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September 20th, 2017 
Awake Goy Biography from German Art Gallery
Jakob Wilhelm Fehrle (1884–1974), who came from a family of gardeners, was a German painter, drawer and sculptor. He studied from 1903 to 1905 at the Kunstakademie Berlin with Paul Meyerheim and later with Balthasar Schmitt at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. From 1911 to 1914, after a study journey to Rome, he kept an atelier in Paris, where he met artists like Georg Kolbe, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Aristide Maillol, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee. After his military services from 1914 to 1918, he went back to his hometown Schwäbisch Gmünd where he lived until his death. From 1922 he had many exhibitions in the area of Stuttart. In 1928 he became professor.
Fehrle was well known for his sculptures in bronze and stone, busts and war memorials, and especially for his works in cities in the Schwaben region. Girls and women with long bodies were a central motif in his work. Famous sculptures in this genre were the Gotische Eva (1910), Louise (1912), Aphrodite (1913), Claudia (1914), Madonna (1921) and Verkündigung (1922). His success continued in the 1930s, when he was commissioned works by the Nazis. In Schwäbische Gmünd he created in 1935 the war memorial for fallen soldiers in World War I, a nine-meter-high bronze column crowned with a Swastika and Reichsadler (in 1948 the swastika and eagle were replaced by an angel with a flame-sword made by Fehrle). It is very peculiar that even in 1937 works of Fehrle were taken away by the National Socialist regime from the Stuttgarter Staatsgalerie and the Ulmer Museum because they were “entartet” (“degenerated”).
From 1939 to 1944 Fehrle was represented in the Great German Art Exhibitions with 17 statues, including ‘Bauer’, ‘Hüter’, ‘Göttin des Frühlings’, ‘Flötenspieler’, ‘Julia’, ‘Frühling’ and ‘Opheilia’. After World War II, in 1954, the personal friend of Fehrle, the Bundespräsidenten Theodor Heuss, gave him for his 70th birthday the Grosse Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. In 1974 in the Historischen Museum in Heilbronn an exhibition of works of Fehrle took place. Under the name of “Mädchen und Frauen” a large Fehrle exhibition took place in the Gmünder Museum in 2005, where more than 100 of his works were shown.
Source Article from http://www.renegadetribune.com/jakob-wilhelm-fehrle-sculptor-sensitive-spirituality/
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