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“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” wrote W.B. Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming” (1919). Rough, slouching beasts certainly came to mind upon entering Eugen Schönebeck’s recent exhibition. Horrific homunculi uneasily lurked through a diverse selection of drawings and two intense paintings.
This wide range of work, done between 1957 and 1966, was an amuse-bouche from a complex career. Yet, these nine years are the entire span of that career. Schönebeck, 77, still living in Berlin, simply stopped making art at age 30, just on the verge of commercial and critical success.
The two medium-size paintings stood out in the sea of small ink drawings. Toter Mann (Dead Man, 1962) and Ginster (Broom, 1963) are composed of small brushstrokes that thicken the surface in layer upon layer of obliteration and doubt: tantalizing hints at an invisible narrative process. In drawings done as a student, we can see Schöne- beck developing his form, from pleasant landscape-based pen marks to abstract fields—edgier riffs on Tachisme, the then-popular European version of Ab-Ex.
With its Pepto-Bismol pink field, Ginster features a one-armed creature, with a sagging ruby-nippled breast, appearing to smoke a doobie or to extract a booger from its nose. Sitting on a dark form on a floor the color of dried blood, this frogfaced figure churlishly smiles atop a pile of legs that may or may not be its own.
Recognized in Germany for his historical early col- laborations with Georg Baselitz (examples of which were on view), Schönebeck arguably did his strongest work after their joint efforts ended in ’62, with paintings, such as the two in the show, that forced confrontation with repressed postwar feelings. His influence can be seen in the work of artists such as Martin Kippenberger, and the most recent drawing at Nolan, a portrait of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, seems to presage later Lucian Freud drawings.
The color palette and continuous metamorphosis of paint into ambiguous forms recalls Philip Guston’s late paintings, which had a parallel evolution. Guston, 30 years older, started his transformation at about the time Schönebeck, soon after developing a cleaner, photo-based, social-realist style, had ended his career.
So why did he stop? The official explanation is that he lost faith in the easel paintings that people were finally willing to buy. But the mural commissions that he hoped would allow him to create a socially engaged public art like his role model and portrait subject, Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, were not forthcoming. Unwilling to move back to a more sympathetic Communist East, he ended his art career.
This seems rather mystifying. But perhaps other issues were at play. Only nine when Dresden, a few miles from his home, was firebombed and his family displaced, young Schönebeck grew up in the rubble, chaos and death stench of a defeated Germany. Try then to imagine the satisfaction of coaxing form out of chaos for a young German painter in late ’50s Germany. Even if the forms were grisly and abject, it was willed, real and emotionally honest.
Working from photographic sources granted Schönebeck new creative freedom and allowed him to avoid the painful uncertainty and self-doubt inherent in a process that begins with abstract randomness. Estranged from this creative existential fuel, and lacking the maturity to overcome a setback, it’s plausible that the young artist simply lost contact with his motivation to paint.
—Dennis Kardon
In 1966, at the age of 30, German artist Eugen Schönebeck stopped making art. Little known in the United States, despite his postwar prominence in Germany, he has spent the last 46 years “simply living his life,” says the Berlin-based curator of the intriguing show, Pamela Kort.
Born in Dresden, Schönebeck attended art school in West Berlin in 1955. After a brush with art informel during a 1956 visit to Paris, he adopted the urgent, dash-and-stroke method of French tachism, and the show’s abstract black-and-white drawings from this period are dizzyingly wild. Rendered in tusche and pencil, they display a masterful command of space and composition—notwithstanding their apparent spontaneity—and possess the gestural energy of Fauvism, though without its vibrant color. From their turbulent surfaces emerge harmonious constructions that conjure landscape, architecture, and even written language.
The mostly untitled words on paper from 1960 onward are darker and seethe with the traumatic inheritance of World War II. Tangles of gnarled black lines writhe around tumescent masses; in 1961, the tortured forms begin to uncoil into figuration, all etched in frenetic crosshatches. In compositions such as Hanged Man (1962), the artist introduces deformed figures with faceless heads on thick necks and bulbous proptrusions in place of severed libs. The look is familiar, recalling the grotesque style of Georg Baselitz, who was in fact Schönebeck’s friend and collaborator.
All of Schönebeck’s work, much of it never seen outside Germany, is infused with melancholy. Channeling his bleak view of humanity, these rare drawings and paintings—with their fraught, sinewy lines and sickly palettes of pink and green—capture the spirit of the artist in a spasm of sublimation, engaging childhood traumas and fears at the most volatile, and potentially fecund, point.
