Page 30 - Studio International - January 1965

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as a rhythm in the rhythm of Nature. Perhaps that is
one of the few ways in which he can be ·seen' today.
One finds a more direct attack but also more depen­
dence on the past in two young women painters. Sarah
Schumann showed in the early summer at the Galerie
Parnass in Wuppertal. Eila Hershon later at the Niepel
Gallery in Dusseldorf. They are complimentary oppo­
sites. Eila Hershon. the elder. is American born. Her
influences though are Beckmann and Kokoschka. both
of whom one finds in other young painters here just
now. She paints her nudes-couples. mothers and
children. sometimes a woman with a dog-with a
strange. deliberate clumsiness. The heavy limbs are
packed and folded yet they seem transparent. There is
an almost bull-like power in the forms which makes one
think a little of the mother-architypes of Henry Moore.
At present the strongest paintings are the big gouaches.
Sarah Schumann's influences go a little farther back.
to the world of Klimt and Redon. almost with a touch
of the Pre-Raphaelites. But they have traversed the
surreal atmosphere. At present the painter has only one
theme. an imaginery self-portrait. here double. there
plain. or again as a landscape-element. The heads seem
to develop less out of the painting process than to be
projections. slides of a vision so to speak. Yet the forms
are precise. the colour subtle and the irony deep. Like
Marie Laurencin. Sarah Schumann makes a statement
as a woman. We are still too neo-primitive in taste for
her work to be easily acceptable.
The attack is still more direct in the painting of Gerd
Richter. a painter of the youngest generation showing
at the Sch me la Gallery in Dusseldorf. Richter came over
from East Germany in order to paint as he pleased. At
first he tried the Tachiste mode. then all the fashion
here. Dependent on Fautrier and others as these paint­
ings are. they show his sensibility. Then he tried a
variant of Pop-Art. Fed up, one day he started to copy a
photograph. He has been doing so ever since. The
copies are practically exact. complete with caption.
though often with a certain blurring. as though the
image were passing at high speed. What startles is the
transformation. The banal press-photograph is curiously
transformed. A child looks like an embryo. Faces are
satirized more savagely than ever by George Grosz. A
little reproduction of the Sphinx out of a lexicon has
close affinities-quite likely without influence-to the
early Bacon work. Most of Richter's painting keeps to
black and white. Just recently he has gone in for
colour. Exact here. too. he gets the sickly. tinted colours
of the Sunday Supplements. the glare of travel posters.
The latest trend to have taken hold in Germany is the
tendency to ornament. By that I mean Hundertwasser
and Ouixart. figuration without the figure. a language of
esoteric signs. This was prefigured years ago by Rein­
hold Koehler. who exhibited at the municipal Haus
Seel in Siegen in September of last year. Koehler is a
lone wolf who in his forties lies between the generations
and has been ignored by both. But he invented the
technique of decal/age and used it as early as 1948. ten
years before the neo-dadaists in Paris. Apart from this.
his painting today is divided between the Space Fields
and Thorax Paintings. The first are areas decked with
hollow points. a little like the craters of the moon. In
fact. from a distance these do have a space-expansion
which almost amounts to optical illusion. The Thorax
paintings are Koehler's approach to the human figure.
The space experience is shallower and denser. more like
that surrounding sculpture. 'Acre· (Arthur Cremer). who
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