The Lighthouse

Born and educated in Breslau, Willy Jaeckel was one of Berlin's most enigmatic artistic personalities in the 1920s. He moved in secessionist circles, was a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and painted portraits of numerous Berlin celebrities. From this time on, Jaeckel often stayed on the island of Hiddensee, where he owned a house in Kloster in Gerhart Hauptmann's neighbourhood. Behind the painter's glamorous appearance, however, was a brooding, emotionally scarred man who was intensely concerned with the question of the meaning of human existence. Unlike most artists of his time, Willy Jaeckel had already taken a vehement stand against the war in 1914/15 with his lithographic cycle "Memento". Because of the shocking depictions of cruel deaths, the portfolio was banned shortly after its publication. After the end of the war, the artist retreated into solitude for several years. In the mountain village of Gunzesried in the Allgäu, he produced his main graphic work, the 200-etch Bible cycle. Afterwards he concentrated more on painting and its classical genres, especially the portrait, the nude and the landscape. Jaeckel now created a positive, basically harmonious image of contemporary life. In 1925 he accepted a teaching post at the College for Art Education in Berlin. The artist's public success dates mainly to the years between 1925 and the beginning of the National Socialist dictatorship. During this time Jaeckel worked a lot from models in the studio, but during the summer months on Hiddensee he liked to draw in the open air. Landscape pieces were produced rather rarely or were lost with the destruction of his works in Berlin in 1944, which also brought Jaeckel's death. Jaeckel's main work of landscape art from the Hiddensee estate, the group of works that survived the war in his summer house in Kloster, is "Leuchtturm". This exemplary work expresses a partisanship contrary to Willy Jaeckel's portraiture for areas of nature that he experienced as wild and unbound. The dramatic storm atmosphere captured in the picture with the uprooted plant formation in the foreground is at the same time also an expression of the artist's crisis-like attitude to life.