Rudolf Wolfgang Jährling (October 27, 1913July 5, 1991) was a German architect, gallery owner and one of the first patrons of the Rhenish avant-garde. In 1949, he founded Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, which, together with Galerie Schmela and Galerie 22 in Düsseldorf and Galerie Der Spiegel in Cologne, was one of the most daring galleries in post-war Germany and was closely associated with the Art Informel movement in its early days.
Galerie Parnass at Moltkestraße 67 in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, where the gallery was located from 1961 to 1965, was the venue for the first Happening and Fluxus events on German soil. It wrote international art history with its spectacular media art events and exhibitions in the early 1960s. In Nam June Paik's solo exhibition Exposition of Music - Electronic Television, the first video objects were shown in 1963, and at the 24-hour Happening of 1965, the performances of the Paik muse and Fluxus cellist Charlotte Moorman, dressed only in a transparent cellophane film, caused a sensation.
Life and work From architect to gallery owner Rudolf Jährling was born in Hamburg, the son of the teacher Bruno Ferdinand Jährling.Ruth Meyer-Kahrweg: Architects, civil engineers, master builders, property developers and their buildings in Wuppertal, Pies, Sprockhövel 2003, p. 244 He already admired Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier during his school days.Rolf Jährling: Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal. In: Gerhard Finckh, Antje Birthälmer (Ed.): “Private”. Contemporary Wuppertal collectors at the Von der Heydt Museum, p. 37 After attending secondary school in Hamburg, he graduated from the Dürer School in Dresden in 1933. From 1933 to 1935, Jährling studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule (TH) in Dresden, from 1935 to 1936 at the TH in Stuttgart and from 1936 to 1939 with Heinrich Tessenow, a teacher of Albert Speer, at the Technische Hochschule Berlin, where he graduated as an Diplom-Ingenieur. In 1937, he first visited the World Exhibition in Paris, where he saw a Pablo Picasso painting for the first time - the Guernica painted for the Spanish pavilion - as well as works by Joan Miró. The visit to the National Socialist Entartete Kunst propaganda exhibition in Munich in the same year brought him into contact with Modern Art even before the outbreak of World War II. In 1939, he worked as an architect in Berlin on the construction of the Reichsautobahn, was called up to the army in 1941 as a Pioneer and was deployed in Russia and southern France. In 1944 he fell into American prisoner of war, from which he was released in 1946. Antje Birthälmer: “Private”. Contemporary Wuppertal collectors at the Von der Heydt Museum. The art of inner participation. In: Gerhard Finckh, Antje Birthälmer (Ed.), p. 14
Parnass Gallery 1949-1965 After his release from captivity as a prisoner of war, Rolf Jährling moved to Wuppertal in September 1946 and settled there as an architect. He owed his interest in modern art to the architect Heinz Rasch, born in Berlin in 1902, a colleague of Kurt Herberts, who had set up the "Studio for New Art" at Döppersberg 24 in 1945, where around 120 solo exhibitions of living artists and architects were shown until 1953. Jährling spent the first post-war Christmas with the architect and painter Franz Krause in a furnished room of a three-storey house. A friend, who was an attaché at the embassy in Athens, christened his room "Parnassus three stories high", thus giving birth to the name of his gallery, which also has a reference to the Montparnasse in Paris.Rolf Jährling: Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal. In: Gerhard Finckh, Antje Birthälmer (Ed.), p. 38Brigitte Jacobs van Renswou: Rendez-vous on the Parnassus. Pioneering work for the avant-garde. In: Gerhard Finckh, Antje Birthälmer (Ed.), p. 25
In January 1949, Jährling founded the Galerie Parnass in his architectural office In der Aue 30 a under the roof of a half-destroyed warehouse, whose spectrum ranged from architecture, plastics, stage art, photography to lectures, discussions, happenings and music performances. and supported artists such as Helen Ashbee, Elfriede Luthe, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Claire Falkenstein, Lil Picard and Nele.Annette Tietenberg: Tomorrow was approaching and the 'end of something' was nowhere near in sight. In: Bogomir Ecker, Annette Tietenberg (Ed.): “24 HOURS” in photographs by Bodo Niederprüm, Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2016, p. 15 In 1950, the gallery moved to the commercial building built by Rolf Jährling at Alten Freiheit 16-18. Probably the first penthouse in Germany offered a light-flooded exhibition and work room on the top floor, a promenade-like roof terrace and a built-in studio stage for various productions. In April 1950, Jean-Paul Sartre's Huit Clos (Closed Society) was staged here under the direction of Paul Pörtner and in February 1952 Jean Cocteau's La voix humaine (Beloved Voice).Karl Ruhrberg (Ed.): Signs of the times. Stations of visual art in North Rhine-Westphalia. DuMont, Cologne 1989, ISBN 3-7701-2314-X, p. 458, 462 In 1954, Jährling met his future wife Anneliese (née Schu, 1923-2010), a dentist with a doctorate who came to his gallery as a visitor, at Alte Freiheit. In 1958, he opened gallery space at Gathe 83, moved the gallery to Morianstraße 14 in 1959 and, when the collector Klaus Gebhard moved from Wuppertal to Munich in 1961, took over his villa at Moltkestraße 67, where he continued to run his gallery until 1965.
