Rudolf Jahns

About the artist

Rudolf Jahns was born in Wolfenbüttel on 13 March 1896. He grew up in Braunschweig from 1902, where he graduated from high school in 1915. As a pupil, Jahns was already a member of the school orchestra as a flautist. After serving as a medic in the First World War (until March 1919), he returned to Braunschweig. At his father's insistence, Jahns worked at customs, but continued to paint and draw as a self-taught artist. He rents a studio outside his parents' home. Jahns begins to study the contemporary European avant-garde, in particular the works of Lyonel Feininger, the cubist works of Pablo Picasso and George Braque, the abstract compositions of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. He created his first drawings, tempera paintings and watercolours with a constructive design of the surface. In 1920, Jahns was transferred to Holzminden as a tax official. Here he felt isolated and fled into the experience of nature, which, alongside his love of music, remained important for his compositions despite his geometric-abstract formal language. Jahns sought a creative approach to the forms and colours found in nature, which he believed was a prerequisite for any artistic creation in order to form "living things" and not "rigid matter" (1924). Jahns' engagement with nature, as well as the musical foundation of his compositions, link him to Paul Klee. Jahns studied classical music intensively and played the piano as well as the flute. In 1924, Jahns was able to exhibit his works for the first time in the Berlin gallery "Der Sturm". Here he also saw the works of the Hanoverian artist Kurt Schwitters. The two met in person on 24 February 1927. Jahns had arranged a so-called "Merz" evening for the Hanoverian in his Holzminden studio. On this occasion, Schwitters saw works by Jahns for the first time and invited him that same evening to take part in two planned exhibitions of the "International Association of Expressionists, Futurists, Cubists and Constructivists" ("Die Abstrakten") and to found his own local group of this artists' association in Hanover, the "abstrakten hannover". Founded on 12 March 1927 in Schwitters' flat in Hanover, the group included Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Carl Buchheister, Hans Nitzschke and later Cesar Domela alongside Schwitters and Jahns. The ban on abstract painting by the National Socialists and the confiscation of his oil painting "Abstract Composition" from the Provinzialmuseum Hannover drove Jahns into artistic emigration and towards figurative depictions of people and landscapes. After 1945, Jahns resumed his abstract-constructive work, initially hesitantly, then with renewed intensity, interweaving the experience of nature, landscape, music and architecture into his art. The early death of his wife Renate (1958) and his son (1960) plunged the artist into a creative crisis, which he overcame in the first half of the 1960s. His late work now emerges, characterised by innovation and quality. Jahns is recognised through solo exhibitions in art associations and museums. In 1976, the Westphalian State Museum for Art and Culture organised a solo exhibition of the artist's work, as did the Sprengel Museum in Hanover and the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen in 1981. In 1982, Jahns was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class and honorary citizenship of the town of Holzminden. After Jahn's death, the Rudolf Jahns Foundation was established in 1994. Since then, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover has regularly organised solo exhibitions of the artist's work.