A visit to the studio of Lichtgrafik [light graphic] artist Kurt Wendlandt
This interview with the German painter, illustrator and light graphic artist Kurt Wendlandt was originally published in German in 1970 in the magazine “profile” with the title “Schönheit zwischen Dunkelheit und Schrecken”. In it, Kurt Wendlandt is interviewed by Elma Reiste about his light graphics. Wendlandt explains his techniques and talks about the philosophical concepts he tries to give shape to with his light graphics (photograms).
Not more big city. The unpaved road ends in front of the nature reserve where, as I was to hear later, foxes still say “good night” to each other [German expression meaning place in the middle of nowhere]. The elongated reinforced concrete building, white and gray, with its glass wall facing the garden did not exactly suggest that I would soon be confronted with a “dog-breasted Djinija”, a “demon circus” or an “angel from the apocalypse”.
A casually dressed man in his fifties, medium height, with waiting brown eyes opens: Kurt Wendlandt. No affectations, no conventions. I immediately sense that everyone has a chance to be treated as an old acquaintance [by him].
In the studio, a spiral staircase swings up to the book gallery, making it clear that the height of the 70-square-meter room exceeds the 4-meter limit. A few exquisite pieces of furniture contrast with the sparseness of whitewashed walls and white curtains. Otherwise, only simple seating furniture, partly covered with stacks of books. Obviously, the residential part [of the house] struggles to assert itself against the expansion tendencies of the working wing. Here: gray-painted boards on trestles – there: brushes, paint cans, paper. In the adjacent workroom, too, an abundance of hand tools and work materials. The all in all meticulous tidiness reminds me of a scientific laboratory. I make no secret of my surprise. The answer comes quickly:
“Do you think a composer can work better if he has first messed up the keyboard of his grand piano?”- But right after that he winks: “What do you think it looks like in here when I’m at work?! Then all the strings are hanging out of the piano!”
Having grown up in Berlin (Kurt Wendlandt attended a grammar school at Alexanderplatz for a while, together with Alfred Döblin’s son, who was a few years older) the dry Berlin accent resonates, even if only occasionally hinting at dialect.
On the shimmering brown of the Dutch baroque cabinet, a modern sculpture. It comes from a Brazilian sculptor. Brought to Berlin some time ago by the Ford Foundation, he was fascinated to find some of the structures of his sculptures in Wendlandt’s light graphics. So the artists exchanged works.
The walls are covered with black and white and colored images. On the glass wall, divided only by steel beams, colorful glowing collages. Film parts are glued with foils and Plexiglas, partly in such a way that an isolating frame was forgone and the compositions of irregular outlines hang in front of bushes and trees, which cause movements in the pictures with changing point of view of the observer. Most of the paintings immediately reveal that a radically new technique, combined with the highest artistic sensibility, is at work here. Here, matter is no longer used to feign light and space, it itself becomes transparent, its structure made visible. Kurt Wendlandt has taken a saying by Franz Marc as a motto for his work: “The old view of the world has turned into a view through the world.”
“Transparency”, “chance” and “transformation” are obviously key words in Wendlandt’s technical vocabulary. He leaves no doubt that their philosophical meaning has also become clear to him. Transparency opens up the ossified form, letting in what was known early on, what has long been forgotten, but also the unknown that comes to us, which can now be named, transformed and banished into new form.
It is fantastic to think that images of such immaterial beauty can be created with the help of the much-maligned “soulless” technology! And slowly I understand why an artist who is at home in all conventional pictorial techniques and who has been awarded German and foreign prizes has exchanged the palette for the [photographic] enlarger, litho stone and copper plate for repro film, turpentine and linseed oil for developer and fixing salt. Why, in the musty confines of a cellar converted into a darkroom, he is trying to carry over the “mutabor” of the alchemists into the dawning third millennium.
Before I can ask how a light graphic is created, the artist’s wife enters the room. Also with her a friendliness without reservations. While we sit with tea, the wandering sun changes colors and valeurs in the diaphanous collages [Diaphane Collage] in front of the glass wall. I learn that the couple met at the “Hochschule für Bildende Künste” [College of Fine Arts] in Berlin.
“Yes, and Papa Michel, then a professor of lithography and etching, immediately recognized the human situation in addition to the artistic one.” Before Wendlandt begins his story, he examines a particularly thin piece of puff pastry for its translucency. If, as I’ve heard, potato peels turned into “Lucifer,” glue turned into “Daphne”-, why shouldn’t puff pastry be able to persuade the adventure-obsessed to discover a “Leda” or “Saint Anthony”? And while Wendlandt’s pictorial imagination thinks ahead, his memory wanders back. “I used to have many role models – all too many. When I sat in Papa Michel’s workshop and transferred a drawing to the copper plate or the litho stone, he would come over and say in his Saxon dialect: ‘Well, in which century is Wendlandt now?’ He bent low over my work, pushed his glasses into his forehead and stated ‘Aha, he’s already forgotten Dürer, now he’s already in the 17th century and is excluding Rembrandt. It’s about time we started with ‘Vernis mou’ (etching technique), because soon he’ll have Goya on his hands.’
