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Professor
Oskar Sommerfeld
1885-1973
Academic Painter
from the town of India
(Indjija)
As
remembered by
his fellow
countrymen of
India.
Translated by
Rose Vetter
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These
two
paintings
reveal
his
joyful
spirit
and
love
of
his
homeland.
Professor
Oskar
Sommerfeld
once
said,
"I
consciously
distance
myself
from
modernity
because
I am
convinced
that
I
can
express
the
memory
of
my
homeland
and
the
historic
significance
of
our
fate
only
through
my
personal
art
form."
From
the
very
beginning,
the
art
works
of
our
Landsmann,
Professor
Oskar
Sommerfeld,
were
closely
tied
to
his
homeland,
to
which
his
art
and
his
life
were
dedicated. |
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Born in 1885 on
the Pußta
Mojavolja to a
civil servant of
the counts Pejačevič,
he spent a
happy
childhood
there. After
completing
elementary
school and four
years of high
school, he
attended a
school for
cadets in
Fünfkirchen. As
a young officer
he was then
educated at the
Academy of Art
in Budapest,
where he
developed his
skills as
draftsman and
painter. After
World War I he
traveled abroad
and received
further
education in
Paris and
Munich. In 1922
he settled down
in India as a
freelance artist
and remained
there until his
marriage in
1930, when he
moved to Ruma.
He displayed his
art collection
in private
exhibitions in
Neusatz,
Belgrade, Linz,
Essegg,
Budapest, Vienna
and Fünfkirchen.
The art critics
of Belgrade
called him "The
Discoverer of
the Syrmian
Landscape".
Thus he also
discovered Čortanovci
as the ideal
Danube beach in
India.
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Professor Sommerfeld claimed that for him the most beautiful country in the world was Syrmia, fulfilling an artist's every wish: Flat wheat and corn fields, softly rolling meadows, a manifold world of flora and fauna, the Fruschka Gora, coniferous and oak forests, softly flowing and untamed streams, the Danube and the Sawe, old monasteries, as well as an eventful history. In this way he portrayed the width and depth of Pannonia in his paintings.
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To the vulnerable soul of the artist the expulsion in 1944 was a traumatic experience which could not remain without an impact on his work. How could he portray the historic significance of the fate of the Donauschwaben, as well as his own, without considering the pain, the death and the evil we had to endure?
This picture expresses the misery and desperation of the refugees. |
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Professor Sommerfeld was active to the end. And so it happened that the last painting on his easel was still literally damp when he died on April 27, 1973 at the age of 88 years.
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