Bernard Schultze

(Piła 1915 - 2005 Köln)
Author: Hans Günter Golinski Bernard Schultze Bernard Schultze, too, experiences the artistic enculturation typical of his generation, which passes through the stations of the late medieval and Romantic intellectual and pictorial world, which legitimises individual creative possibilities through the discovery of the pictorial work of children, the mentally ill and the primitive, and which is shaped by the theory and methods of self-discovery of Surrealism. At the same time, he remains more strongly attached than other informal painters to Romantic thought and feeling, which is defined primarily in terms of content. The Romantic painter narrates, names and circumscribes moods; for the first time, visual art rests on an ideological substructure. For Schultze, Informel, with its thematisation of non-form or not-yet-form, form in the making, opens up the possibility of painting not-yet-images and narratives in the making. The difficulty with which he freed himself from formulated pictorial themes is demonstrated by his detours in search of help, for example with Ensor and Brauner, Miró, Nay and above all Masson. His idea of having to discipline himself in terms of content and form is shown by the academic-constructivist compositions of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ultimately, Schultze found the key to effectively open pictures in the chaotic-looking painting of the Paris-based Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle: "This unbelievable brilliance, the nuance of the colours, painted completely free and vital, that's when I thought, that's really it. Before that I had been somewhat influenced by Ritschl, surrealistically by Egon Günther - figurative surrealism to rework the situation - but ... none of that satisfied me, I had to become free, I had to do something. And that's where 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 antithesis of himself, with an anti-literary painter who 'only' painted. Bernard Schultze can all the more be called an informal romantic 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, influenced by old German painting. Schultze contrasts the meditative contemplation of the individual in 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 that - used methodically - draws the unconscious to light and serves self-discovery. "I begin, association begets association ... I can't meditate, then I fall asleep." By painting single images in layers, by painting over them, 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 observer are multiplied, relicts, overpaintings, glazes, a multitude of nuances, in short traces of manifold efforts characterise such a treated surface. The painting becomes full-bodied, rich, can become precious, but without the intention of being so in the final result." Informal painting enables him to make infinite associations that take on metamorphic form and visibly push out of his labyrinthine pictorial spaces into real space. Finally, since 1962, his fantasy Migof, a hermaphrodite of painting and sculpture, has been completely detached from the painting support and leads a life of its own as an ambiguous colour sculpture.

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

1934 Abitur at the Prinz-Heinrich-Gymnasium, Berlin

1934-1939 Studies at the Hochschule für Kunsterziehung in Berlin with Willy Jäckel and Hans Zimbal, studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Paul Bindel

1939 State examination at the College for Art Education, Berlin

1967 Art Prize of the City of Darmstadt

1969 Art Prize of the City of Cologne

1972 Elected full member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin

1981 Titular Professorship of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia

1983 Wormland Art Prize, Munich

1984 Great Hessian Culture Prize

1985 Society of Fine Artists of Austria - Künstlerhaus Vienna, Golden Laurel Award. Member of the Mannheim Free Academy

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 Leaves the Academy of Arts, Berlin

2002 Binding Culture Prize

2005 died on 14 April in Cologne

Bernard Schultze, born in Schneidemühl in 1915, is one of the best-known representatives of German abstraction and was, among others, a co-founder of the artist group Quadriga, which was to form the core of the later German Informel. Since the early 1950s, flourishing and decay have been themes around which Schultze's work revolves. In them, he combines influences of the Surrealist pictorial imagination with an impulsive brushstroke typical of Informel, using an additive painting process. 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. When looking at it, the eye always remains in motion and is unsettled when trying to comprehend the perfect density of the composition. On a purely visual level, his works neither narrate nor describe anything, thus denying the viewer access to the pictorial content.