from FAZ.NET, 24, 2, 2011
He came, he revolutionized the art and disappeared
Now Eugen Schönebeck back: The painter was in the sixties with his friend Baselitz to enormous picturesque force. Then he just listened to - but Baselitz was a star.
From Swantje Karich
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who met him, must expect to get a new perspective on the story . Eugene Schönebeck silent for many years. His only major solo exhibition he had in 1992 in the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover. Whether he stayed away because of no interest for him or because he was so persistent, since opinions differ. Now he and his work are back.
He Runaway in a striking number of calls, from which he dreaded so far Sun The Frankfurt Schirn claimed for the "rediscovery", shows almost all the resulting images - some of it has destroyed itself - and forty drawings. Beck's work was beautiful but never forgotten, once seen, can not delete the images from the top hook, fixed to endure - especially because of the inconsistency. His paintings hang in major museums in Germany, although he only painted for ten years before he resigned in 1967 brush.
Eugene Schönebeck in January 2011
Eugene Schönebeck was removed in 1936 eighteen kilometers from Dresden, in Heidenau born. His parents were sympathetic to the Communists and acquiesced only reluctantly to the Nazis. In February 1945 he experienced the effects of the bombing of Dresden: "As a German soldier was lying on the highway, with a swollen belly, already half a mile away you could smell it."
His biography is available for a generation that lived through the Nazis, suffered in the war, and later to a better society through communism and hoped eventually more and more resigned. His gray hair combed back, he added, with a beard. His amber pendant, a large drop, dangling as protectively around his neck. "Detachment" says Eugene Schönebeck those career that made him become a man without corners and edges, a Buddhist without faith. Then he corrected himself, but then he got all without fear of death.
A Rose for Mao
but we look at his art and free ourselves from the legendary myth Schönebeck. Check us why he the most important artists of the twentieth Century, is one of the Figurative revolutionized. It is certain: He was the first to "the political icons as art, painted before Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol are far ahead of iconic paintings of" Mao ".
He a photo of the dictator in the "Spiegel" edition of 18 January 1965 and found it translated into monumental painting: The Communist leader is sitting there with a confident gaze, his elbow propped casually. Instead of a cigarette shoved Schönebeck him a rose between your fingers - do not knowingly red carnation.
For this picture he reveres. And indeed it is iconic, because it reflects on Schönebeck's enthusiasm for this man and communism, the attraction of heroic images, and yet an uneasiness in the world, the people shines through in the companies. The painter, it was never happening.
informal painting as an enemy
as "Mao" was created, was Eugen Schönebeck almost at the end of his creative life. Four phases he went through a whole: the abstract phase, the gestural, figurative but already, the phase of the inspired by Bacon Crucifixion images and the final phase in which he combined the radical aesthetics of Socialist Realism, with its obstinate portrait painting.
How it all began: first working Schönebeck timidly, but soon he does open at the informal painting, which has been a debate between the artist Karl Hofer and Will Grohmann at the College of Fine Arts in West Berlin - where Schönebeck of 1955 together with his friend Georg Baselitz studied - the dominant style rose. As an abstract painting, she was led to the figurative paintings of Socialist Realism in the field.
Every gesture he filled with history
in this mood will Schönebeck, now accessible in a duo with Baselitz, his own, his contemporary form. Ten years after a terrible war, he shows atrocities. Rotting body, without being brutal head suffer from acid in a brown color, the all-decomposed Positive. Schönebeck himself claims that come in the pictures no war memories to the fore.
But hell from which these beings have free? The distorted body of a hanged man, for example - the "dead man" hanging there in 1962, warning of a steadily more smelly, not to be brought to silence trauma. The story creeps in every gesture on the canvas. The inwardness of informal other hand, looks really escapist.
escapism and commitment both
Some pictures Beautiful Becks recall in design and color of Francis Bacon, the painter whose work in 1962 was seen at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. One is reminded of Gilles Deleuze and his text of Francis Bacon "logic of sensation," his thesis on the isolation of the figure in a visual space: Eugen Schönebeck shows (almost) always have a single body, which is isolated in an (almost) monochromatic room must say. A clear narrative is broken to release the essence, the direct action force of this nature can.
As a sculptor he worked with the color of his being tortured. The background is still breathing the gestural painting, but over time more clearly. flee to the painting is a way for him to intervene before the world and at the same time continue to be able to provoke, and, as Eugene Schönebeck says, meaning even to be provoked.
conciliatory tones
in 1962 is a crack through his life and his work. It is a picturesque and biographical. Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schoenebeck, which until then denied at the Academy of Fine Arts had everything in common, even formulated a joint manifesto, broke with each other - until now. Beautiful Beck says that the couple had agreed not to talk about the incidents. But now he announced in a gentle tone to a possible reconciliation.
Currently, the artist relies on a statement that is logged in the catalog is: "From anger that had broken their oath Schönebeck only to exhibit together, turned Georg Baselitz, who was studying at the university, away from him." The break was final. The two artists go their separate ways, Baselitz is an international star, and the beautiful pool paint is only five years.
Portraiture new type
His second phase started in 1963. After the painting "The Cross" created surreal, vivid images: suddenly rings out a hysterical laugh. In each subject is a cross found in T-shape, the figures as in a vise holds. In 1964 he painted his key work "The true man." Here, too, breaks through the scene, a cross torment, the man who articulated the end of humanity.
Schönebeck's "True Man" has for the first time a source of motives vorzuweisen - and thus a direct reference to communism, David Alfaro Siqueiros monumental murals at the University in Mexico City. The road is paved - to Mao, the Socialist realism that inspires him.
large format drawings, portraits of his hero, Mao, Yevtushenko, Trotsky, Mayakovsky or Ho Chi Minh testify to this in the catalog writes curator Pamela Kort: "The result was a novel, steeped in existentialist engagement portrait painting, which in the 21 Century has not yet found a successor. "
he would now like Gerhard Richter painting?
some point was raised by Schoenbeck even the desire to put away the easel and create murals. The Mexican Diego Rivera, he remembered it. But before that happens, listen to Schönebeck 1967th Just like that? He was no longer want to be painters, but artists. Survivor? Since one needs no work. What is your last picture? There are around at home with him still a lot of unfinished pictures, and he did not remember which was the very last, says Schönebeck. Today he could not paint Sun
a lack of inner conflict? He looks like a man who meditates a lot, he devoted himself actually of Indian philosophy, an elderly man with a slight uncertainty in connection with a pleasant childish. Inevitably, we inspected the late work of Gerhard Richter in the mind, wondering how Schönebeck would now draw well: so good?
not cover painting, Beautiful Beck wrote in 1961 in conjunction with Baselitz in his manifesto "pandemonium". It reveals his unique moral claim to art. Forty years later, his art is fundamentally detached from the person who stands here in front of a Schirn. Their work remains, however - and is reflected in a unique density of the postwar period, in West and East shows that the legacy of the past is far from being sufficiently worked.
Eugene Schönebeck in the sixties in his studio
Eugene Schönebeck . 1957 to 1967. In Frankfurt's Schirn to 15 May The catalog costs € 26.80
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