibitions such as ″Art Education in Korea: Studies from the College of Fine Arts Seoul National University″, ″Anton Kolig″, ″The young Kokoschka″ and ″Brancusi Photographe″ activated the public relations work of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, a special concern Kermers since the beginning of his rectorate.

From 1975 Wolfgang Kermer was also able to organize more exhibitions after a court order had succeeded in freeing the university's exhibition hall, which had been blocked by the illegal storage of obsolete computers since 1971. One of the highlights was the exhibition of Austrian artist Walter Pichler in 1981 with drawings and plans for his architectural projects. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart after World War II, Wolfgang Kermer has organized the large-scale exhibition "Zwischen Buch-Kunst und Buch-Design: Buchgestalter der Akademie und ehemaligen Kunstgewerbeschule in Stuttgart", which was shown in 1996 at the State Library of Württemberg in Stuttgart and in 1997 at the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach am Main. Kermer's scholarly work has been devoted since the 1970s to the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and world-famous professors like Bernhard Pankok, Adolf Hölzel, Willi Baumeister, Gunter Böhmer [de], Alfred Hrdlicka.

In 1972, while visiting the Royal College of Art in London, Wolfgang Kermer met Sam Herman, one of the pioneers of the studio glass movement, who was then head of the Glass Department. Two years later, he curated Herman′s first solo exhibition in Germany in Stuttgart. As a connoisseur of modern glass design, Wolfgang Kermer, together with Hans Gottfried von Stockhausen [de] and Jörg F. Zimmermann, promoted the expansion of the traditional glass workshop of the Stuttgart Academy with a studio glass furnace in 1983/84, which made it the only art university in Germany that enabled students of all disciplines to work freely with hot glass.

Teaching art history since 1966, Wolfgang Kermer worked more than thirty years at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, from 1972 as professor and chair holder. After various art-historical articles for the Saarbrücker Zeitung and the Stuttgarter Zeitung, he published a critical report on the state of the Stuttgart Academy during the protests of 1968 and called for a reform of the training of art teachers Since 1969 he has been active in university politics as an elected member of the Academy Senate and as a member of various university bodies in Baden-Württemberg. In order to avoid conflicts of interest, he gave up his work as chairman of the art educators association Württemberg (today: BDK [Bund Deutscher Kunsterzieher] Baden-Württemberg) after two years in 1972 after being elected rector of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart in 1971. These elections took place for the first time in the history of the university with the participation of all university groups, professors and lecturers, assistants, technical teachers and representatives of the administration. 1973, 1976 and 1980 confirmed by the university committees in this position, he remained rector of this institution until 1984, where he made profound content and organizational reforms after the students protests in the late sixties against backward training conditions, against unlawful admission procedures for studies and the lack of examination and study regulations, against nepotism and the Nazi Past of professors. The legal status of the academy has been clarified, the inner structure was reorganized, diploma degrees were introduced for all programs and new regulations for admission to studies were created. New types of support for students have been introduced. Kermer promoted international exchanges with artists and art educational institutions in Australia, Austria and South Korea. His special attention was on previously neglected public relations. He founded and edited the series of publications Akademie-Mitteilungen [de] (1972–1978), Beiträge zur Geschichte der Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart [de] (1975–2004) and WerkstattReihe [de] (1996–2006) and has also written articles and books on modern artists and art education. He has been the curator of numerous exhibitions and high school events and founded in 1975 the Academy Collection, which he built up over the course of more than two decades with works by current and former teachers as well as alumni. Main acquisitions included works by Willi Baumeister, Gunter Böhmer, Paul Uwe Dreyer, Heinz Edelmann, Marianne Eigenheer, Rudolf Hoflehner, Alfred Hrdlicka, Bernhard Pankok, Rudolf Schoofs, K.R.H. Sonderborg, Giuseppe Spagnulo, Micha Ullman.

Wolfgang Kermer was last present with prints in the traveling exhibition ″Neue Deutsche Graphik″, which started in 1962 and was shown in 28 cities in the Federal Republic of Germany, with paintings in 1964 in the Galerie Elitzer Saarbrücken (with Horst Linn) and at the annual exhibitions of the Baden-Württemberg Artists′s Association and the Saarland Artists′ Association.

Also active as art collector – after meeting Erwin Eisch in Frauenau, Wolfgang Kermer was one of the first, if not the first, to collect works of the studio glass movement privately in Germany as early as the 1960s, and this at a time when museums were not yet interested for the new departure in glass art – he donated his private collections of international studio glass, modern French ceramics as well as contemporary paintings, graphics und sculptures to museums in Frauenau, Neunkirchen and Sarreguemines. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 2005, he gave his hometown Neunkirchen under the title ″Stuttgarter Begegnungen″, among others, works by Erwin Eisch, Alfred Hrdlicka, Markus Lüpertz, Chris Newman, Arnulf Rainer, Michael Sandle, Gustav Seitz, K.R.H. Sonderborg, Niklaus Troxler, Micha Ullman, Jörg F Zimmermann. The Donation Wolfgang Kermer to the Frauenau Glass Museum in 1982 includes works by numerous major studio glass artists and glass designers, including Sergio Asti, Erwin Eisch, Claire Falkenstein, Kaj Franck, Kyohei Fujita, Sam Herman, Harvey Littleton, Marvin Lipofsky, Benny Motzfeldt, Edvin Öhrström, Sybren Valkema, Paolo Venini, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Tapio Wirkkala, Ann Wolff, Jörg F Zimmermann. In 2017, he presented the Frauenau Glass Museum with an extensive collection of hand-blown glasses, ″Homage to the unknown glassblower″ he called his donation, typical examples of the production of long-gone glassworks in eastern France. Together with his wife, he donated to the city of Sarreguemines in 2018 their collection of works by important French ceramists from the period 1970–2000.

