The work of Herwig Schubert
Texts and commentary on the work of Herwig Schubert
Monograph accompanying the exhibition Herwig Schubert – Drawings and Gouaches, Städtische Galerie Albstadt, 1976
Man and Nature
Heinrich Geissler
Schubert’s pictorial world revolves around just a few themes: Female nudes and landscapes. … The nudes are always women, mostly alone, sometimes in pairs or groups – but even then they are isolated, with no connecting dialogue. They are usually sketched in energetic strokes that pay little mind to the harmony of line or recognition value of the images depicted. They appear to be more a release of oppressive mental images or records of his own inner states, than a representation of visual reality. Bundles and cascades of pencil or brush strokes, hacked up as if broken by blows, over-paintings and corrections that do not cover up, but reveal the previous form and thus the creative process. …, stark white highlights are applied as a dramatic contrast to the deep blacks of the ink. The media are laid down without hesitation, in a seemingly uncontrolled way: Lead and chalk, opaque paint and coloured pencils, as well as ink accents inserted with wooden sticks (as would otherwise be done with a reed pen) are used to achieve the desired expression. Strokes excited by swirls, like chiaroscuro conjured by lightning, and from the dramatic contrasts between the materials used and the more or less fully developed sections, the density of the image increases until it arrives at a state of suspension in which any further additions would only weaken the desired effect. The psychological gesture, wild and passionate, with a strong, at times almost baroque sense of pathos (because the body, in its softness and fullness, always plays a role), the immediacy of the personal and the confessional is an essential component of these representations. … despite all this spontaneity, a wealth of artistic experience is necessary and, in all this, acts as an unconscious controlling force.
Schubert’s working method is characteristic of his artistic intentions. When working on a sheet, he spreads out others that he considers unfinished on the floor around him so that he can continue working on them spontaneously, depending on his inspiration. The emphatic lines are often complemented by colour, light and darkness, which articulate the pictorial space. Despite his graphic expressiveness, Schubert remains essentially a painter. His sparing use of delicate veils of colour, which play across bodies or mountainsides in pastel shades, are of an almost saccharine beauty that seduces and transfigures. Only a master painter can achieve such powerful effects with so little effort. The melting veils of colour enhance the beauty and sensuality of the subjects depicted and, at the same time, the sadness that lies in the knowledge of their transience. … The experience of transience is, consciously or unconsciously, a powerful driving force behind his art. … Ultimately, it is always a symbol of human existence in all its grandeur and bitterness.
… on landscape paintings: Schubert consciously seeks life in all its danger, living it as a risk, because only then does it appear whole and essential to him. He is drawn time and again to powerful, untamed nature, to the sea or to northern regions, to Iceland, Greenland or the Canadian bush, where life can still be experienced at every turn in its devastating majesty, its almost unbearable grandeur. Afterwards, these impressions of the landscape give rise to large sheets created using various techniques … subsequent condensations of what he has seen. More than external details, it is the ‘sound’ of a landscape that is captured. In the Iceland pictures: The infinite vastness, the magnificent uniformity, mountain ranges captured in powerful waves. Lines that vanish into the distance, in an ever-changing rhythm. Loneliness and the overwhelming power of the absolute are also present here. The beauty of the visible in colourful shimmer. Soul image and reality in one. Thus, this second major theme in Schubert’s current work, reflecting his world view, connects with the first, the nude drawings. He himself probably never perceived it as a contradiction, for there is a depiction in which he places both side by side on one sheet: A colourful, shimmering, powerful mountain landscape and, next to it, on the free margin, a pensive figure of a girl, lost in thought, with almost tenderly supple features. One senses something in common – not only in the use of colour – and suspects that the depiction has become, albeit unconsciously, something of a personal symbol of existence for the artist. This is certainly a lofty statement! But Schubert’s art, with its combination of spontaneous gestures and contemplative experience, has a tone that – far removed from all fashionable trends – makes such enduring content palpable.
The Real Adventure
Margarita Jonietz
Herwig Schubert describes the painstaking and concentrated work on his landscape paintings as an adventure with countless detours. Far removed from topographical views and details, they convey a detachment from the objective world and the struggle to bridge the gap between external circumstances and one’s own inner experience. For Schubert, every day on the way to the painting means a new beginning, a new rethinking and reordering of experience in order to overcome this distance bourne by doubt.
The decisive factor in his imagery is the unsettled and unusual life that Schubert seeks in the solitude of deserted landscapes, spending months away from civilisation to experience nature as a powerful and unpredictable force. Travelling by canoe on rivers, mostly in northern regions (Canada, Alaska or Iceland), he collects impressions, which he records in his diary. Imbued with the experience of nature, the landscape begins to shape his inner state of mind on these journeys. These liminal situations are the inspiration for his painting, which begins its long process of approximation in the studio.
Schubert usually works on three or more images of a landscape adjacently in order to capture the numerous impressions and experiences one after the other, yet in context, on the substrates. The dialogue that arises between the individual images that make up these triptychs, with titles such as ‘Ketchika’ or ‘Fonterutoli’, influences each of them thus becomes the driving force behind the painting process.
Schubert requires recourse to visible objects in order to work through the dense plethora of emotions and memories they evoke. In the course of the creation of these paintings, which is often a lengthy process (taking up to two years), the content of the first representational version is relativised, while the inner attitude takes on essential significance. Thus, the ‘shadow’ can become more important than the object from which it originates. The act of pausing in front of the picture, looking at it from a distance and then up close, essentially determines the application of the numerous layers of egg tempera paint and the extremely precise reworking of each tiny detail in relation to the whole. The paint is applied so thickly that its consistency seems symbolic of nature itself. This makes it difficult for the viewer to find a fixed point in the picture. The form emerges only with difficulty from the densely painted surface before our eyes, only to disintegrate the next moment, while at the same time beginning to reform again.
In this way, Schubert succeeds in making the differing experiences of man in nature universally present through the ‘simultaneity’ of the image. The vastness and distance of a landscape and its physical proximity find their analogy in the pictorial structure, which is in a state of constant dissolution and reorganisation. What remains apparent here is that the process of formulating this connection between inner experience and outward-directed vision remains open. The painterly approach cannot completely bridge this gap, so that the images become places of examination and struggle. Herwig Schubert’s works are characterised by the vehemence and energy with which the artist is able to overcome this level of turmoil and tension. Frequent overpainting gives their surface an irregular, rough and scarred texture. The paintings, whose colours evoke earth, the landscape and the seasons, derive their power not least from their cracks and breaks, but above all from the painterly possibilities that the artist seeks to exploit to the full, so that they balance on the precipice between harmony and chaos, thus embodying painting as the real adventure.
That which makes an impression in and of itself and for its own sake
Reutlinger speech on Herwig Schubert (1991)*
Otto Breicha
Exhibitions serve to draw attention to an artist and showcase his work. Both purposes are fitting in the case of Herwig Schubert. He does not draw attention to himself and is therefore largely unknown. Because of this, he exhibits little. He does not necessarily reject the so-called art scene, but he does virtually nothing to ‘feature’ in it. His painting, as distinctive as it is, has its qualities elsewhere.
First (in appropriate brevity) a few words about the artist: Herwig Schubert was born in Salzburg in 1926. He studied in Darmstadt and Stuttgart, taught in Istanbul and Stuttgart, and in between this made a living as a freelance artist, illustrator and translator. He taught drawing and painting from the nude at the Stuttgart Academy. Now, at the end of his career in Stuttgart, he has settled in the Allgäu region, in a former farmhouse that is perfectly suited to his lifestyle and work: Secluded, as befits his nature, and surrounded by a landscape that appeals to him.
He takes a lot of time for his work (partly because he cannot do otherwise). He can at times spend years working on a picture before he is reasonably satisfied and ready to let it go. With no pressure from demand and no exhibition deadlines to worry about, his pieces emerge slowly but, all in all, with impressive consistency.
Herwig Schubert, who used to draw often (and well), has since concentrated on his painting (as circumstances have allowed him to do so). In his painting, he seeks to express what drives him and what he is capable of. A complex person who does not live lightly, he therefore does not paint light, care-free pictures, but rather complex, intricate ones. They are sophisticated in terms of their creation (not their essence). Their most striking features are their very distinct use of colour and their almost haptic quality.
