Ewald Mataré
Aachen-Burtscheid 1887 - 1965 Büderich (Meerbusch)
Selected Works
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Plaque with Kallendresser
1964
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Receding cow with closed horns
Around 1950
Vita
1887On 25 February, Ewald Wilhelm Hubert Mataré was born in Aachen-Burtscheid, the youngest of three sons of Franz Joseph Mataré (18851-1922) and his wife Elisabeth Mataré (1853-1939), née Dohlen. The family, who had lived in Aachen since 1798, originally came from the Catholic harbour town of Materó near Barcelona and moved to the Catholic southern Netherlands under Charles V, where they settled in the border town of Bardenberg near Aachen at the end of the 17th century. The first entries in the Bardenberg parish registers date back to 1700 as farmers, innkeepers and builders.
1893
Mataré received a humanist education by attending the "Staatliches Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium".
1897
His mother gives 10-year-old Mataré a workbench for Christmas, which provides the impetus for practical work.
1902 - 1907
With little interest in academic achievement, he transferred to the Städtisches Gymnasium Aachen. Shortly afterwards, he received private tuition from Prof. Karl Krauß (1859-1906), who worked as a lecturer in modelling and embossing at Aachen Technical University until 1906.
1906
After the Obertertia, Mataré leaves school to pursue his artistic inclinations. It is also his mother, Elisabeth, who asserts Ewald's wish to train as an artist and supports him financially.
1907
Moves to Berlin to study painting under Prof J. Ehrentraut (born 1841) at the Academy of Fine Arts.
1914
Pupil of Lovis Corinth (1858-1925), whose studio he leaves after just six months. Mataré receives the Siberne Medal of the Academy.
1915
Master student of the history painter Kampf. However, he is already internally detached from the influence of his teachers.
1917
After being discharged from the army in 1916 as "unfit for service", Mataré spent the summer of 1917 in Alt Gaarz, where he returned to open-air painting (open-air painting was forbidden by the military police at the time).
1918
Mataré becomes a member of the November Group. They represent radical expressionism.
1919
First private commissions. The majority of these were commissions for memorials to the fallen of the First World War.
1920
He receives an invitation from the architect H. Franzius from Düsseldorf to accompany him to the island of Wangerooge with his fellow student G. Làtk. There Mataré produced over a hundred works from flotsam and jetsam boards. He intensively studied Hildenbrand's "Problem of Form in the Visual Arts".
1922
Severe mental depression almost drove Mataré to suicide. Nevertheless, he forces himself to work. He turns to free sculpture for the first time. In the same year, he marries the 31-year-old H. Hasenbäumer.
1925
Trip to Paris. Study trip across Germany to Italy. He pays particular attention to Giotto. The sacred component that Mataré analyses in Giotto's work influences the basic concept of his later sacred works.
1926
His daughter Sonja Beatrice is born in Aachen on 9 August.
1927
Travelling to Paris, Denmark and Sauerland. Major commission from Dr E. Senff for the renewal of the window gables. Mataré chooses variations of lying and standing cows.
1929
He works in Toila/Estonia. He writes an essay under the topic: Besides work, graphics should function as narratives. Without success.
1932
Journey to London. Starts as a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. From now on he lives in Büderich.
1933
Suppression of modern German cultural life by the KfdK (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur). After only seven months in office, Mataré is suspended from office with immediate effect due to the agitation against modernism. In the midst of this period of upheaval, however, he did not resign himself, but withdrew into nature to work while he continued to travel. Of course, the ban on his profession also meant a lack of public commissions.
1934
A larger commission: "Dead Warriors", a war memorial in the town of Kleve. However, the memorial was removed four years later.
1937
Tightening of Nazi cultural policy. "Decaying art" is removed from public property.
1938
Mataré is in a commission slump. But church commissions bring him new work.
1942/43
During a stay at Eberbach Monastery, he became very interested in the subject of cows. The war made it increasingly impossible for him to pursue his work in Büderich. The fear of destruction plagued him more than the fear of theft. He therefore packed his works from the last few years in boxes and stored them in the air raid shelter under his studio. In 1943, he had to undergo a medical examination to check his fitness for war. He was cleared due to heart failure. The Becker couple from Hagen buy some of Mataré's works. Due to the couple's death, these works end up in the hands of the city of Hagen.
1945
Depressed by the effects of the war, Mataré fled from the Düsseldorf area to Kripp in 1944 and later to Eberbach Monastery. The war was over and Mataré returned to Büderich with his family. He is immediately appointed director of the Düsseldorf Art Academy. However, he very quickly learns that his ideas of a fundamentally new beginning for the academy with professors who are not politically charged and a reformed study programme based partly on craftsmanship, in which the student's personality should develop in intellectual and artistic terms, are not acceptable to those politically responsible. He relinquished the post of director and took over classes as a professor.
1946
He moved his work to his studio in Büderich, where he cultivated a very good master-student relationship. The basis for the student's own development is created through rigorous craftsmanship, which is always accompanied by an endeavour for spiritual penetration. It is important that the students work together. One aim is to find oneself, not to breed imitators, but to develop one's own path.
1947
During this early post-war period, Mataré was recognised as an outstanding artistic personality among the Rhenish and Westphalian sculptors and several exhibitions were dedicated to him in Cologne.
1947 - 1954
The post-war period and the years that followed saw Mataré fully immersed in the reconstruction phase of a rebuilding Germany. The federal government and the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia awarded him numerous official commissions, and he was also constantly pressed by the church with new projects. The commissions, which interested him in terms of the task and subject matter and which characterised his later work, proved to be a hindrance to his own independent work.
1965
Torn from an active artistic life, Ewald Mataré dies of a pulmonary embolism.