In the winter semester of 1958/59 he sat in the academy's bronze workshop under Herbert Heinzel, where he met the sculptors Emil Cimiotti, Otto Herbert Hajek and Paul Reich and their working methods. In 1959 he stayed in Paris for a period of time and studied as a scholarship holder of the French government at the École du Louvre. After passing the exams in ″Werktechnik″ in 1959, in art education in 1961, in philosophy and additionally in education science in 1962 in Stuttgart, he was awarded in 1966 the title PhD by University of Tübingen magna cum laude with the dissertation Studien zum Diptychon in der sakralen Malerei; von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts. Mit einem Katalog. From 1961 to 1962 he was at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart artistic and research assistant (Faculty of architecture, Chair of Professor Maximilian Debus, a student of Johannes Itten). From 1963 to 1965 he worked as an artistic assistant for photography at the Art History Institute of the University of Tübingen. At this time, after more than a decade of artistic work, that includes paintings, drawings, graphics, photographs related to Informalism, he stopped his exhibition activities to devote himself entirely to his scientific research. He completed long study visits to museums and collections in various countries to compile a critical catalog of medieval painted diptychs as a basis for the temporal, regional and iconographic interpretation of this pictorial form, which was at times highly valued in private devotion.

After he had passed the entrance examination in 1957, Wolfgang Kermer studied for two semesters at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart with Hannes Neuner, Albers and Kandinsky student at the Bauhaus, where he encountered an open form of teaching that remained exemplary for him throughout his years as a university lecturer.

The beginning of his studies was marked by four basic semesters and the encounter with the photographer Otto Steinert. From 1956 to 1957 he completed a two-semester basic course in Saarbrücken with Oskar Holweck, who further developed his teaching on the instructions of his teacher Boris Kleint, an Itten student. Otto Steinert made it possible for Kermer to use the abundant photo workshops at the Saarbrücken School of Arts an Crafts for his experimental photographic work (photograms).

From the age of six he received piano lessons, which made him waver in his professional ideas between music and art. In 1954 his first solo exhibition with paintings and drawings took place in the municipal library of his hometown. After graduating from high school in 1956, he studied visual arts education at the Staatliche Schule für Kunst und Handwerk Saarbrücken and at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart; art history, philosophy, educational sciences, prehistory and cultural geography at the universities of Saarbrücken, Stuttgart and Tübingen.

As far as his own artistic work is concerned, Kermer has exhibited his abstract paintings, drawings, etchings and photographs in more than thirty solo and group exhibitions in Germany since 1954, in France since 2003 In a 2006 interview, he described his return to artistic work after a long break in the late 1970s as ″a revitalizing measure″ for his scientific work.

Born as the son of the Moravian-born Austrian Kapellmeister Franz Kermer (1893–1936), Wolfgang Kermer spent his childhood and youth in Neunkirchen (Saar), where he attended elementary school (Bachschule) and high school (Gymnasium am Krebsberg). His father died as a result of an injury from World War I, when Wolfgang Kermer was only one year old. The Viennese engineer Alois Kermer (1894–1967), who designed the first Austrian record-breaking glider after World War I in 1923 (located in the Vienna Technical Museum), was his uncle. Wolfgang Kermer's childhood memories include a long stay in 1938 with relatives in Stargard in Pomerania. At the end of World War II he lived in Montabaur, where his family had fled after losing their home in Neunkirchen in a bombing raid at the end of 1944 and where he escaped a fighter plane attack on broad daylight and witnessed the American invasion of the city on 26 March 1945.

Wolfgang Kermer (born 18 May 1935 in Neunkirchen, Saarland) is a German art historian, artist, art educator, author, editor, curator of exhibitions, art collector and professor. From 1971 to 1984 he was repeatedly elected Rector of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and thus the first scientific and at the same time youngest teacher in this position in the history of the university. Under his rectorate, the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart was reformed in 1975 and 1978 on the base of two new university laws of the State of Baden-Württemberg and thus, for the first time in its history, authorized to set up diplomas for all courses. His focus is the history of Visual arts education, the art of Willi Baumeister and the history of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and its predecessor institutions. He was the publisher and editor of the publication series Akademie-Mitteilungen [de] (1972–1978), Beiträge zur Geschichte der Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart [de] (1975–2004), WerkstattReihe [de] (1996–2006) and ″Die Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart im Spiegel der Presse 1970/1971″ (2008). On the occasion of his 75th birthday, the Stuttgarter Nachrichten called Wolfgang Kermer ″the memory of the Stuttgart Art Academy″.

The collection of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart contains a full-length portrait of Wolfgang Kermer, which the Austro-German painter Herwig Schubert (1926–2019) created in 1980.