First exhibitions 1949-1956 At the first exhibitions, Rudolf Jährling exhibited works by Classical Modernism artists, including August Macke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gerhard Marcks, Oskar Schlemmer, Jean Cocteau, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and Lovis Corinth, followed by sculptors and painters of his generation, initially as part of salon exhibitions. The exhibition program showed abstract art, especially Tachisme, the French École de Paris and the German Informel. Important representatives such as Francis Bott, Peter Brüning, Rolf Cavael, Karl Fred Dahmen, Albert Fürst, Hans Hartung, Gerhard Hoehme, Heinz Kreutz, André Lanskoy, Bernard Schultze, Emil Schumacher, Jaroslaw Serpan, Heinz Trökes, François Willi Wendt and WOLS as well as the sculptor Norbert Kricke exhibited at Galerie Parnass from 1951. The exhibitions were always opened by renowned art critics and theorists, including Pierre Restany, Franz Roh, Albert Schulze-Vellinghausen, John Anthony Thwaites, Eduard Trier and the Düsseldorf gallery owner Jean-Pierre Wilhelm. Brigitte Jacobs van Renswou in: Gerhard Finckh, Antje Birthälmer (Ed.), p. 27 In 1951, the first Le Corbusier exhibition in Germany took place in the Galerie Parnass and the following year Jährling dedicated an architecture exhibition to the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
In 1952, Jährling traveled to Paris to meet the art dealer Aimé Maeght, whose gallery represented the artist Alexander Calder, and to inform him of his plans for an exhibition of works by Calder, whose "Mobiles" he had come across in an old Life-Magazin during his time as a prisoner of war. Maeght, not at all enthusiastic, asked the Wuppertal gallery owner, whom he did not know, how much money he wanted to deposit for the exhibition, whereupon Jährling told him that he had no money available, to which Maeght replied that nothing would come of it. Calder, who heard about this, made a huge noise and made sure that Jährling received 16 "Mobiles" from Paris, as a result of which Rolf Jährling was able to open Alexander Calder's first solo exhibition in Germany on June 5, 1952 in the Galerie Parnass.Brigitte Jacobs van Renswou in: Gerhard Finckh, Antje Birthälmer (Ed.), p. 26Alexander Calder: Blick in die Mobile-Ausstellung 1952 (Memento from October 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive), June 1952 A year later, they met in person at the Darmstadt Talks, and Calder asked him to come to Roxbury in the USA, where Calder lived with his family. The three-month travel program was put together by Calder, which Jährling used, among other things, to view American architecture.
With the help of Wilhelm, who ran Gallery 22, the exhibition Poème Objet took place in 1956. It included works by around fifty artists from Germany and France. This exhibition at Galerie Parnass became the first bridge between the abstract and surrealist roots underlying informal art, from artists such as Hans Arp, Max Ernst and Raoul Ubac to the contemporary avant-garde such as Peter Brüning, Albert Fürst, Winfred Gaul, Karl Otto Götz and Gerhard Hoehme.Brigitte Jacobs van Renswou: In the beginning was nothing www.faz.net vom April 24, 2010, retrieved on July 8, 2011
Small summer party - Après John Cage 1962
The stately Art Nouveau villa of the collector Klaus Gebhard at Moltkestraße 67 in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, which Rolf and Anneliese Jährling moved into in December 1961, offered space for the architectural office, the gallery and a private apartment. The landlord was the then Lord Mayor Heinz Frowein, who lived in the house next door. With its spacious rooms from the cellar to the attic, the villa was the venue for the first pre-Fluxus events in Germany. On the occasion of the opening of an exhibition of various sculptors and painters, the Small Summer Festival - Après John Cage was opened on June 9, 1962, which became the beginning of further Fluxus actions in the Galerie Parnass.Brigitte Jacobs van Renswou in: Gerhard Finckh, Antje Birthälmer (Ed.), p. 28
The idea for this summer party came from Jean Pierre Wilhelm of the Düsseldorf Gallery 22 and Nam June Paik, whom Jährling had met a year earlier at Mary Bauermeister and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, where Paik had worked on the music theater Originals by Stockhausen. Around 100 guests took part. Concert pieces by George Maciunas and Benjamin Patterson were performed, with Carlheinz Caspari, Jed Curtis, George Maciunas, Nam June Paik and Benjamin Patterson appearing as actors. A music stand, paper tubes, children's flutes and a double bass were set up on the steps of the villa's entrance hall. Patterson played the piece "Variations for double bass", for example, by - according to a newspaper reporter present in 1962 - "bowing with one bow, bowing with two bows, pulling a tow rope under the strings, making noises with knife and fork, with hammer and tin foil, sometimes turning the instrument upside down, sometimes lying on the floor next to the instrument",NN: Summer party with Dada. In: New Ruhr Newspaper, June 12, 1962; quoted from Brigitte Jacobs van Renswou in: Gerhard Finckh, Antje Birthälmer (eds.), p. 28 whereby Caspari, director at the Theater am Dom, read out the text Neo-Dada in the United States by Maciunas, which is regarded as the preliminary manifesto of Fluxus. Among the Fluxus events, this concert occupies a key position, as it was the first public appearance of the American Fluxus founder George Maciunas in Germany.Susanne Rennert: Chronology (1958-1968). In: Sediment. Communications on the History of the Art Trade, Nam June Paik's Early Years in the Rhineland, Central Archive of the International Art Trade e. V. ZADIK, Issue 9, 2005, Publisher for Modern Art Nuremberg, Cologne 2005, ISBN 978-3-938821-28-2, p. 34
Music Exhibition - Electronic Television 1963