words

I was born in 1925 in Höxter an der Weser. The first book on art that I encountered was a small work about Renoir. There was a landscape illustrated in it that excited me more than Renoir’s nudes. It was Painted in outline and only hazily recognizable. I began to comprehend that representation of reality is not coupled to recognizability but rather that it is falsified by exact reproduction. 

Years later I became acquainted with Reinhard Schmidthagen in a Marburg Hospital. A young painter and pupil of Käthe Kollwitz. I obtained the final impulse from him to become a painter. Through his friends, a group associated with Hamann, the art historian, I obtained an insight into the resistance against Hitler. 

Schmidthagen worked like one possessed on large woodcuts appealing for an end to the war. A few days before the Americans reached Marburg, he died. I got his paints.

After the war, I lived for a few years in a wooden cabin on the wooded outskirts of Höxter. I painted from morning to evening. My father gave up his attempt to put me in the office of his small furniture factory as he had intended. 

In 1948, I went to Willi Baumeister in Stuttgart. The pictures I had painted up to that time and was now able to show in exhibitions alongside the no longer condemned masters Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, Heckel and others paled through the many new impressions I obtained from the war-damaged Stuttgart Academy. The first thing my new teacher said was “Don’t open your portfolio!” He didn’t want to see the groping attempts of his pupils. “It is my job to empty you,” he stated. Later, I understood that well. “We are not painting pictures, we are studying” – or – “Everything in nature is formed from globe, cone and cylinder.” 

Cezanne and the progressive stages of cubism were the principles of our study. Ochre, black and white were the colors, wrapping paper and newspapers the canvas. Goethe’s and Oswald’s color theory were only touched upon. “Nuances of white, earth colors are an adequate curriculum. It will be up to you to decide later whether red, blue and yellow should be added. There are no rules for colors – this is subjective, left up to each individual.” 

The association with the elementary resources of painting freed us from the established conceptions haunting each of us. The “emptying” permitted a new start in all directions, whether to pictures, stage scenery, posters or whatever else. Everything optically perceptible must be capable of organization in the picture, part of an ordered whole. The picture elements are used for clarification, for conclusions for proportions which lead to new criteria and thus influence the relative “objectivity” of art observation. 

Baumeister understood how to make it clear that this insight is also economical in the process of seeking for our own pictorial happenings. Knowing this was a clear advantage. In short, I was fortunate to be the student of an important painter and of certainly the best teacher of his time. The slow transposition of my picture elements to the left and the right toward the margins finally led to the result of the division of my picture surface through a line in the middle. But this also commenced the departure from my teacher. This happened after 4 years. Baumeister told me that he missed us students. “I learn just as much from you as you do from me!” 

Famished by the long-practiced economy with colors I got something like a color intoxication in 1952. With the old oil paints from Reinhard Schmidthagen I painted for weeks on a picture that was to become very colorful – what remained was a thin black line against a gray background and a small wedge of blue. The pictures that followed were even more frugal. I did not know how to formulate any more sparsely. That was in 1954. In the next few years I came into a group of young architects. We forged plans for houses, cities, walls. We talked about material and the connection of differing materials. We argued about Le Corbusier, Doecker, Gutbier, Gutbrod, Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe. I built chairs, made pottery, developed wood carvings, which due to their free spaces permitted the surroundings to take effect. Years with attempts to relieve the isolation of creative art in the framework of the tremendous spectrum of the applied arts. 

In 1956, a daughter joined the son. I had to earn money! Warned by a friend against “Art in building” – his work was becoming more and more functionally oriented, I made a wide path around art to avoid having to adapt. Illustrations from photographs originated, like photographs – cartoons – layouts. Parallel to this my pictures. After a short informal period, the contrast composition returned ever more clearly. It became clear to me that this formal framework would be the decisive basis for my further work. In many sheets I added spontaneous marking to the equally large, empty halves of the picture: both halves increased mutually through the contrast to an intensity I had never before recognized.

In 1962, I found the simplest connection of the canvases through a seam. The pictures stood next to each other – one empty, one painted. Everything was now sewn together. It was no accident, it had function: the seam connected the contrary The “Coudrage” (coudre = sewing) was there. My wife invented the name. The “sacred surface” (Leonhard) was for me the empty surface – the intact, untouched; connected with it the created surface, of threads and paint, held by the form found. I subjected all forms worked on by me to the contrast principle. The pebble forms, now with the triangle between round shapes. I was occupied for around 3 years with figuratively associable with increased colorfullness on the painted picture half. In the same period, plastic pictures were also made in which white in white cloth-covered padded forms made the solid marking of the form outlines through color surface superfluous. Sculptures also originated such as filled sacks, which due to their weight and their mobility formed folds such as on Greek robes. I built stairs out of steel, which with tapering treads lead to a divided picture. Sculptures with forms which could be humans moved by the wind. Frames out of metal on which a shape of steel turns as on a gallows – the pendant, soft, lying on the ground, crinkled like a cushion.

