Albert Hennig - Gruppe "Die verschollene Generation" - watercolor - boy with cap - signed

• Hennig was born into a working-class family in 1907 and grew up in the Leipzig district of Kleinzschocher. He trained as a concrete worker and joined the Socialist Workers' Youth (SAJ) in 1923 and the SPD in 1928. During the Great Depression, he was unemployed from 1929 to 1931. He began to take photographs autodidactically with a Zeiss Ikonta 6 × 9 cm. He applied to the Bauhaus in Dessau with a series of photographs. He was accepted in 1932 and studied until 1933, mainly in the field of advertising and photography. His teachers in Dessau and, after the closure in 1932, in Berlin were Josef Albers (preparatory course), Walter Peterhans (photography), Hinnerk Scheper, Joost Schmidt, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

In terms of motifs and style, Hennig's photographs are close to the social documentary worker photography movement of the Weimar Republic, with which Hennig also maintained active contact in Leipzig. His photo series "Children of the Street" commissioned by the social democratic Children's Friends movement was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933 when the SPD office in Leipzig was occupied. Hennig was conscripted as a construction worker in 1934.
After the end of the Nazi state, in 1945 he was one of the founders of the "Visual Artists" group in the Zwickau Cultural Association. From 1948 to 1951 he was secretary of the Zwickau Cultural Association and representative of the FDGB for exhibitions in the companies in the Zwickau district and in 1952/1953 senior consultant for visual arts in the Chemnitz district. He was a member of the Association of Visual Artists of the GDR. After differences with the GDR's cultural policy, he was forced to work as a concrete worker from 1952 to 1972. After that he devoted himself exclusively to painting. Hennig had a significant number of solo exhibitions and exhibition participations in the GDR and abroad.
In 2008, the community of heirs handed over Albert Hennig's extensive and extraordinary artistic estate, consisting of 140 drawings, 2100 sketches and 20 sketchbooks as well as around 180 watercolors, 70 pastels and monotypes, as well as woodcuts on paper and fabric in many variants and prints, to the Zwickau art collections. A bundle of archives, photos, catalogs, magazines, invitation cards, reviews and important documents, such as lecture notes and certificates from Hennig's Bauhaus period from 1932 to 1933 and letters from artist friends, for example from his Bauhaus fellow student Carl Marx or the Gersdorf painter Heinz Tetzner, complement the works from the estate. The Zwickau art collections have thus been able to obtain extensive material from this important Zwickau artist. Starting in 2009, the “Year of Graphic Art,” the work of Albert Hennig will be presented in changing exhibitions on the west gallery of the art collections.
Part of the artist's photographic estate, which consists of photographs (mainly the original vintage prints), roll film and glass plate negatives as well as other rare negatives from the Bauhaus period, has already been acquired with the support of the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony.