With the Eyes of a Child
In their
anarchic attack on social and artistic conventions, painters have been
seeking to give expression to their need for immediacy and genuineness
since the avant-garde. The notion that the childlike in art is a
possibility for the creative process to penetrate into regions of the
personality that remain inaccessible to others carries through to the
present day. Ulrich Clewing describes the childlike strategies of
this urge.
Laura Owens, Untitled, 1999
Deutsche
Bank Collection,, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
This is how a child might paint: the lines of the check pattern in the
background form an irregular scribble in colored pencil, while the bright
green and yellow spots on top seem randomly distributed, like leaves
drifting over the paper’s surface. In reality, however, the American
artist
Laura Owens was 29 years old when she painted this watercolor in 1999. "I
always thought it was better to adjust the picture to everyday reality
than to adjust the everyday to the picture," she said in an interview with
Artforum the same year. Now, Owens counts among the most prominent
representatives of present-day American painting. While many of her
contemporaries struggle with the heroism and achievements of past
generations, the paintings of the Los Angeles-based painter are filled
with an almost magical lightness. Owens employs a variety of sources
ranging from Modernist masters like
Henri Rousseau or
Toulouse-Lautrec to
Abstract Expressionism and
Op Art. At the same time, her work is inspired by wallpaper, decorative
patterns, comics, children’s books, and traditional Japanese art.
|
Laura Owens, Untited , 2001
Courtesy of Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York
|
The naive grace of the gentle forest animals that populate
her landscapes might be misleading in regards to their art historical
references. Yet a closer look makes it clear just how expertly her work
shifts between abstraction and figuration. Owens is mainly interested in
formal aspects such as the application of paint, perspectives, surface,
the relationship between the painting and its environment. The playful
connection between apparently childish or "primitive" gestures, conceptual
concerns, and skilled technique serves Owens as a strategy to reflect upon
the history of painting and to test its borders.
Erich Heckel, Stehendes Kind - Fränzi, 1910
Deutsche Bank Collection
|
|
Paul Klee, Seiltänzer, 1923
Deutsche Bank Collection
|
And she is in good company with her strategy of the
childlike. A look back over the art of the past hundred years shows that
the childlike was also a main reference point for the avant-garde. The
painters of the Dresden
Brücke group, the
Dadaists, Surrealists,
Bauhaus artists like
Paul Klee – these and countless other artists belong to the broad movement
that left its mark on 20th-century art like no other.
Pablo Picasso, one of its chief advocates, once described an exhibition of
children’s drawings in the following words: "When I was that age, I was
able to paint like Raphael. But it took me my whole life to paint like a
child."
At the beginning of the 20th century, a broad
opposition grew among artists all across Europe that was directed against
the academies and its members, which were seen as rigid, bloodless, and
flaccid. This initially expressed itself in secessions from the older
artists’ organizations and unions, later in an increasingly intricate
patchwork of artists’ groups that were often not only in agreement in
terms of their art historical ideas, but in their world views, as well.
A painter like Erich
Heckel did not paint his figures and landscapes in such a coarse and
seemingly childlike way because he was incapable of doing otherwise, but
because it enabled him to express what he and his artist friends
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
Fritz Bleyl, and
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff had formulated in 1906 as their program while
announcing their exhibition at the Seifert Lamp Factory in Dresden: "With
a belief in development and in a new generation of creators and
connoisseurs, we hereby call today’s youth together; we, as the youth that
shall carry the future, want to bring about a freedom in life and action
in opposition to the well-established older powers. Anyone who gives
direct and pure expression to whatever moves him to create counts among
us."
Kurt Schwitters, Contramerk, 1923
Deutsche Bank Collection
These were
the words the Brücke painters chose to formulate the prototype
of an artists’ manifesto that would prove quite similar to what many
artists’ groups after them would have signed their names to, as well.
Freedom in visualization, the rejection of the old and traditional, the
self-satisfied, combined with the right to participation and to being
heard, in short: the future – these are the motivations and postulates
artists often voiced throughout the 20th century. Yet the most important
point in the Bücke Manifesto is the urge to give in to inner
impulses and to translate them "directly and purely" into a work of art.
|
Heinrich Hoerle, Begegnung, 1925 ,
Deutsche Bank Collection
|
[1]
[2]
[3]
|