Once, when I was sitting in the workshop working with my wife, who was still my fellow student at the time, he came over again, put his arms on our shoulders on the right and left, and said, under his raised glasses, looking alternately at the left and right sheets – in the meantime I had actually landed on Goya – ‘And when are [you two] going to get married?’”
As a Primaner [student in his final high school years] Wendlandt had still found the recognition of Käthe Kollwitz, but was too late to receive her fostering [support]. At that time she had already been expelled from the academy and lived ostracized and withdrawn in a working-class district of the northeast [of Berlin], where her husband practiced medicine. After only a few semesters, Prof. Hans Meid offered the art student a master studio. After the war, Wendlandt kept the family of five afloat by copying old masters before he began working as an illustrator, incidentally often with his wife, with whom he also wrote children’s book texts and later shared a lectureship in graphic design at LUFA (formerly TU) [Technical University Berlin]. “Without my wife, my Lichtgrafik [light graphics] would not exist. In the time of the first experiments, which devoured a lot of money and yielded nothing, she encouraged me to continue and soothed my guilty conscience when I neglected the bread and butter work [main income work].”
Wendlandt’s versatility is at first disconcerting, but then, apart from the variety of subjects, reveals a complexity that ranges from eye experience [feast for the eyes] to abstraction. An immense wealth of illustrations for picture books, children’s books, books for young people, and fiction. And again and again landscapes: from North Africa, Italy, Yugoslavia, Holland, from the islands of the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands. Almost always, sometimes with only a few strokes, the essence of a region is exposed, giving not only its stylized skeleton, but at the same time all the sensual charm of its landscape. “After many years of attempts, I now seem to succeed in letting this process of abstraction take place directly in front of nature, at times with my back to the object and almost always wandering around and encircling the chosen place for days first.”
An almost frightening diligence lets folders and cupboards overflow, even though during the war almost all oil paintings, drawings, pastels, watercolors and all copper plates were lost.
To prepare for the illustration of “Leatherstocking”, Wendlandt made, for example, up to a thousand studies of weapons, clothing, jewelry and utensils of the North American Indians. He revised the text of his latest picture book “Die drei Königreiche” [The Three Kingdoms] seven times. The material for this picture book developed from his study of Goethe’s theory of colors. The kings of each of the three color kingdoms believe that only the color of their kingdom is the most beautiful and best in the whole world, until they learn that they cannot live without the other colors. Publishers from all over the world, as well as UNESCO, are interested in this theme that unites peoples, whose hidden background shines through the magnificent colorfulness of the funny and dramatic pictures. “Let us hope that the 70s will make us more aware of one thing: tolerance alone is not enough. Otherness must be experienced and recognized as enrichment, even as medicine.” But I have to tear myself away from fairy tale telling, even if I am curious to know whether King Firehand will succeed in stealing miracle plants from the newly founded grassland and whether Purpurinchen can thaw out the frozen blue grandfather. I have to get to the light graphic artist to finally learn more about his technique.
Wendlandt is not afraid to reveal professional secrets. In the catalog for the traveling exhibition of more than 70 of his light graphics and diaphanous prints through five Brazilian cities, organized by the Goethe-Institut São Paulo, he himself writes about his work: “The source material for my light graphics can be any more or less transparent material, mounted on glass or other transparent supports, usually in the size 6 x 9 cm, and then copied onto photographic paper by means of the enlarger. The camera remains out of the picture, in contrast to photography, in which real photos are alienated by phototechnical means. The first print is usually followed by others, and the first result can be altered by many means (double exposures, second negatives in different sizes, blurring and gradation, shifting the paper during exposure, gradually turning the aperture, post-exposure with a flashlight, etc.). I use positive solarization especially often. It makes the sheet, intuitively handled, a non-repeatable unique, but can be brought under control by measuring duration of first exposure, duration of second exposure, light intensity, distance of light source, angle of incidence of light, etc.
Instead of photographic paper, one can also copy onto film material in the original size of the later sheets and process it further. I usually scrape out lines or areas with a razor blade or draw in with a brush and grease pencil, recopy to film and process that again, too. Sometimes I combine negative and positive in whole or in part, or cut the films apart to make a negative collage. Sometimes I like this better than the positive. I combine them with transparent colors and plexiglass and thus come to luminous and backlit images [Leuchtbild and Gegenlichtbild].
