Bernard Schultze

(Piła 1915 - 2005 Köln)
Author: Hans Günter Golinski Bernard Schultze Bernard Schultze also experienced the artistic enculturation typical of his generation, passing through the stages of the late medieval and Romantic intellectual and pictorial world, which legitimised individual creative possibilities through the discovery of the pictorial art of children, the mentally ill and primitives and was shaped by the theory and methods of self-discovery of Surrealism. At the same time, he remained more strongly attached to Romantic thinking and feeling than other informal painters, which was defined primarily in terms of content. The Romantic painter narrates, names and describes moods; for the first time, visual art rests on an ideological foundation. For Schultze, Art Informel, with its thematisation of non-form or not-yet-form, of form in the process of becoming, opened up the possibility of painting not-yet-images and narratives in the process of becoming. How laboriously he freed himself from fully formulated pictorial themes is demonstrated by his detours in search of help, for example to Ensor and Brauner, Miró, Nay and above all Masson. His idea of having to discipline himself in terms of content and form can be seen in the academic-constructivist compositions of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ultimately, Schultze found the key to seemingly open pictures in the chaotic-looking painting of the Paris-based Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle: "This incredible brilliance, the nuance of the colours, painted completely freely and with vitality, that's what I thought it was. Before that I had been influenced a little by Ritschl, surrealistically by Egon Günther - representational surrealism for the reappraisal of the situation - but ... none of that satisfied me, I had to become free, I had to do something. And Riopelle was the start for me, and then it started ... that's when I began to paint informally." Significantly, he had his key painterly experience with an opposite pole of himself, with an anti-literary painter who 'only' painted. Bernard Schultze can be called an informal Romantic all the more because, unlike his companions, he does not allow himself to be influenced by the circulating ideas of a Zen aesthetic; the ideal of an infinite nothingness of the white canvas is contrasted with his horror vacui, characterised by old German painting. Schultze contrasts the meditative contemplation of the individual into a higher unity and harmony of all being, where all individuality is extinguished, with free and guided association, the densely woven web of ideas and feelings which - methodically utilised - draws the unconscious to light and serves self-discovery. "I start, association creates association ... I can't meditate, then I fall asleep." Through the layered painting of individual pictures, through overpainting, he creates a total 'psycho-physical organism', "the perfect constellation of things, of lines, of form, of colours. ... The succession of layers creates a very complicated system of overlaps. The associations of the painter and the viewer are multiplied, relics, overpainting, glazes, a myriad of nuances, in short, traces of manifold endeavours characterise a surface treated in this way. The picture becomes full-bodied, rich, can become precious, but without the intention of being so in the final result." Informal painting allows him infinite associations that take on metamorphic form and increasingly push out of his labyrinthine pictorial spaces into real space. Finally, from 1962 onwards, his fantasy Migof, a hybrid of painting and sculpture, detaches itself completely from the picture support and takes on a life of its own as an ambiguous colour sculpture.

Born on 31 May 1915 in Schneidemühl (today in Piła in Poland)

1934 Graduated from the Prinz-Heinrich-Gymnasium, Berlin

1934-1939 Studied at the College of Art Education in Berlin under Willy Jäckel and Hans Zimbal, studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Paul Bindel

1939 State examination at the Academy of Art Education, Berlin

1967 Art Prize of the City of Darmstadt

1969 Art Prize of the City of Cologne

1972 Elected a full member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin

1981 Titular professorship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia

1983 Wormland Art Prize, Munich

1984 Grand Hessian Culture Prize

1985 Society of Austrian Visual Artists - Künstlerhaus Vienna, awarded the Golden Laurel. Member of the Free Academy Mannheim

1986 Lovis Corinth Prize, East German Gallery Regensburg

1989 Awarded the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia

1990 Awarded the Stephan-Lochner Medal of the City of Cologne

1992 Resigns from the Academy of Arts, Berlin

2002 Binding Culture Prize

2005 died on 14 April in Cologne

Born in Schneidemühl in 1915, Bernard Schultze is one of the best-known representatives of German abstraction and was a co-founder of the Quadriga group of artists, which was to form the core of the later German Art Informel movement. Since the early 1950s, Schultze's work has centred on the themes of blossoming and decay. He combined influences of surrealist imagery with an impulsive brushstroke typical of Art Informel using an additive painting technique. Schultze paints his works in several different layers. As soon as something takes shape, it is "disturbed" by further overpainting; the "successful" forms the basis for the new, which changes and covers it. The viewer's eye remains in constant motion and is unsettled when trying to comprehend the perfect density of the composition. On a purely visual level, his works tell and describe nothing and thus deny the viewer access to the content of the picture.