In our politically divided country slowly recovering from a costly war, it is unsurprising that inward-facing abstraction has become the language of choice for many artists wanting to escape their circumstance. In 1961, two fledgling art school graduates named Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck were in a similar situation when they decided to countermand the German art establishment by publishing their Pandämonium manifestos (two rambling, poetic diatribes on the state of German art), while their brash figurative paintings and drawings became some of the first to reference the bitter realities of postwar Germany. Baselitz matriculated to international art-world success, while Schönebeck, torn between the art market (with its perennial excesses) and his growing concern for the political climate, abandoned artmaking altogether in 1967. His thirty-one works in this stunning exhibition reveal an artist with an exceptional ability to digest and disseminate influence, primarily through the humble sketching technique of hatching.
Baum (Tree), 1957, gives us a glimpse of a precocious twenty-one-year-old enraptured by the transcendental markmaking of Vincent van Gogh and Henri Michaux. Postmanifesto, Schönebeck confidently moved into a signature style that blended the angst of German Expressionism and the automatism of Surrealism. Ginster (Broom), 1963, one of the two paintings in this show, emits a shocking rawness through fleshy color and gruesome deformity, rivaling even the more carnal Francis Bacon paintings. Hints of stumped appendages and decaying tissue powerfully reify Germany’s loss during and after the Great War.
Schönebeck’s final works meditate on the heroic aesthetic of Marxism through a technique of layered cross-hatching, as in his deftly rendered portrait Majakowski, 1966. Perhaps Schönebeck’s new focus on social realism forced him to question art’s ultimate function in a country undergoing political unrest, triggering his premature retirement. Whatever the case, we are fortunate that this artist was able to find his voice, even for such a brief moment in time.
Among several strong shows in Chelsea, including Carolanna Parlato at Elizabeth Harris and Katherine Taylor at Skoto Gallery, David Nolan has mounted one of the best of them, with an historical exhibition of the greatest post-war German artist you’ve never heard of.
Coming from the Communist East, moving to the West, and struggling to find a voice outside of Cold War ideology, Eugen Schönebeck in many ways mirrored Georg Baselitz, his now better-known contemporary. Yet unlike Baselitz, Schönebeck never found a middle ground between the misplaced idealism of the East and the demands of the West. By 1967, his non-conformism caught up with him. He gave up art altogether.
This show—Schönebeck’s first solo exhibition in the United States—testifies to the abilities of an artist who channeled the spirit of the age into macabre paintings and drawings of singular dexterity and imagination. Abandoning the Soviet Realism of the East, Schönebeck first worked through Tachisme, Western Europe’s cooler answer to American Abstract Expressionism. In the early 1960s, these drips and drabs coalesced into nightmarish figures. He aimed “to let a certain tenor rise to the surface . . . a consciousness of crisis, pervasive sadness, gruesomeness, and even perverseness—that I found missing in the work of my colleagues.” With Baselitz, his fellow student, he wrote a pair of stream-of-consciousness manifestos called “Pandemonium” seeking to “point the way unerringly to the true meaning of freedom. / Flowers in the undergrowth. / The crematorium.”
Curated by Pamela Kort, the Nolan show follows this trajectory and focuses on the grotesque figure drawings of 1962 and 1963. The show is less than a survey. There is only one example, Mayakovsky (1966), from his late series of deadpan portraits dedicated (ironically?) to the icons of socialism. Schönebeck’s political evolution therefore remains unexamined, as do his reasons for leaving the world of art. Still, the dyspeptic mood he enunciated remains as current today as it did in the 1960s. One cannot but hope that this visionary, now living in Berlin, may once again put pen to paper and brush to canvas.
by Thomas Micchelli
In 1961, two scrappy young artists decided to stage their first show together. One of them was Georg Baselitz, who would later become a mainstay of Neo-Expressionism’s German flank; the other was Eugen Schönebeck, who would stop painting by the time he was thirty.
The show was held in a condemned building in Berlin, and in keeping with the well-establishedenfant terrible tradition, the two artists produced a manifesto — the enviably titled First Pandemonium (Manifesto) — as a 52 x 39-inch lithograph.
From a translation provided by the David Nolan Gallery, where the manifesto is part of a superb exhibition of Schönebeck’s work, it’s immediately evident that the writing is your standard apocalyptic fare, especially Baselitz’s section (“spots of shadow, drops of wax, parades of epileptics, orchestrations of the flatulent, warty, mushy, and jellyfish beings, bodily members, braided erectile tissue, moldy dough”).
The hyperbolic tone of the artists’ screed is not unexpected, written as it was in a destroyed and divided city sixteen years after the fall of Hitler. But even in its condemnation of “the amiable” who proceed “by art-historical accretion” and its rejection of “those who can’t wrap art up in a smell” (Baselitz again), the differences between the two artists are already apparent.
