In 1921 the painter Hugo Gugg (1878 - 1956), from the Weimar School of Painting, is appointed Professor for Landscape Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar, as the successor of Theodor Hagen, and where he taught until 1945.
From Saaleck, he moved with his wife Milda and six children to Oberweimar to an old, still preserved farmhouse in the Merketalstr. 1.
Hugo Gugg belonged, alongside with Alexander Olbricht and Carl Alexander Brendel, to the three new appointed professors in the course of the separation of the "College of Fine Arts" and the "Governmental Bauhaus", together with the ancient teachers of the former Grand Ducal Academy of Art: Max Thedy, Walther Klemm and Richard Engelmann, who opposed to the Bauhaus movement, to make their task to care about and teach the traditional art.
It was fascinating about Gugg that he, despite of only ground school education and apprenticeship as a decorative painter, achieved such an extensive humanistic education and wisdom.
He sought to maintain the tradition of the Schultze-Naumburg studio “Workshop of Saaleck” where he had worked until his move to Weimar.
Gugg was self-taught. The apprenticeship and journeyman years he spent with the academic painter and decorator Gollmar & Franke in Leipzig, at the same time attending evening classes at the "Academy of Graphic Arts and Printing Arts” also in Leipzig. He was able to study as a gifted scholar one semester, at the same time that he took private drawing lessons with the famous animal painter Fedor Flinzer. In 1901, Hugo Gugg presented 7 landscape paintings at the Leipzig Art Association. Those paintings impressed deeply on Schultze-Naumburg who provided the poor Gugg with a scholarship for several years, first in Saaleck, then in Berlin, then again in Saaleck where Gugg took over his painting classes, because Schultze-Naumburg wanted to devote more of the architecture.
Apart from his early work and due to his solid craft training, he worked in the mind of the old masters. Together with the art theorist Conrad Fiedler, he expressed the opinion that art is not a luxury. In his words it is "how science and religion exist to expand our view of the world."
Professor Engelmann once asked him what he does to get his students so attached to him. He replied with the words of the 2nd part of Goethe’s "Faust": It's really easy; it must come from the heart.
That's what did make the charm of his personality on everybody who was lucky enough to have met him: His heart speaks, and you feel it. In its simplicity, openness and frugality, this is a whole man!
Despite differences in opinion, he could also tell, that he is "well off" with the masters Feininger, Klee, Kandinsky, Muche, Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy of the Bauhaus.
"But all knowledge of this modernists makes me stronger only to myself”. And when he is looking at Klee and Feininger between the old masters at the museum, he states: “Very well in the decorative effect, even in the purity of mind wherefrom these paintings are created, just like the old work. But it remains decorative, it remains jewelry, and at last I find the Moderns very thin and empty ".
For Gugg the Bauhaus had the status of an art school and as such welcome school for his daughters Hildegard and Marianne (weaving), while his daughter Esther (weaving), son Horand (cabinet maker) and son Camill (painting) studied in the civic amenities.
Gugg was originally coined by Art Nouveau, which for example the six-part cycle of figures in oil tempera for the music room, created in 1912, of his patron, Councilor Paul Axhausen testimony. Three of the plates are now in the City Museum of Weimar. Around 1919 he also painted some neo-impressionistic, brightly colored landscapes. The landscapes of the twenties, however, are finely painted in the old masters style, more idealized, not losing in disturbing details. In this his favorite way of painting, he painted the landscapes of the castles of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen in Southern Italy. His large sepia drawings, painted in 1939, are very expressive and collector's favorites.
Completely independent from the fashionable streams, Gugg was an original, conservative painter, ascetic and modest. Regarding his party affiliation. Schultze-Naumburg, who in 1930 became the head of the Weimar Art Academy, urged Gugg to join the party. Unwillingly he did just for not disappointing his former patron and supporter. This is testified by many letters in our possession. Gugg was his very own nature artist and saw himself embedded in the various religions of the world.He was a totally apolitical person and was far from any ideology. Because of his skills, he received an order from the architect Hermann Giesler for 6 paintings, "Thuringia landscapes", 100x200cm, that he finished in 1939, in time for the inauguration of the by Giesler newly created “Hotel Elephant” in Weimar. Another 3 paintings were commissioned privately to him by Giesler.
Guggs friends included a variety of people, including Jews. The in parchment handmade guest book of the Gugg family in the Merketalstrasse 1in Oberweimar would show a great testimony thereof. This insightful guest book is unfortunately missing since 1964 and their descendants would give a great deal to reacquire it and would be grateful for any advice.
Hugo Gugg was primarily a landscape painter, but also a gifted portraitist and many important people sat before his easel, like Carl George Brandis for the Gallery of Jena Professors, as the Supreme Court president Baron von Seckendorff, as the pianist Josef Pembauer, as his former teacher Oswald Franke, as his maecenas Councilor Paul Axhausen, etc. Particularly striking are the portraits of his grandchildren.
He painted mostly scenes from the Thuringia countryside, where he took as model the immediate vicinity: the Weimar Park, Belvedere Avenue, Ehringsdorf and the immediate surroundings of Upper Weimar, and earlier, the Saale River with its castles, all of them reproduced countless times on letterheads and as oil tempera paintings. Even for the execution of his Italian landscapes he made studies in the stone masonry of nearby Ehringsdorf. His longing for Italy led him and his pupils, who highly loved the "Master", again and again in the south, starting in 1924 with his master student and, later with the well-known photographic artist and lifelong friend Walter Hege (who teaches Gugg to deal with the plate cameras and later roll-film camera), and 1904, 1925, 1932, 1933, 1935, 1938, 1939. Guggs son Camill met 1933 in Sorrento his future wife Maria. Camill himself studied painting with his father and ornithology with Berlepsch, and went on and off to the photographer Walter Hege. He was an accomplished wildlife photographer and a talented painter of animals and plants.
Guggs eldest son Walter, born1900, fell in France in 1918 and his youngest son Horand, born1912, died in 1948 in the war.
Gugg worked as restorer in 1949 for the Goethe year. Among other things, he was trusted to re-paint in “fresco” the damaged "Muse Dance" in the Römisches Haus situated in the Park an der Inn in Weimar. The 7-meter long and 1 meter high frieze shows about 20 dancing female figures. In the improved Wittumspalais, he restored four of the ceilings of Oeser and in the destroyed Goethe House he renewed four lintels, and restored the great ceiling of the "Aurora" in the stairwell. At the age of 71he painted the dome of the chapel of the Russian Royal Crypt and added a large head of Christ to the 24 desolated angels taking as model the Turin grave cloth.
A special form of art - a synthesis in pictures and words - are Guggs countless (thousands!) of letters with letterhead drawings, which he prefaced nearly to each of his letters. From these small treasures we see the whole essence and soul of this man, who always was longing for peace, tranquility, simplicity and wisdom. His letters show lived humanness texts, written in delicate script with sepia ink.
"Small sketches are the really big picture" as he called it himself, and in a letter dated December 24th, 1945, to his daughter Esther. We read: "... I can also not give more - almost as much - to a big picture. I'm sorry if my letters would get lost ...”
A small selection is included in the booklet "Only in memory exist the absolute silence", letterhead and letter excerpts from Hugo Gugg, compiled by Gugg pupils (Christians Verlag), Hamburg 1985, out of print.
Until his death in 1956, he painted tirelessly. His numerous pictures are widely scattered in private hands. Hugo Gugg lies with his wife Milda on the Upper Weimar cemetery. The tomb is still preserved.
"He painted the sunset of a dying age."
Quote of the former Gugg pupil Gottfried Legler in Lörrach