For Herwig Schubert, painting is not about excited (and correspondingly exciting) behaviour. The painting he refers to and appreciates arises from colour and is based on this chromaticism. That is why he admires Monet (with whom he otherwise has little in common). Herwig Schubert does not need the landscape in order to extract images from it. He develops (and interweaves) what he sees and experiences on the painted surface into something that bears only a remote relation to the original visual stimulus. The initial impression is laboriously (and literally!) translated, changed many times and ‘redesigned’ to ultimately become something that makes an impression in its own right and for its own sake.
It is a form of painting that is thoroughly conceived and experienced as colour, whose essence is defined by colour. It would be wonderful (and in fact ideal) if this could be achieved in a single attempt. However, as a rule, the initial painting is repeatedly reworked and repainted, improved as far as possible. It is a true adventure that Herwig Schubert embarks on each time he paints, surprising himself and allowing himself to be surprised by what emerges, questioning what has been created, wondering whether it could perhaps be presented and depicted in a more concentrated and powerful way. Layer upon layer of paint is applied until the many coats of tempera form veritable mounds of colour (as might otherwise be the case after years of experimenting with colours on a palette). Thus, the unusually textured surfaces of these paintings have inevitably become what they are, not the creator’s original design intention, but something that emerged in the course of and throughout the development of these paintings: In any case, a testimony to what was ultimately (under glass and locked away from further access) deliberately laboriously and intricately brought into its form.
Herwig Schubert allows himself to paint in such a laborious manner, knowing that having the time and being able to take his time are essential prerequisites for his work. If it were any other way, his work would be different. But this is how it should be, because he regards the paths and detours that his painting takes as what really matters to him: A truly adventurous journey that demands his full attention and effort.
Lengthiness and complexity are characteristics (i.e. character traits), but that does not necessarily make them qualities that are always representative. In Herwig Schubert’s case, the situation is similar to that of Alberto Giacometti, who ‘struggled’ in a similar way on and with his figurative post-war work. As we know, he was dissatisfied with what he had achieved, and unbearably long portrait sessions were the norm (which was a nightmare for the models). The next day, he would destroy what he had modelled the night before; the figures were repeatedly reworked and shrunken, sometimes down to the size of a pinhead. For Giacometti, it was in rendering the true reality of the sculpted form that he failed again and again (and always in complicated ways). If he could manage just once, he insisted, to capture the bridge of the nose exactly as it really is, then perhaps he would also succeed in ‘realising’ a nostril, a lip, an eyebrow, even an eye.
If his figures had not been taken away from him in the course of his work on them (from his creative hands, so to speak) and cast in the meantime, there would hardly be any. His numerous drawings, sketches and studies were finger exercises striving towards this obsessively imagined, fervently sought-after reality of their appearance. The creative process is almost reciprocal: In Giacometti’s case, the reduction of bodies to stalagmite-like structures; in Schubert’s, the accumulation of coats of tempera and colour like layers of skin. Both are risky, obsessive and driven by a desire to improve, dealing with very specific difficulties and scruples, but it is precisely this that makes them interesting and fascinating.
In any case, it is a truly astonishing phenomenon that Giacometti’s complex, seismographically fragile style is so widely recognised, highly regarded and admired throughout the world. What applies in this case does not necessarily apply in all cases. In the case of Herwig Schubert, whose artistic work is based on and affected by similar circumstances, this should not prevent his pictures from attracting attention and making an impression when they are brought to public attention, which is certainly rare, but does occasionally happen (as in the present case).
As was initially the case with Giacometti in the 1950s, Herwig Schubert’s painting is very much an ‘art for artists’. His works are primarily recognised and appreciated by creative people or those who are at least close to the artistic world, who recognise their own creative difficulties in his work and admire the achievements in his solutions (which may not be true solutions, but are certainly exemplary in their exemplary nature).
It is (as with Giacometti) not art based on calculation, nothing that can be worked out and diligently brought about. Rather, it is (in both cases) a strenuous process of improvisation leading towards an undefined goal, which (as far as possible) is to be determined and fixed in the image. An art that emerges from the unconscious and (without knowing how) addresses the viewer’s subconscious; in both cases, it is not intellectual speculation or playfulness, but something that (being downright anti-intellectual, as it is) it is better not to talk to death, as I may have already done, in order to bring the pictures here on the walls closer to you.
*Reprinted with permission from Mag. Christa Breicha, Vienna