After these attempts, I stayed with the materials, cloth, threads, paint – a scale of resources with which I could say what I wanted to say. I was convinced that painting with its fascination, its secrets is makeable even today with the specific resources available only to it Since 1972 I have been living in Spain, on Ibiza, in a house in the country. Why? A retreat from the daily (art) political conflict – desire to live without resistance? It is certain that anyone in equilibrium creates no poems, does not defend the barricades. But equilibrium originates differently with everyone and is different with everyone. That isn’t what it is all about. I have exchanged the wrangling for positions, consumption, the abrasive daily pressure against coming to terms with myself, yielding to inclinations, looking at wood, gray find dried by the sun, possessing water as a treasure, a corner in the room where a fire is warming, mosquitoes, dust, shadow of a tree – many pictures and pictures that have yet to be painted. Flipping out has its price, but also its logic.

If I were to be asked today what painting was important for me, I would like to mention Mondrian, the “Roman Diaries” of Gerhard Hoehme and the picture “La Flagellacione” by Piero della Francesca in Urbino. Through his new dimensions Mondrian proves the importance of proportions and indicates the imperativeness of not permitting painting to happen unrestrainedly, unplanned without bounds. In his “Roman Diaries” Hoehme illustrates with finely differentiated painted calligraphic symbols experience, whereby his text fragments express more visually than readable words. I am concerned with respect to both poles to consider all pictorial resources: that is not to leave a picture up to feelings alone or to regard it only as the result of systematic variations of the possible multiplicity of proportions, but rather, like Piero della Francesca, to find a framework, in which in conformity with our contrary nature there is place for that which defines us as humans: emotion and intellect.

My paintings, my intentions, like all intentions concerned with paintings, cannot be expressed in words. Describe lines, the shades of white…

Touchingly they arise and no result is like the first idea. Who writes the first page does not know the last one. Who takes the first step does not know the last. One line implies the next and becomes dependent till the end, to an organic formation which does not allow any more questions.

I have the surface, the limited space, including the empty half: the steadiness, the intact, untouched, ready to become the counterpart to serenity, grief, fear, to all that I cannot spell out.

I fill the traced field, without intention, like I was filled throughout the years. Uncertainty arises from intention. Just to be, without realizing, self-evident like rain, flowing water. To feel the reflection, waves breaking at the shore, wind moving a blade.

Afterwards: that was me? And tomorrow? To be free means to destroy the attained. Clinging to the attained will destroy me. So the paintings grow by themselves.

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“I like art which doesn’t just sit on its ass in a museum… which can be put on and taken off like pants… which gets holes like socks… I like art you can pick your nose with.” The time has passed, when Claes Oldenburg popularised art with such sentences. For a short time the relation to the triviality had a liberating effect, but altogether it has contributed to (hardly)-useful confusion. Scratching at the foundations shows whether they are dispensable or not. It becomes clear: The Pop-artists marched a long way along the same road with a big pothole at the end like the “Secret Seducers” who suggest consumption to us, which with their popularized products supplied Pop-artists with their main subject for becoming aware of a glimmering surface. Art for quick digestion has at best the noteworthy creativity of Colaadvertising and is exposed to commercialization. To orient himself on the consumer means for a painter, to underpin a refrigerator-society. Art for target-groups and coverages forces levelling. Is that the problem? Accomplice of this plastic world? That is just what it is not all about. Art, which does not subordinate its inherent concepts to a cogent form superior to the content, will stumble, be trapped by the anecdotical and will disappear tomorrow. The high quality of Oldenburg’s art is evident where he does not only enlarge a knee, which – in spite of dimension and high attention value – remains a knee; he convinces, where the subject does not play the only role, where he is less speculative, where he transforms the trivial. The rest is a well-presented aspect of disengagement from the familiar maxims of art and excites the retina for a transitory moment. Warhol, anybody, can return his Campbell cans to the shelf of a store and, in a row with its equals, the consecrated piece will find its buyer for a dime who wants to cook his soup. A tomato-can as ritual object is not just a gallant misdemeanor. If any profane object is wanted on a pedestal, then it should be Marcel Duchamp’s URINOIR of 1915. This was the anticipation of the attitude to start again at zero. This attempt – looked upon as presumption by many – does not obtain any new perspectives by Warhol’s repetition and is refuted by what has been created since 1915 in spite of the manifesto “Art is dead”. The initiators of this revolution have made headlines and started new activities – for or against this thesis. To turn things upside down can be a useful proceeding, which makes things appear clearer than they are. Gags, rattletraps, experimental hints, referring to the possibilities of art, approaches to design, are not sufficient to satisfy the demands of art. Neither do literary references. Everybody should stick to his own job – painters have their own language. “Red is a more comprehensive value that the red of a red-painted rose”, is what Baumeister said. Consciousness of the elementary resources of painting must be restored: Form, line, color have their own laws and do not depend on borrowed gifts from other arts and applied art or on surrealistic surrogates, which, after deduction of the literary content, remains without mystery. 