What the more or less guided coincidence has brought me is reworked. The process of selection, of composition, which had already begun when the basic negative was made, is continued until a picture is created.”
Wendlandt regards knowledge of photographic technique as a self-evident prerequisite, but uses it only as a means to very many ends. Thus, for some time now, he has also been confronting it with conventional painterly and graphic techniques, which has already been registered by the press:
” … the Wendlandt exhibition demonstrates in a special way that the artistic statement with photo-technical means has become a legitimate area of modern art … ” (dpa) [German Press Agency].
Seemingly easily, even elegantly, Wendlandt masters the often unmanageable sequence of technical processes, but in reality long series of experiments precede the final version of a picture. Wendlandt’s work resembles that of a director who stages a light-footed play with the elaborate apparatus of a lacing floor, revolving stage, lighting rod, and individuals of actors striving apart. However, lightness and elegance are not generally appreciated in Germany. One would also like to perceive the transpiration, which is usually connected with the realization of inspiration and believes that then ” profundity” is guaranteed. Is it really so difficult to understand suspended equilibrium as a struggle of heterogeneous forces that has come to rest? (“Mozart’s music is all too easily understood as a rococo garland, the tragic in it all too easily ignored. Bach builds a fortress against terror, Handel a [fairy tale] castle. Mozart transforms the darkness all around into glittering threads, weaves a carpet out of it and floats on it over all abysses.”) There are many relationships to music. Wendlandt’s father and both of his grandfathers were musicians, as were his father-in-law and uncle. The record collection ranges from Frescobaldi to Penderecki. The emphasis is on chamber music.
Wendlandt’s light graphics are in public and private possession in Germany and abroad; the Kestner Museum, Hanover, and the Niedersächsische Landesgalerie [State gallery of Lower Saxony] alone own eleven of his works. The press voices of recognition are multiplying: ” … an intellectual penetration, which has an almost style-defining effect.” … “In any case, light graphics could lead the visual arts out of many a dead end …” (“Petrusblatt”, “Heilbronner Stimme”). “The old, ultimately artificial dichotomy of nature and spirit seems to have been overcome … Marshall MacLuhan preached to us that the technical aids were nothing more than the extended organs of man projected outward.
Here such a conception proves itself in a striking way. Wendlandt’s light graphics basically make us aware of what the eye – in the broadest sense – is actually capable of. No phantasties are played out. The initially invisible is made visible … Within the integrations sought by Jean Gebser (Swiss cultural philosopher), such experiences and results as Wendlandt’s work have their place.” (Dr. L. Schauer, – “DIE WELT”- in the catalog of the Goethe-Institut Säo Paulo “Da experiência fototécnica a nova figuração”.) At the “Biennale delle Regioni”, Ancona, Wendlandt was awarded the “Medaglia speciale per opere di avanguardia” in 1969. Insiders already call his name a secret tip. Nevertheless, part of the press continued to remain silent or dismissed his paintings as “laboratory art” (“Der Tagesspiegel”). Wendlandt recalls, “Didn’t Wilhelm II call Impressionism ‘gutter art,’?” One critic saw a “neuralgic point” in the fact that light graphics could not yet be classified in the previously known techniques. When one observes how the known groups and styles of modern art hermetically seal themselves off from one another, struggling to find a conspicuous label for a pigeonhole and settle down in it, this cry of complaint takes on a special meaning. One has also occasionally objected to Wendlandt’s mixing of heterogeneous structures, placing hard, empty areas of color next to soft, subtly worked out fields of detail, so that the viewer, depending on which part of the picture he is looking at, wants to change the distance. Kurt Wendlandt says about this: ” 1. The problem is not new. Paul Klee was already interested in it. 2. Whoever as an artist does not merely reflect in his pictures one of the in itself hardened and aggressive individual areas of our pluralistic society, but tries to bring into focus the so necessary work of integration by bringing together what according to an outmoded and harmful opinion should fight each other, whoever therefore with the help of the tension between heterogeneous elements suggests a movement that could lead to border crossings, must not be surprised if success comes only slowly.”
When I drive back, the suburban street is shrouded in darkness. Only Wendlandt’s studio glows, lit by two dozen neon rods, a “hermitage” equipped with all the blessings of civilization, a bright world with open windows to the darkness.
The original artist portrait was published as a magazine article here:
Reiste, Elma: Beauty between darkness and terror. A visit to the studio of the light graphic artist Kurt Wendlandt. In: profile No. 13, Veith-Pirelli AG, Höchst-Sandbach, 1970, pp. 96-106.
Translated from German by DeepL and Nicolas Wendlandt