Discover Top Posts Tagged with #paul hoecker

Abend, Paul Hoecker (Höcker)

Paul Hoecker - Ave Maria (ca. 1898)

The painter Paul Hoecker was the first ‘modern’ Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He introduced his students to art movements beyond the constraints of the academic art world, such as the Barbizon School, Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism etc. However, a scandal surrounding one of his paintings forced him to resign from the Professorship in 1898. Allegedly he used a male sex worker as the model for the mother Maria as a depiction of the Madonna, with whom he also maintained a private relationship. According to the novel L’Élu (1902) by Achille Essebac, this is the painting Ave Maria, which is in the collection of the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. During that time, the infamous Paragraph 175, which was first instituted in 1872, criminalized homosexual relations. Long before the scandal broke, Hoecker had written to the Berlin-based sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld about Paragraph 175 as well as about his own homosexuality: You dedicate your strength to one of the most humane purposes, and I am pleased to see how many men in the relevant sciences and other excellent and influential people want to contribute to the abolition of this cruel law, but I cannot give you my signature alone – because I myself am predisposed to desire my own sex. In 1910 Hoecker died in Munich after he returned from a prolonged stay in Italy (Capri, Rome etc.) during which he became infected with “Roman malaria”. (source)

#Paul Hoecker #german art #religious art #1890s