Willi Sandforth (10 January 1922 – 7 January 2017) was a German painter and graphic artist and a late representative of Constructivism."Willi Sandforth, dem inneren Kompass folgend, Verzeichnis der Gemälde" (Willi Sandforth, Following the Inner Compass, Index of Paintings), 2014, edited by Dr Dagmar Kronenberger-Hüffer, Helga Gausling and Burkhard Leismann, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, DruckVerlag Kettler, hereafter cited as "Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth", p. 9; figure – The large-volume illustrated book also includes a detailed account of the artist's vita.Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, Foreword
Life Early years (1922 to 1947)
Willi Sandforth was born 10 January 1922 in Ahlen, Germany, the youngest of five children. His father was a foreman in an enamelling factory and his mother a trained housekeeper. The early childhood impressions of the industrial buildings in Ahlen shaped the artist's vision just as much as his first encounters with contemporary art. Thus, a collector's picture from a cigarette packet showing Carlo Carrà's Pine Tree by the Sea ended up in the hands of the adolescent, who was deeply impressed by the clarity and austerity of the picture's composition.
Already as a teenager, Sandforth created portraits of his parents in the manner of the old masters without having enjoyed any artistic training until then. In 1938 he made a plaster bust as a sculptural self-portrait, of which only one photograph exists. After finishing primary school, he completed an apprenticeship as a decorator at his parents' request. In 1939 he attended a class for commercial art at the college of arts in Bielefeld until he was called up for military service. At the end of the war he was taken prisoner in France, where he experienced not only the typical privations but also impressions of the southern French landscape and the Strasbourg Cathedral. After a visit to the camp by control functionaries, he was appointed camp supervisor for art, which allowed him to draw and paint watercolours for a time.Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, p. 12 In April 1946, he was able to return to his parental home, where he first recorded impressions of the horrors of war and captivity in a depressing triptych, before he was able to turn to classical painting themes "with conscious colourfulness".Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, pp. 11–13
Training and first years as a freelance artist: (Kassel and Munich 1947–1954)
When the college of fine arts in Kassel resumed classes in autumn 1947, Sandforth enrolled to study with Kay Heinrich Nebel. He produced nature studies, figurative compositions, circus paintings and street scenes. When Nebel fell ill in the second semester, Sandforth considered continuing his studies at the Munich Art Academy with Xaver Fuhr. However, this did not happen after he was offered a traineeship with Hermann Lohe in the restoration department of the Bavarian State Painting Collections. This job took up so much of his time that he was unable to work as a freelance artist alongside it, as he had expected. So in 1951 he left the galleries and at the same time ended his training, looking forward to an uncertain future as a freelance painter full of hope.Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, pp. 13–17
Sandforth had married in 1951 his fellow student Charlotte (Lotte), of whom he had already painted a first portrait in 1947. She supported him with her work as a graphic designer and layout artist in demand in Munich, and Sandforth appreciated and admired her work. The young couple with their son Hans Georg found friends among artists and journalists. Sandforth drew the destroyed and the preserved Munich and its surroundings and created his painting Big city children. In 1951 he joined the Artists' Cooperative founded by Hannes König, which, among other things, organised exhibitions to which Sandforth contributed works. Sandforth participated in the Great German Art Exhibition from 1952 until the 1970s. Nevertheless, it was arduous to assert himself as a young freelance painter against those already established.Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, pp. 18–20
In 1953 Sandforth travelled to the Jutland North Sea coast via Greetsiel and Sylt. He exhibited the sketches and paintings he had brought with him, the latter partly created in the studio on the basis of the sketches, at the Art Pavilion Munich in 1954, and the press reported extensively. In order to get to know the works of other painters, Sandforth travelled as far as Naples, where he visited the frescoes of Hans von Marées, which are counted among the major works of 19th-century German painting.Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, pp. 20–21 Further study trips took him to Lake Garda, Holland and the Lofoten Islands.
