Page 30 - Studio International - February 1966

Rupprecht Geiger : the making of a personal art

by John Anthony Thwaites

There are artists, sometimes great ones, whose whole
life takes place inside their art. The personal and
biographical are not important. With others, all the
things they make come out of their experience and
then transmute and transcend it. For these, almost
every detail of their personal lives has a connexion
with their later work.
This is the case of the Bavarian Rupprecht Geiger; and
because of it he has suffered misunderstanding inside
Germany and general indifference outside (Sir Herbert
Read has been the one exception). Geiger uses quasi-
geometric forms. That makes him some kind of Con-
structivist. Yet his colour does not 'stay in the plane'.
He even uses 'naturalistic' space. That makes him in-
consistent, an eclectic, a provincial. So it comes about
that only at the age of fifty-seven has he had his first
retrospective show, at the Wuppertal Museum, and
taken his first teaching post, in Düsseldorf.
Yet in reality the whole analysis was false from the
start. The influences which Geiger has built upon do
not come out of art. They derive from four landscapes,
from his studies as an architect, and from his intuition
of the WeltbiId of our period. These things have made
him into the most personal and powerful of painters
now active in Germany, as well as the least-understood.
Geiger was born in Munich. He spent the summers of
his childhood in the Alpine foothills of Upper Bavaria.
Trauben (Grapes) 1947 Photo: Manfred Tischer It is a landscape virtually without perspective. Mountain
Gouache masses stand up flatly, like a pack of cards. One feels
19 5/8 x 22 1/8 in.
space which one does not see and cannot measure.
Here, anchored fast in his subconscious memory, is
Abstracte Traumlandschaft the picture-space which Geiger has today. When he
(Abstract dream landscape) 1948
Gouache was sixteen, he went with his father, Willi Geiger, to
13 3/8 x 19 5/8 in. Photo: Manfred Tischer Spain for a year. (His father's bullfight etchings were
famous at the time.) They travelled through Spain,
the Canaries, and Morocco, then torn by the Rif war.
Rupprecht drew and sketched in watercolours. The
best works are those of buildings in the landscape, or
interiors; in any case of architectural space. There are
colour-combinations, warm and cold, not very different
from those of his mature work. In Munich two years
later he began his studies as an architect. On trips to
France and Italy he drew and measured buildings of the
early Renaissance. The geometric forms of walls and
windows, like the blocks of shut-in space, were to
return transmuted after twenty years.
From eighteen to thirty Rupprecht Geiger did not
paint, except for watercolours done on holidays. He
qualified professionally four years before the war.
Save for two trips to Paris, the Nazi dictatorship cut
him off from contemporary art. In 1940 he was mob-
ilized, and soon found himself at Wyasma, a rail-head
in the Moscow region. There he stayed until 1942. Con-
ditions for German wounded, Russian prisoners, and
the peasantry were indescribable. Geiger was isolated
there. He saved himself from a breakdown by sitting at
his window towards dusk and again making water-
colours. Long stretches of a dull-green earth and
brownish sky, two sheets of colour, with men and
houses crushed between the two. The loneliness, the
vast extent, even the sense of being beyond life and
death are tangible. One of these little pictures which