Hubert Wackermann

from The George G. Matthews Collection of Western Art

Richard D. Thomas

1945 - 0000

Hubert Wackermann was born in Solingen, West Germany, the birthplace of Western Landscape painter, Albert Bierstadt. For centuries, the city has been known for the manufacture of fine swords, knives, scissors, and razors. Hubert was raised by his mother and grandparents on a farm, right on the East German/West German border, between Braunschweig and Berlin and he remembers East German refugees regularly escaping to the West.

Wackermann says he developed an interest in North American Indians at an early age while watching American Western Movies and reading Karl May books about Indians, though he later learned May’s books were not particularly accurate since May had never actually seen the American West. Later he pursued his interest by visiting museums and libraries and during one of those visits was particularly inspired by an exhibition in Düsseldorf of the work of Karl Bodmer and Rudolf Friedrich Kurz, Swiss painters who documented the landscape and Native American life along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers during the mid-nineteenth century.

Wackermann worked for three years at the Georg Westermann Verlag (printing works) in Braunschweig, West Germany, where he worked as a lithographer and learned watercolor, pencil, pen and ink, crayon, tempera, gouache, lettering and design. He was conscripted into the Bundeswehr (Federal Defense Forces of Germany), but when he fell ill from what may have been tuberculosis, he was sent to the Harz Mountains to recover and then on to the Niedersächsische Versehrten Berusfachschule (Lower Saxony Convalescent Technical College) in Bad Pyrmont, West Germany for two years where he learned photography, silkscreen, brush and ink, landscape and composition. Wackermann then studied for five years at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf), West Germany, where he earned a degree of Master Student of Art and was certified as an art teacher. He rounded out his interesting combination of formal and hands-on training through scholarship funded study trips to Canada, the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, and Egypt. Given his broad training in a variety of media, not surprisingly Wackermann is comfortable working in acrylic, gouache, watercolor, and oil paints.

Wackermann got his chance to study North American Indians firsthand when he first visited Canada at the age of 24 on one of those study trips, and again Canada and the United States in subsequent visits over the next six years. He immigrated to Canada in 1976 and lived for a year on the Six Nations Iroquois (Mohawk) Reservation in Southern Ontario, where he taught art classes for the Mohawk children. The next year Wackermann immigrated to the United States, eventually settling near Albuquerque in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

Today Wackerman works from his studio in Marietta, Georgia, where he moved in 1987 Wackermann to be close to his wife’s family and a bit closer to Puerto Rico, where his wife is from. However, he has made many trips back to the West to do research and to attend reenactments popular with painters of the West.

BLACKFEET WINTER CAMP Oil on Canvas 2018 24 ½ x 36 inches