When the birth of their second child was imminent in autumn 1954, the couple decided to return to Westphalia. They found a flat in Gütersloh, East Westphalia, where Sandforth's parents-in-law lived in their own house. Before that, Sandforth travelled to Niendorf (Timmendorfer Strand) to paint with his colleague Josef Seidl-Seitz, who was 14 years his senior. Seidl-Seitz was known through various exhibitions and was, among other things, a juror of the "Great Art Exhibition". Together with him and some artists from Munich, the Art Association in Beckum, Germany, organised an exhibition in the district of Warendorf following the study trip. The daily newspaper Westfälische Rundschau of 21 December 1954 wrote: "Willi Sandforth ... also exhibited five works, which show a great ability for powerful composition and captivate the viewer with their noble colouring, which is fresh and lively despite all its delicacy. ... His landscape paintings are filled with a consistent striving for simple size and line and a fine harmony for colour."quoted from Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, p. 27
In 1957, Willi Sandforth and his family moved into his parents-in-law's house, where they lived until the end of their lives. Sandforth built a studio next to the house where he could work at any time, even at night.Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, pp. 25 and 28
Creative periods after his return to Westphalia 1954 to 1968 In rural East Westphalia, Sandforth had a hard time following up on his first successes in Munich, as here in the provinces he lacked cultural institutions, museums and, above all, exchanges with colleagues. In order to secure a livelihood for his family in addition to the salary of his wife, who had taken up a job as an art teacher, he accepted numerous commissions for the design of reliefs, mosaics, murals and concrete stained glass windows in public spaces until the end of the 1960s.Example: Waves, windows in an indoor swimming pool, 1966, publisher: Forschungsstätte für Glasmalerei des 20. Jahrhunderts Nonetheless, the craftsmanship suited him and he gained a feeling for the surface, which was not without influence on his later large-format paintings. An albeit not entirely new theme for him was the industrial landscape. Around 1962, he created his work Winding Towers after studying, among others, Fernand Léger and his painting Les Constructeurs. Towards the end of the 1950s Sandforth was inspired by Giorgio Morandi for another subject, still lifes.
Sandforth spent November 1956 on Elba for the first time, again together with Seidl-Seitz. Impressed by the island's landscape, he made countless sketches in which the artist geometrised individual elements of the nature surrounding him and thus simplified them on paper until he virtually typified them. In 1958, he went on a study trip to Elba, Ischia, Rome and Naples with Paul Schneider, a fellow student from his time in Kassel, who had become his brother-in-law and friend in the meantime, in order to find new motifs and to work more deeply on his own formal language.
Another of Sandforth's companions was the Ahlen artist and art teacher Hermann Schweizer, with whom Sandforth repeatedly exchanged ideas. In 1961, Sandforth went on a study trip to Greece with him and Paul Schneider, which was extraordinarily inspiring for all of them. For Sandforth, the view of the fascinating architecture of Santorini was "the decisive impetus to depart from spatiality and from now on to place the structures increasingly in the surface. ... Santorini therefore possibly only gave Sandforth the final impulse to concretely push ahead with his development from now on with a different consciousness."Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, p. 36
Whereas Sandforth had already found a reduced and clear formal language based in the pictorial tradition of New Objectivity, his art now developed more strongly into a Constructivist form characterised by more austere pictorial architecture. The landscape paintings and graphic works shown at a solo exhibition in 1963 bear witness to this. This creative cycle also includes drawings of rocky cliffs on Bornholm, motifs from Elba and the Cyclades, from Lake Garda and from Holland. Hermann Schweizer describes in a text for an exhibition in 1973, at which Sandforth brought these pictures together under the title "Study Trips of a Painter", that Sandforth was particularly attracted to the places on Bornholm and Lake Garda "where the ordered crystalline structure of the rocks became visible in its clear, naked form and the variety of its gradations."Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, p. 40
Sandforth's development into a predominantly constructivist painter can be considered complete when looking at his paintings and the years in which they were created. He painted his last representational picture in 1982, a still life, which he revised again around 2000. Another remarkable feature is his new application of paint. He often used hardboard, painting not the smooth side as usual, but the rough side, which by its structure does not allow a smooth application of paint. "He applies the paint, spatulas layers of paint over it, smooths them out again, applies layers of paint again, some of them thin and translucent, until an inherently structured surface emerges with a depth effect that gives the work its liveliness. Often areas of varying density lie next to each other to increase the tension in the painting and Sandforth takes days, weeks, even months to apply this paint.".Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, p. 46
Overall, the 1960s can be seen as a period of orientation as far as his painterly development is concerned. Sandforth only participated in isolated exhibitions at this time, so that self-discovery and reinvention could predominantly take place in concentrated work.For the entire section: Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, pp. 25–46
The active years 1969 to 1979
The new period began with six exhibitions. In the summer of 1969, Sandforth exhibited five paintings as a member of the artist group "arcus" in the municipal museum Herford. In autumn 1969, works by Sandforth and Herbert Schlimgen were presented in the rooms of the Deutsche Bank in Gütersloh. In the autumn of 1970, another exhibition was held together with other members of arcus at Ringenberg Castle. In 1971, the exhibition New Art in an Old Abbey was held at Liesborn Abbey. At the exhibition Artists from East Westphalia at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Sandforth was represented in 1969 and 1971.Kronenberger-Hüffer, Willi Sandforth, pp. 46 and 206 Here Sandforth showed for the first time a group of 15 abstract works. "In these paintings he had concretised his formal language in a short period of time and created works that are consistently characterised by a great harmony and balance."