Dr. rer.pol. Friedrich Wilhelm Mundinger, watercolorist and painter

born on December 7, 1893 in Offenburg/Baden and died on May 24, 1965 in Remscheid.

His origin and development

Friedrich Wilhelm Mundinger’s father Karl Wilhelm founded the brewery  Mundinger brothers in Offenburg/Baden with his younger brother Otto in 1889. As first son after his two years older sister Frieda Katharina he should become a brewer himself. But things turned out differently.

Friedrich Wilhelm, known as Will, preferred to play the violin and write poetry. He enjoyed drawing and painting. That doesn’t sound at all like a rather down-to-earth, sober future beer brewer. He first attended elementary school in Offenburg, then secondary school up to and including grade 11, then the Ecole superieure de Commerce in Neuchatel for 1 year. Afterwards he made a commercial apprenticeship (2 years) in a Pforzheimer Bijouteriefabrik, in order to satisfy thereupon its military obligation as a one-year volunteer with the Infanterieregiment 170 in Offenburg. At the outbreak of the war – as he himself writes in his curriculum vitae for his later doctoral thesis – “I was still active and spent the war in the field as a field magazine inspector after remaining with the troops for 2 months as a result of a nervous condition (6-month stay in a mental hospital).”

Studies after the 1st World War

From 1917 to 1921 Mundinger studied at commercial colleges or universities: in Cologne for 4 semesters, in Munich for 1 semester and in Mannheim for 3 semesters, graduating with a degree in business administration. This was followed by studies in political science in Hamburg and Frankfurt a.M. and a doctorate (Dr. rer.pol.).

Marriage to Gertrud Loeb on December 08, 1923

In Limburg/Lahn at Parkstr. 7, where Mundinger  lived during his doctoral studies, he met and fell in love with Gertrud Loeb, who was 4 years older than him, on 01.11.1922. Gertrud had been a deserving and repeatedly decorated senior nurse during the war, came from a Jewish family of doctors, and helped her brother Georg Loeb in his rural medical practice in Limburg. Gertrud and her parents, Sanitätsrat Dr. Carl Loeb and his wife Emy, née Markheim, were Jewish by religion. Gertrud was baptized Protestant at the age of 16 on September 22, 1905. Regarding her Jewish ancestry, she herself says: “…never had Jewish religious instruction…and never felt Jewish.” In 1925 Rosemarie, called Roja, and in 1927 Ingrid, called Inka, were born. They, too, were baptized Protestants.

Professional activity of Friedrich Wilhelm Mundinger

Contrary to what one might have expected, Mundinger did not start his career at the Mundinger brewery in Offenburg or at the jewelry store in Pforzheim, where he had completed his commercial apprenticeship, but is said to have worked at Buderus in a managerial position. Financially, he must have lost a lot of money as a result of the financial collapse in 1929 (black Friday) in the United States of America. He himself describes his later activity as an independent bank representative for new construction financing for a mortgage bank with extensive travel throughout Germany from 1935 to 1939. During this time he must have been doing very well financially. He acquired 2.5 hectares of land in Schwienhorst near Telgte and built a thatched country house with a swimming pool there. On 01.10.1936 the Mundinger family moved in there. This purchase and move from the city of Münster, where they had previously lived, proved to be a stroke of luck in the approaching 2nd World War. On the second floor of the country house, Mundinger set up a studio with a large window, in order to be able to devote himself to his pronounced passion, painting..

His passion for painting was dormant during his education and World War I and was only reawakened by his wife in 1926, who gave him an easel for his birthday. Obviously he had talent. He never attended an art academy, but received further training from Otto Modersohn, as whose master student he is named. He probably painted out in the field  but often he took photos/slides from which he then produced the watercolors very quickly in his studio.

“Friedrich Wilhelm Mundinger, a “modern master of watercolor”.

With this heading Franz Grosse-Perdekamp, (*14 January 1890 in Bottrop; died 30 December 1952 in Recklinghausen) a German educator, art historian and writer, describes Mundinger as a painter and graphic artist in 1947 in an extensive portfolio of 24 watercolors with landscapes and still lifes from the years 1943 to 1947. Mundinger and Perdekamp knew each other through the artists’ association “Westfälische Sezession 1945”, in which Mundinger was deputy chairman and Perdekamp secretary.

Mundinger had moved to Münster in the mid-twenties. On this Perdegang writes:

“…certainly, however, the experience of Westphalia..decisively determined his artistic development. The South German obviously owes the collection of his Alemannic open nature to the structural unambiguity of the Low German plain and the close contact with the people formed by this landscape to a more statically solidified world view. The Lower German-Westphalian habitat, rich in dangerous mental tensions, nevertheless had a calming effect on the painter who experienced it through observation, but above all caused a mental compression in his watercolors. The secret melancholic Mundinger, who hardly ever becomes visible in his outer life and often remains hidden from closest friends, felt himself addressed by the melancholy beauty of the rambling, atmospherically heavy lowland landscape as an elective.”

In a description of two of his watercolors, “Westphalian Village” and “Sauerland”, Mundinger himself says: “Born in Offenburg/Baden in 1893, I drew and painted a lot in my early youth. For the purpose of taking over the parental brewery, I studied national economy; I was interested in art only theoretically. – After a 12-year break, inspired by my wife, I took up the brush again in 1926. – I paint mainly landscape, cityscapes, recently portrait – in oil and watercolor. – The economic profession is not, as I once believed, an obstacle to artistic activity, on the contrary.

Friedrich Wilhelm Mundinger, Münster i. W., Gertrudenstr. 28″

(taken from Landesarchiv MS Oberpräsidium No. 7962).

It is important for a painter to find his typical style. In the beginning it was landscapes, still lifes and portraits. Under the influence of his later partner Inge Arntz, who painted and exhibited with him, Mundinger changed his style. The colors become brighter, more southern and the watercolors become more abstract. After his death in 1965, the Remscheid gallery owner Georg Müller takes over his artistic estate – about 200 pictures and separates the watercolors that Mundinger painted until the end of the 40s – just for him typical landscapes and still lifes. The style of the fifties and early sixties would pass today also as “temporary art”. The gallery owner held exhibitions and sold the paintings as far away as the USA. Towards the end of his life, the watercolors become more and more somber: gray, black large-format paintings that the gallery owner has kept in his private collection.

How well known was and still is Mundinger today? He is little known in his hometown of Offenburg. In Münster and the surrounding area he is better known and is also listed as an artist in the LWL Museum in Münster. Also in Delbrück near Paderborn, where Mundinger had gone into hiding with his family under a false name at the beginning of 1945 until the end of the war, there are still watercolors by him.