Page 30 - Studio International - May 1965

� A German Surrealist

1 by Hanns Theodor Flemming

Born in 1900. the German surrealist painter Richard
Oelze has. unjustly, up to now remained comparatively
unknown. Only recently, in the Kestner-Gesellschaft in
Hanover. subsequently in Braunschweig, Stuttgart,
Dusseldorf and Heidelberg. a wide-ranging retro­
spective brought the significant life-work of this
reticent artist convincingly home to the general public.
Oelze is a Surrealist with a note all his own. whose work
is distinguished by a high degree of pictorial imagina­
tion and painterly quality.
Why did Oelze have to pass his sixtieth birthday before
engaging closer attention Certainly the reason is to be
the
to
prevailing tastes. but has pursued his own imperturbable
belongs th between
fo epoch-makin trail­
blazers and whose recognition was early blocked by the
that
tim h c Paris. he
made contact and th Surrealists with
whom the se pictures
(Erwartung-Forebo 1935/36)
found their way into the New Yo Museum Modern
after he bee States
the Dada.
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t by devious
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Tourments
those

Surrealism.
One of the most fascinating of the early works is the
already mentioned Foreboding in the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. It is a banal scene-a group
of very conventionally dressed people. with hats and
raincoats. is standing in back view before an empty
landscape under a lowering sky-and yet, it is pregnant
with a mysterious. uncanny tension. No gesture. no
outward event gives rise to this tension: it derives
purely and simply from a magic of the void. which seizes
the beholder by the throat Samuel Beckett is anticipated
here: the waiting, the inexplicable fear. The picture
is at the same time a metaphor of the situation at that
time. when murderers had seized the helm of power.
Oelze has painted all that in the idiom of a magical
realism. with the most scrupulous exactitude. deliber­
ately keeping to the banal. Not least there is. too. a
self-depicting tendency in the anonymous figures.
something of the character of this shy recluse.
After 1945. Oelze began afresh. now in the seclusion
of Worpswede. an artist's village, famous at the turn
of the century. in the vicinity of Bremen. Since 1962 he
has been living in Posteholz. a little place in the Weser
Hills. likewise sequestered and isolated. Now, over
and over again. he will paint rock formations. figure
groups, interpenetrating each other in anthropo­
morphic landscapes. His dispersed. somnabulistic
1
Self Portrait 1937 figures and medusa-like. proliferating vegetations are
Pencil drawing bathed in pallid. brown-gold. sea-green. grey or
2 sweetish-pink tinted shades. which are thinly applied
Oracle 1955
in glossy colours that sometimes opalesce transparently.
3 From their darkly simmering or light bubbling forms
Vegetative 1958
Kunsthalle. Hamburg ghost-like heads emerge. breasts. or eyes which stare
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