While Schönebeck shares Baselitz’s disdain for the status quo and taste for fatal syntactical collisions (“Painting was — is a formic raster putrid subjective general. Tendentious.”), in general he takes a more reserved and philosophical tone, one that sees a glimmer of light limning the black horizon:
"[…] the gift of unlimited exuberance can make possible the leap out of the routine track of the well-known and, with the instantaneousness of light, point the way unerringly to the true meaning of freedom. / Flowers in the undergrowth / The creatorium"
Which makes it all the more ironic that Baselitz, who became famous twenty years later for exhibiting his splashily expressionistic figurative paintings upside-down, would continue along a career path to international stardom while Schönebeck would cease to make art after 1966.
The duo produced a second Pandemonium Manifesto the following year. It is even longer than the first, and more fevered; Baselitz’s part (which ends with the pithy “All writing is crap”) is less readable than the first effort, while Schönebeck’s (which ends similarly but enigmatically, “Words are prick piglets”) is far more coherent.
Titled “Fragments for a Pandemonium,” Schönebeck’s text exhorts the reader to “Pandemonize!” while heaping scorn on the artist’s peers, carrying forward the flatulence motif introduced by Baselitz in Pandemonium I:
"My colleagues are introverted and extroverted Rubensians. I have to counter my colleagues with wealth; I have to do the imaginative. My colleagues consist of natural flatulence. They love the wild and they love it unconsciously — the way flayers have to gnaw their victims with their lips until they rub off."
Such youthful, self-consciously flamboyant pronouncements would be ultimately tangential if not for the gnarly graphic invention coursing through the two lithographs. Hung one above the other in the dead center of the gallery’s longest wall, their head-banging, high-contrast image-and-text mash-ups, even without benefit of a translation, immediately grab you by the eyelids.
All but one of the works in the show were made between 1957 and 1963. The exception is a 1966 portrait of the doomed Soviet poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, who shot himself in 1930 at the age of 36. Granite-hard and forbidding, the graphite-on-paper head, which measures 38 ¼ x 28 ¾ inches, is among the last of Schönebeck’s works.
These final pieces were overtly political if not propagandistic, in which the artist (as described in the gallery press release):
"[…] not only scrutinized the character and behavior of revolutionaries such as Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao, but also the aesthetic strategies of such Mexican mural painters as David Alfaro Siquieros. These likenesses and the few large-scale drawings that followed attest to Schönebeck’s struggle to find a middle way between art made for the capitalist market and work harnessed to political ends."
The struggle to reconcile these competing interests eventually became Schönebeck’s undoing as an artist:
"Disinclined to turn his back on either of these aesthetic traditions and unwilling to compromise the moralistic edge of his art, Schönebeck decided in 1967 to stop painting and withdrew from the art world."
In Schönebeck’s decision we may hear echoes of Marcel Duchamp’s abandonment of art in favor of playing chess (though he spent years secretly working on the fetishistic installation, “Étant donnés,” now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art). But an unwillingness “to compromise the moralistic edge of his art” is hardly in the Duchamp mold. It is a decision with which Schönebeck, who lives in Berlin and has continued to show the work he made during his brief career, is apparently at peace.
The drawings and paintings at Nolan are ample evidence of why Schönebeck’s work persists. The drawings are especially trenchant, many of which are executed in tusche, the greasy ink used in lithography, from which the artist wrings an exquisitely realized tonal range of warm grays and blacks.
His works from the 1950s vary wildly, from a swirling abstraction to a landscape rendered in matchstick-like brushstrokes to what appears to be a page of automatic writing. Tangles of lines fill two drawings from 1960 and ’61 in what could be combinations of abstraction, landscape and automatism, or they could be in utero depictions of the beasty humanoids that were soon to spring into his work.
In the scheme of the exhibition, which is arranged more or less chronologically, Schönebeck’s monsters appear immediately to the left of the Pandemonium lithos, as if unleashed by the manifesto’s channeling of artist’s id.
These chunks of bone, meat and hair look exhumed from Otto Dix’s grave. The earthbound repulsiveness of their misbegotten forms is as stark and startling as the otherworldly beauty of the lines and washes that conjured them.
Mostly the size of a sheet of typing paper, the drawings are mini-marvels of the graphic genius of German modernism. And given Germany’s hallowed tradition of the graphic arts, as well as Schönebeck’s self-evident originality this arena, it is puzzling that he didn’t follow the example of Dix, George Grosz, John Heartfield and Max Beckmann and turn to multiples, books and magazines as an outlet.
It would seem to be the logical path for a radical left-winger to take, rather than give up altogether once his ideals failed to mesh with the market’s demand for unique, high-end objects.
