CovSoc founder member Paul Maddocks is a guide at Coventry Cathedral and has a lifetime interest in the public arts on display there. Paul writes…..
Coventry Cathedral has many works of art from the very large impressive ones to the not so large artworks. Some are better known than others and only last week I was asked who the artist was who created the metal brass/bronze coloured panel near the stairs to the basement of the Cathedral at the north end.
I know it from a long time ago when it was first hung in the old Cathedral’s Vestry in the cafe area of the international visitor centre. It must have been moved when the Blitz Museum moved from the basement over to the old Cathedral. So not knowing the artist I started looking into who it may have been. Was it done by a visiting German student, many of whom came to Coventry in the 1960’s to do voluntary work?
The metal Artwork was created by the German artist Fritz Kühn for the cafe and international visitors meeting place in the Vestry of the old St Michael’s Cathedral. Most likely it was done in 1962.
Fritz Kühn (29 April 1910 – 31 July 1967) was an East German visual artist whose output included sculpture, metal-artwork and photography. In 1937 he qualified as a Master metal artist, when the War broke out, he did not get conscripted as he had a longstanding heart defect. During the war his studio was bombed and all his drawings and photograph destroyed. After the war he started working on various rebuilding projects including the railings for the interior and exterior of the Berlin Opera house. He also did a metal screen called ‘Alphabet Tapestry’ for the entrance to the Berlin City Library in 1965 which had various type faces on various square discs.
His iron-based artworks feature not just in the German Democratic Republic but also in places such as Hannover, Dortmund, Saarbrücken and Düsseldorf. Further afield, he also contributed to the war memorial here at Coventry and the vast Futa Pass Cemetery in the Apennines between Bologna and Florence. Fritz was a very keen photographer and liked taking photograph of nature and the shapes they made. He liked looking at thing in a different way. Even logs floating in the river made unusual patterns or steps casting long shadows, all which he would use in his artwork.
He did grand architectural features for various buildings.
Some of his artwork had a uncanny resemblance to William Mitchel designs in Coventry, the attached photograph is a detail of a few panels from a fountain that Fritz did.
Fritz wrote many books on metal working and also on photography, unexpectedly at the age of 57 he died on 31st July 1967 as the result of an operation that went wrong. He and his wife, were buried alongside each other in a ‘Berlin grave of Honour’.
In 1969 at the Louvre Museum in Paris there was a retrospective exhibition of his life work and in Berlin there is now a Fritz-Kühn-Museum, so he is quite famous in Germany, and I am ashamed I did not know more about him, I have collected from the internet many images of his work, please see attached photo-strips.
I like that the entrance which has a hanging metal sign to the museum, it’s of an anvil with a crossed hammer and tongs.
I wonder if anyone has any more information on the panel in the Cathedral, when it was done and how it got commissioned etc?