Karl Weschke 1925-2005
Karl Weschke was a painter and sculptor, best known for his paintings exploring landscapes of Cornwall.
Weschke was born in Gera, Germany in 1925. He was placed in the care of a children’s home by his mother at the age of two where he stayed until he was seven years old. His mother reluctantly reclaimed him when he outgrew the orphanage but the reunion was an unhappy one, Weschke eventually found a sense of belonging after joining the Hitler Youth and later the Luftwaffe. Captured by Canadian forces in the Netherlands, he arrived in the UK in 1945 as a prisoner-of-war.
Radwinter prisoner-of-war camp, near Cambridge had a particular emphasis on rehabilitation and education which Weschke threw himself into; working on the camp newspaper, designing theatre sets and attending art lectures organised by Cambridge University. These lectures introduced Weschke to the German Expressionists which would later be influential in his own work. Weschke began creating sculpture at the camp while he was educated on the realities of the Holocaust, separated from the Nazi propaganda he had been exposed to throughout his youth. By 1949, Weschke had been released from the camp and had enrolled at Saint Martins School of Art, at which he only stayed for a term but proved to be a significant time nonetheless. The artist met members of the Borough Group who encouraged his work, in particular Dorothy Mead.
Fatefully in 1953, Weschke met Bryan Wynter, a painter from Penwith, Cornwall in a Soho bar. This meeting instigated a relocation for the artist who at first moved to Tregerthen, near St Ives and in 1960 settled further west to Cape Cornwall, where he would stay for the rest of his life. Weschke became close with members of St Ives painters Roger Hilton and Peter Lanyon. He also developed a friendship with Francis Bacon, the two would frequently visit each other’s studios after meeting at Porthmeor Studios. After a lifetime of displacement and alienation Weschke seemed to enjoy the sense of community that Cornwall provided, even becoming an auxiliary coastguard.
By the late 1950s, the artist was developing a personal language as a painter, with his work consistently imparting his personal experience alongside themes of landscape and isolation. The Cornish landscape is frequently depicted as hostile and the artist’s Borzoi dog, Dankoff is often deployed as Weschke’s double in his paintings. Weschke’s early exhibitions were successful including a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1974 and another in 1980 at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge where the Tate Gallery purchased the first of many of his works. By the 1980s, Weschke had started to incorporate elements of mythology into his work, an artistic decision seeped in the artist’s cultural heritage of German Expressionism. Two trips to Egypt in the early 1990s further shaped the mythological themes in Weschke’s later work.
Despite his origins, Weschke is considered a Cornish artist after spending most of his life and producing the majority of his work in the county. The Tate St Ives holds some of his work in their collection, where a major retrospective was held in 2004. Weschke’s work can also be found in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Fitzwilliam Museum and the Arts Council collection.