Perhaps he saw all of art-making as part of the same stew. And perhaps that is something we can identify with in our post-Zuccotti, post-Sotheby’s moment.
Or maybe, from the evidence of the manifestos and the infernally intense work on display, he simply flamed out early and refused to carry on by repeating himself for the sake of cash and career.
A decision like that can be viewed as artistic suicide or spiritual salvation, but either way it is pure speculation. Still, one look at these drawings will tell you that Schönebeck was playing for keeps.
Eugen Schönebeck Paintings and Drawings: 1957–1966 continues at the David Nolan Gallery (527 West 29th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through November 3.
“Sausage clouds” were the first words out of my mouth—to the apparent dismay of the artist whose drawing I was looking at. I couldn’t help myself. That’s what they look like. Which is unsurprising given that I was in the world’s wurst capital—home of bratwurst, bierwurst, bockwurst, blutwurst, and braunschweiger, to mention only the Bs—and given that I had had two of the five mentioned above for lunch, plus knackwurst, several types of mustard, and potato salad. Beyond all that, clouds were also on my mind because the artist and I had just been discussing the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose likeness he had painted and drawn.
I once heard Yevtushenko recite Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Socialist-Surrealist ode “A Cloud in Trousers” (1915) at a dinner party at Irving and Lucy Sandler’s that was also attended by Elizabeth Murray and Bob Holman. Holman too recited Mayakovsky’s poem. Yevtushenko declaimed it in the small NYU apartment as if he were addressing a thronged Soviet stadium, which, of course, he had done countless times. His delivery was correspondingly stirring but emotionally abstract. Up close but impersonal, one might call it. Holman spoke Mayakovsky’s lines like a guy on the street, with an ear for the syncopated rhythms of everyday speech, rendering the poem intimate in ways I’d never before thought possible.
The painter, who’d twice drawn Mayakovsky’s likeness and painted it once, managed to do the same thing with line and color and form, taking well-known photographic images and rendering them palpable and affecting because his stroke was so, like the obsessive hatching of someone doodling while others chatter and argue. I wonder if the artist—his name is Eugen Schönebeck—would like Elizabeth Murray’s paintings and drawings. I think he would. After all, they too make the most of an occasionally awkward but always engaging touch, of the sense that drawing is indeed feeling one’s way over and into an image.
Now I must confess that the sausage clouds that caught my attention and prompted my spontaneous analogy were not exactly clouds in the first place. They were pneumatic lozenges of smoke, stretching laterally from two chimneys like inflatable pennants or an airfield’s wind sock in a steady breeze blowing across a humble village over which chimneys rise. Those lozenges remind me of the cigarette smoke in Claes Oldenburg’s metamorphic caprices which, by way of his shared affinity for Walt Disney, bring me back once again to Murray. However, Schönebeck’s inflated forms are gritty and nervous in ways that neither Oldenburg’s nor Murray’s are and, by the same token, they distance themselves from Pop cartooning’s double-edged—cute and cutting—arabesques.
True, the figure to the right of the chimneys has a doll-like head; however, it isn’t really a figure but is instead one of two crucifixes in the composition. The other hovers in the middle of the scene near the horizon line, and the doll’s head uncomfortably suggests the impaled head of a decapitated child. So we’re not in Kansas anymore, nor in California or New York. We’re somewhere at the edge of town in Mittel Europa, in a place where the boy-protagonist of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird (1965) might be right at home, inasmuch as anyone is at home in a nightmare.
Schönebeck is clearly at home in this drawing; he seems to know every nook and cranny of the buildings and terrain before his pencil gets to them. We learn this from the tenderness with which he accounts for details large and small in blunt, gray annotations—from the contours of small factories in the background and the bridge in the foreground to the uncanny balloon of foliage that swells behind the crucifix. But since the artist offers no explanation for that ambiguous religious symbol or what billows back of it, the foreboding that imbues this weird provincial vignette is mostly projection, mostly a habit of mind acquired after years of reading about the terrible things that once occurred in the obscure corners of a Germany whose friendly folkish face was a mask for horror.
Schönebeck provides no evidence of actual torture, no references to the Holocaust; the ubiquitous crucifixions of “Christendom” refer to suffering and, in the Medieval German tradition, often depict it with excruciating precision, but they remain archetypes. It is as archetypes that they function in Schönebeck’s image—but with a twist. For nothing is so disconcerting as turning Christ in agony into a Christ child-as-assemblage, or transforming Golgotha into a roadside shrine on the way out of one tiny berg and on to the next. German Expressionism is often spoken of as if it had only one hysterical register. Schönebeck’s way with graphite demonstrates that it has minor modes as well—with major resonances.