Page 44 - Studio International - February 1966

A noteworthy outsider is Horst Janssen (born 1929
in Hamburg), whose drawings and graphic work are
in a travelling exhibition which started at the Kestner-
Gesellschaft in Hanover and will visit Hamburg,
Düsseldorf, Darmstadt, Stuttgart, Berlin and Lübeck
during 1966.
There is a macabre poetry running through Janssen's
works : it results as much from individual content as
from the pictorial means employed. Fine-spun yarn and
silken darknesses alternate and intermingle; rents and
abysses, skeletal or contorted figures step—delicate as
tracery—towards the pale light where space and surface
appear anti-poised (see the etching Susi of 1958).
Janssen does not draw back from a close delineation
of the limits of human experience; above all, he never
hesitates to show forth those aspects scarcely
accessible to verbal description—the ultimate sexual
and erotic situations of man. His works are con-
temporary Fleurs du Mal. The underlying reality is
reality, one can trace its features; yet it appears in a
truly aesthetic form, the magical transformation of
graphic vision. At times, one would think that Art
Nouveau and pre-expressionism had entered by some
artistic back-door: Beardsley, Alastair, Klinger, Schiele
and Klimt are suddenly present to our eyes—but
changed, and granted a new artistic dimension. Their
unrealized possibilities have been recognized and
revealed in opposition to a now-tired formalism, which
nevertheless still rules the 'official' art-scene.
Like Picasso, Janssen has never been afraid to para-
phrase shapes or themes of the Old Masters. Ensor's
Entry into Hamburg, Klee and Ensor bickering over a
Kipper, An Afternoon with Max Klinger—the titles
accompany corresponding echoes. But these are not
just steps made into the fastnesses of the past; they
form the raw material, the initial moment of something
entirely new, which always bears the unmistakable
signature of Horst Janssen. Life itself, lived and suffered
in its force and anguish, forms the texture of the work.
In connection with the Janssen exhibition, the
Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover, leading place for 'first
exhibitions' of new art in Germany, is giving this
February a retrospective of the work of Bernhard
Schultze (born 191 5) ; this show will then go on to
Leverkusen and Karlsruhe.
Bernhard Schultze has provided the most original
Horst Janssen
German contribution to contemporary art. In New
Susi 1958
Etching York, in November—December 1965, an exhibition of
23 5/8 x 15 3/4 in.
his new migofs at the Howard Wise Gallery—for which
Kestner-Gesellschaft. Hanover
Peter Selz wrote the catalogue introduction—aroused
considerable interest. Bernhard Schultze has taken a
conception of the independent validity of colour to its
most radical conclusion. In his works colour becomes
fluid energy, solidifying as craters and lakes of colour,
becoming increasingly distinct from the surface of the
picture, only to release itself finally from the pictorial
background in those works sculpted spatially from
colour, which Schultze has been producing since 1960
and which he calls migofs. One critic has said that they
make him feel as if the painting had got down from the
canvas and suddenly frozen in the middle of the gallery
in a series of bizarre shapes. Although this is an