Just as much in question is the current Vasarely, who makes formal statements but allows them to become decorations, toys, who as painter forgets half of his language and reduces the alphabet to 12 letters. Reduction certainly, but not the kind of reduction that becomes fragment and then pretends this to be the entirety. Vasarely shows his rank, where perfection does not make him smooth and poor. But now, he has mainly pushed a couch into better light in the furniture store, changed a curtain. He does not have the aura of Mondrian, who for half a century has forced on us his proportions – who changed our houses, our cities, who moved the table with the lamp above from the middle of the room to a corner. The strength of a visual statement becomes evident in its influence on the applied arts. Posters, sceneries, result from the formulations of painters. The applied arts, the makers, hardly ever perceive or know the connections. They take without knowing (or wanting to know) where they take from – even if they live in the room next door. 

Also the Pop-artists had strength, had influence. But at the same time they boosted the growth of banality at any price. They took part in the fetishism of consumer goods which is smothering us. They wrote ketchup on their banner – for a few years – as it is customary with perishable goods. The subject – to speak with Schiller – was seldom exterminated by the form. Schiller: “This is the real secret of the master, that he exterminates the subject by the form; and the more imposing, arrogant, seductive the subject is by itself, the more arbitrarily it shows its effect, or the more the spectator is inclined to engage himself directly in the subject, the more triumphant is the art, which defeats it (the subject) and remains master of it.”

The dilution of this, up to now irrevocable definition of art by newly added means of expression cannot replace these principles. Only if new means become subordinate to this definition can they be useful for mobilizing art. If they break out, become independent, they have no other effect than confusion. 

Concept-art outlines ideas. It produces glimmering processes, which clear away stale clichés. Seductive projects – neglecting realization – thought impulses. The autonomy of the picture is not in demand. The Minimal art is a fascinating process of becoming aware of elementary details, a reference to everything suitable for becoming art. Objectivization while neglecting the subjective portion. Impressive demonstration, switching to zero. Both, Minimal art and Concept art stand high above most of the currents of our time by their sovereign share of pure imagery resources. Minimal Art is the takeoff, free of pathos, restricted by its attempt to restrict reality. Here it comes to a dead stop in spite of its very promising tendency. Nothing but pure reality is truth – such nonsense is disseminated. If Herbert Marcuse says today, that transcendence in the sense of going beyond reality is the essential characteristic of any art, then this is a late recognition.

The photo-realists trespass on the graphic designers’ preserves. And their manual – better technical – dexterity performs startling feats. Perverse proceedings! Filling a market gap. Adaptation to reality, coupled with adaptation to banality. 

For a short time many opinions can be maintained, especially since it is possible to cut a slice off for the communications-media of the advertising industry, which is forced to produce peep shows continuously, which of necessity are subordinated to attractiveness and are partners in every speculative venture. The same is true for publications which have to be up to date and must attract attention. 

Of course it is difficult even for serious publications to make a correct evaluation of attractive innovations until some time has elapsed. New and important ideas can easily defy spontaneous judgment.

 Without transformation of reality – without an art con­taining this – we become smothered in objectivity, we sit alone high and dry. One house is beautiful, another house is not beautiful. Both have the same windows and doors, both have a roof. And yet we do make a distinction: one is lovely, the other isn’t. That’s where the secret is concealed, the adventure of bringing proportions into proper harmony with us. What is important here is the priority, the effect assigned to the proportions developed by the artist, that will become a standard for all of us.

The tremendous power of Mondrian’s rules of form has been weakened by the addition of diluents, buffeted by time and permits nostalgic renewals to come into being intended to replace the diluted ideas. But renewals are not very capable of getting us out of our dilemma. We need a new standard. This is our situation: a massive array of divergent opinions. A plastic world born from confusion just for the sake of economic, rational benefits. Even the maxims of Marcuse and Adorno, the fathers of the youthful revolt, have missed their mark – a depressing result of a start that has already become history. We have become inflated with opposing programs, doctrines, compulsions. Neuroses flourish – old dwellings are in fashion. Our fumbling efforts in all directions. Tomato soup cans, clothespins, Presley posters with frames symbolize the degeneration of art, the pothole that we have to get out of. 

It isn’t enough to take over the inventions of the engineers. They represent ad hoc results. If transformation is not insisted on, the inventors become the mightiest. The great misunderstanding becomes evident here. Let’s pay the engineers a compliment – they don’t pretend that they are producing art. The ones who are pretending to do that are those, who protest loudly against art, and want to have their substitute art treated as art; they want to bother from them and then block the “market” with this usually diluted “pure reality” (which is then declared to be art after all).

Walther de Maria, Michael Heizer, Jan Dibbets, broaden our field of view to include that which we have failed to see with the Japanese. These superior processes of creating awareness are decisive points of orientation: Running alongside the engineer, we shall get lost without a chance of extracting ourselves from being enslaved to technology. There are refineries, there are aircraft motors! Do we want to make the priority of technical discoveries even more evident? Flavin’s neon tubes make us aware of the invention of neon tubes, but why so much modesty? Art is independent. The process of creating awareness for things that have already happened, above all of the technological developments that oppress us, is a thing all of its own. Its confusion with art is the great erroneous assessment. The passage of time will make this clear. 

André Breton wrote on the wall: “Elephants are infectious” so are consumption fetishists, engineers, arrangers! Let’s forget triviality, the makers, decorators, live lovelier. It’s time to fire the office partnership of art + advertising.