Sea and space: Germany rediscovers its artists' colony history

By Andreas Heimann Sep 20, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Rostock, Germany - Gulls swoop over the sand dunes, a couple sit in a wicker beach chair and anglers wait for a bite. That's a typical scene in Ahrenshoop, a charming seaside village in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on Germany's Baltic coast.

There's hotel accommodation for about 2,300 guests and the official statistics say the town has 350,000 overnight guests a year. That's a small number compared to other towns in the region but it illustrates the transformation Ahrenshoop has gone through since an artists' colony was founded here in the 19th century when it was just a sleepy fishing village.

The artists didn't come to bath in the Baltic's waters. 'What fascinated them was this wonderful northern light,' says art historian Ruth Negendanck, 'they also came for the amiable nature of the local people and, of course, for the proximity to the beach and sea.' One of the founder members of the colony, painter Paul Mueller-Kaempff, described his first impression of the village as a 'picture of harmony'.

And that was exactly what the founders were looking for: they wanted a place in the open that distanced them from the commercial aspects of life an artist but yet also had a railway connection to the city. Ahrenshoop fulfilled those requirements and that's how it remained until the outbreak of the First World War.

However, Ahrenshoop has remained a place for artists to this day. 'Only 750 people live here but we have three public galleries and several privately owned galleries,' says Hans Goetze, Ahrenshoop's mayor. 'Whenever we stage an exhibition opening people come from all over Germany to see it.' It's not unknown for works of art inspired by the region to change hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars at the town's annual art auction.

A few of the original artist houses are still standing including the one where Mueller-Kaempff had his painting school. Another colony structure is the Bunte Stube, built in 1922 in the Bauhaus style and which served as a meeting place for the town's painters. One of the most impressive of the town's houses, the Kunstkaten, has been restored and looks just as it did the day it was built. Ahrenshoop's art museum is due to be completed in 2013.

The town of Schwaan is the region's second artist colony. Schwaan is just 20 kilometres south of the city of Rostock but it may as well be in another country. Along with a forest, Schwaan is surrounded by seemingly endless fields of rapeseed and wheat, which is what attracted the original group of artists to found a colony here in 1880.

The region's expansive sky and fields played a big role in the works of art produced by the painters. That was especially true for artist Franz Bunke. Born in Schwaan in 1857, he is regarded as one of the most significant artists to have worked at the colony.

Some of the works produced in the early years of the colony are on display at the local Kunstmuehle museum, located in a half-timber house with bright red roof tiles. Up until the 1950s a mill operated in the building which can also be reached by water. 'A paddle boat travels from Rostock and takes about six hours to get here,' says museum director Heiko Brunner.

The museum opened in 2002 and has so far collected together over 100 paintings and as many drawings. 'Before that the history of the artists' colony here had almost been forgotten,' says Lisa Juerss, an expert on Schwaan's artists' colony and a former director of the State Portrait Collection in Schwerin. Part of the reason for Schwaan's decline in significance was due to the fact that realistic landscape artistry was underrated in the former East Germany.

Right now the museum is staging a retrospective of works by Worpswede artists that runs until October 23. Eighty items are on display including pieces by Fritz Mackensen, Heinrich Vogeler and Paula Modersohn-Becker.