HOETGER, Bernhard
German architect and sculptor. As a youth, he worked as a stonecutter. In 1897, he enrolled as a sculpture student in the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf. In 1900, he went to Paris and stayed there for seven years. He was initially influenced by the work of Rodin but later looked to archaic Greek sculpture. In 1905, he participated in the first Salon d’Automne, and in 1907, he returned to Germany.
He became a member of the artists’ colony in Darmstadt in 1911. The colony transformed the Mathildenhöhe, a ducal estate, into a display of Art Nouveau architecture and design. His contribution was a set of sculptures (1912-14) in the grove of plane trees planted in the park’s main terrace, which stood in front of the Wedding Tower and Exhibition Hall, built by Joseph Maria Olbrich in 1908. The sculptures include a fountain decorated with four reliefs entitled Sleep, Resurrection, Spring and Summer. Elsewhere in the grove, friezes of standing and crouching nude youths hint at the beginning of his appreciation of German Expressionism, the movement with which most of his architecture is associated. Their self-consciously awkward forms suit their folkloric themes.
Hoetger’s first building was Brunnenhof, a villa built for himself in Worpswede in 1915. Never trained as an architect, he sculpted models of his buildings in clay. His most important architectural project is the Böttcherstrasse development (1923-31) in Bremen, built for Ludwig Roselius, a local coffee importer, industrialist and banker. Nine buildings frame a crooked pedestrian street. The climax of Hoetger’s half-medieval, half-idiosyncratic complex is the building he designed to house Roselius’s collection of paintings by Paula Modersohn-Becker (now the Paula-Modersohn-Becker-Haus).
His attempts to collaborate with the Nazis ceased when Hitler himself criticized Böttcherstrasse. In 1933, he moved to Switzerland.
