Franz Gertsch. The new seasons
12. September 2009 - 28. March 2010
Franz Gertsch (born 1930) paints the four seasons – the idea for this cycle of paintings developed when the painter came across the photograph of a piece of woodlands in the fall while going through his papers. The painting "Herbst" (Autumn) (2007/08) was modeled after this picture.
The perception of "Herbst," the first painting in the cycle of the seasons, is turned into an exciting visual experience in which the viewer’s active participation is called for. In order to see "Herbst" in focus as a sundrenched, autumnally shaded wooded landscape, the viewer must step back quite a bit. But the painting is also particularly fascinating when seen from close up; it becomes abstract and seemingly starts to flicker.
The painting "Sommer" (Summer) (2008/2009), which shines in powerful green hues, also holds a number of discoveries in store for the viewer. The painting appears flattish at first and the thicket of the leafy piece of woodlands seems impenetrable. But upon closer examination, one is pulled into the depths and the various zones unfold ever different and new nuances and impressions.
For Franz Gertsch, the portrayal of "Winter" (2009) meant the great challenge of painting snow for the first time. Trees, branches and twigs fashioned in finely shaded hues of brown traverse the work’s surface in a netlike manner. Several branches carry a layer of snow and the lower right corner appears entirely white at first. Seen from up close, the feeling of freshly fallen snow becomes almost tangible. Franz Gertsch has succeeded in structuring the white landscape by means of fine gradations of color, visualizing the delicate powdery characteristics of snow for the viewer.
Aside from the three seasons completed by then, "Herbst," "Sommer" and "Winter," the exhibition also features further paintings and woodcuts from the holdings of the stiftung willy michel as well as loans from the private collections of Dr. h.c. Willy Michel as well as of Franz Gertsch and Maria Gertsch-Meer. They include the imposing "Triptychon Schwarzwasser" (Schwarzwasser Triptych) (1991/92), which will be on show again after a long time.
Franz Gertsch. 1950 and 1960: Sketches and drawings relating to "Tristan Bärmann"
30. January 2010 - 28. March 2010
An exhibition curated by Rainer Michael Mason in the museum's cabinet with ball point pen sketches and pen and ink drawings relating to the artist book "Tristan Bärmann" (1962). The exhibition with loans from the private collection of Franz Gertsch and Maria Gertsch-Meer includes 46 works on paper and the artist book.
The selection of drawings by Franz Gertsch shown here encompasses two very different groups documenting the artistic approach of a young man, but his style—at the age of twenty and then at thirty—is still developing and pursues different objectives.
The small suite of quick sketches drawn with a blue ball point pen on the pages of a small pocket-sized sketchbook date from Franz Gertsch’s second stay in Paris when he, just released from the military, traveled to the Seine in the spring of 1950. With gentle and vibrating gestures of the wrist he recorded the summary indications of memory drawings. The first two sketchbook pages lead us to the two adult figures from Leonardo da Vinci’s renowned (and famously interpreted by Sigmund Freud) painting, “The Virgin and Child with St. Anne” (1508–1510) in the Louvre. After looking down a path past a tree, Franz Gertsch also outlined, perhaps somewhat surreptitiously but persistently—in the tree-lines park streets?—the silhouette of a Latvian girlfriend whom he invited to an outing to Fontainebleau (the Palace of Fontainebleau was built by King Francis I, the one-time owner of Leonardo’s oil painting now located in the Louvre).
A word must be said about the writing instrument employed by Gertsch, the ball point pen. We owe its technical development to László József Biró (1899–1985), an Argentinean from Hungary who applied for the patent in 1944: the British designation “biro” still refers to him. The first model was sold by the Reynolds Company in New York in October 1945. This pen was first marketed in France in the early nineteen fifties. The French patent for the “Bic Cristal” goes back to 1950. Franz Gertsch was therefore one of the very first artists to make use of the ball point pen.
The other suite of drawings, executed in pen and ink, can be dated to 1960. At that time, Franz Gertsch was preparing the prints for the last of his four artist’s books, “Tristan Bärmann,” which was printed in Burgdorf in 1962 (the first book, “This und Weit,” was published in September 1950).
Franz Gertsch worked on “Tristan Bärmann” while he was separating from his first wife. It is a fairy tale in twenty quarto format woodcuts with a narrative reminiscent of a venerable chronicle that the artist himself meticulously modeled after ancient Chinese literature (Franz Gertsch was then also reading the German Romantics). Because the image very naturally seemed “just as important as the text,” he made numerous preliminary studies. Those which were to be cut in wood are marked in the exhibition with a black pointer.
These “briskly drawn” works unfold intense features and distinctive black strokes that simultaneously recall from afar the Chinese paintings with which Franz Gertsch regularly occupied himself. They feature a type of expressionism, if not even a somewhat wild coarseness which is somewhat surprising, even though the artist was unfamiliar with German expressionist prints at that time. Transferred to pear wood, these drawings would experience a permutation and refinement to a certain extent while being cut. “You cannot cut a line,” people told Franz Gertsch at that time who then pointed to the linear woodcuts of Aristide Maillol’s “Daphnis et Chloé” (1937).
The portrayals address all sorts of occurrences: a thatched-roof house between trees, encounters at the fountain and around the table, seascapes, the inner worlds of the library and going to sleep, the affectionate embraces of a couple and, naturally, the appearance of the bear…
(text: Rainer Michael Mason)
