Ludwig Nick (Münster, 30 January 1873 – Jena, July 1936) was a German sculptor and art professor, who worked in stone, bronze, wood and porcelain.[1][2]
Nick was practically educated in stone and wood sculpting by Heinrich FleigeKunst- und Gewerbeschule.[1][3] After practising his profession for several years, he started a six-year study at the Königliche akademische Hochschule für die bildenden Künste in Berlin, receiving master classes from Peter Breuer and Ernst Herter.[2]
(1840–1890) in Münster, and he visited the localIn 1905 – perhaps earlier also, and certainly several times more in the next decades – Nick was an attendee of the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, a joint annual exposition of the Akademie and the Verein Berliner Künstler (Union of Berlin Artists).[4] He showed a marble piece called 'Verlassen' ('Abandoned'), which was then bought by the German Emperor Wilhelm II.[5] In 1908, Nick won a one-year travel scholarship from the Paul Schultze-Stiftung,[6] better known as the Rom-Preis (Rome Award) of the Preußische Akademie der Künste.[3] This meant he could reside 1908–1909 in Villa Strohl Fern in Rome.[7] After the stay he started to work at the Berlin Akademie.[2]
In the years before World War I, Nick was the favorite collaborator of architect Edmund Körner , Nick's fellow student in Berlin.[8] Körner, based in Essen and famous for his design of the Old Synagogue there, commissioned Nick for stone sculpture jewelry for public and private buildings, for a marmor fireplace and bronze statues for the court state Dippelshof in Darmstadt, and also for the giant nail man Schmied von Essen .[9][10][8][2]
Meanwhile, he made other works too, among which funerary monuments in Berlin.[2] Nick's only known public work outside Germany can be found in the Dutch city of Enschede, not far from Münster: in 1912 he was commissioned to create a monument in memory of the fire that fifty years earlier had burned down the town;[11] in the same year, Nick created sculptures of Gerrit Jan van Heek (1837-1915), a textile manufacturer from Enschede, and his second wife Christine Friederike Van Heek-Meier (1842-1920), the parents of Jan Herman van Heek.[12]
After the war had ended, in 1918, Nick created many war memorials, among other in Berlin-Schmargendorf. In 1924 he sculpted the stone lion for the Löwendenkmal , the warrior memorial for Leipzig University, a monument designed by August Gaul, who had died before finishing it. In 1925 he made a wooden epitaph for the members of the Berliner Liedertafel that fell in World War I.[2]
In 1920 Walter Gropius' Bauhaus in Weimar was looking for a master craftsman for stone carving and gypsum foundry. The sculptor Richard Engelmann , professor at the Großherzoglich Sächsische Hochschule für Bildende Kunst, the older art school in Weimar, asked Gaul for a candidate, and Gaul recommended Nick. Gropius however declined the appointment, saying that there was "künstlerischer Ehrgeiz", artistic ambition, in Nick's work and that he looked more for a stonemason.[13]
Nick worked freelance for Meissen porcelain from about 1927 to 1930 – the factory acquired several of his models.[2][14] Among his Meissen works are Hirte (1929), Rübezahl (1930), Mutter mit Kind (1930) and other figurines, that often came in cheaper white and more expensive colored, sometimes gold decorated versions.[2] His porcelain work was praised for its stylistic unity and pronounced main view.[2] He designed the firm's new year plaque for 1929.
In 1930 he received the sculptor price of the Verein Berliner Künstler.[15] The same year the City of Berlin purchased Nick's Madonna, a piece that was on display at the Verein's autumn exposition.[16]
In Weimar in 1930, the architect, critic and NSDAP member Paul Schultze-Naumburg on the initiative of Wilhelm Frick got in charge of the Weimar Hochschule.[13] He set up a section for crafts and sculpture (it was in fact a private school, separate from the Hochschule) in Gropius' Bauhaus building in Dessau.[13] Engelmann had been fired and Schultze Naumburg didn't want him to return, he had Nick leading the section.[13] Engelmann's work lacked the Heimat expression and the steel, folk element as they were perceived or wanted in that time, while Nick's figures looked incomparably slimmer and more sinewy, therefor corresponding more to the new ideal.[13]
After the Gleichschaltung of 1933, Nick became head of the workshop for stone and wood carving in Weimar. He became a member of the Deutscher Werkbund in 1934, and he would keep his position until his death in 1936.[17][18] Among Nick's students was Jan Holschuh.[19]
In the year of his death he created the chain of office for the mayor of Eisenach and in Gerstungen he finished his Storchenbrunnen .[2][20]