Udo Sellbach Was Just a Teenager When in 1944 Hitler Ordered More Than Half a Million German Youths to the Still Russian Front
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Andrew McNamara and Wiebke Gronemeyer that the idea for the dark rectangular shape found in many of his abstract paintings of the mid-1960s came from watching a sheet drying on a clothes line in the intense Australian sunlight. Whether quotidian or highly Udo charged, these vivid references seem to overwhelm and predetermine any assessment of his oeuvre. Yet there is also something elusive in Sellbach’s art. One Sellbach: result of this push and pull reception is that Sellbach’s abstract paintings are often interpreted figuratively, whereas the seemingly figurative, largely graphic work, often appear to verge on the abstract. Seeing it, Born in Cologne on 9 July 1927, Udo Sellbach was just a teenager when in 1944 Hitler ordered more than half a million German youths to the Still Russian front. It was a mere nine months before the unconditional surrender. The war was already long lost.1 The mass conscription of young boys—many taken straight from school—was a forlorn act to prevent the Russian advance into eastern Germany. Sellbach was conscripted in late February 1945—just three months before the end of World War II when the Russian forces were already rapidly advancing on the German capital. After weeks of ferocious fighting Sellbach was captured, but rather fortuitously escaped execution. He fled Berlin on foot and eventually made his way home through a shattered country only to find his home city largely abandoned.2 Cologne had suffered severe bombing since 1942. By May 1945, it was a wasteland of rubble, ‘an endless panorama of ruins’ like so many European cities at that time, a mere shadow of the city once renowned for its cultural richness and its easy-going Rhinish nature (rheinische Frohnatur).3 Sellbach reflected on these experiences in several works, most poignantly in the collection of etchings and aquatints, The Target is Man (1965); the print series the Night Watch (1990), a cycle of thirty etchings; and finally, And Still I See It (1995), a beautifully produced book of prints based on the ominous theme of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the first part of his epic poem Divine Comedy, focusing particularly on Canto XXVIII. In each case, however, Sellbach mixed references to his own formative experiences with subsequent events, such as the perennial conflicts of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, Udo Sellbach, Eye for an Eye Tooth, for a Tooth, 1967, acrylic on linen, 130 × 101 cm, photograph: Charlie Hillhouse, courtesy the Estate of Udo Sellbach and Milani Gallery, the Arab–Israeli (or Six Day) War of 1967, the sight Brisbane of the shadow images left by victims in the wake of the Hiroshima atomic blasts, or the uprisings of The spectre of traumatic events dominates the May 1968. None of this is ever rendered explicit, reception of Udo Sellbach’s art practice. His work is although it often seems inescapable. It is as if Sellbach usually directly related to his wartime experiences due sought to universalise his own experience by offering to the proliferation of images suggestive of wholesale a generalised image of the common threat posed by destruction, charred landscapes, mutilated bodies, violence, war and annihilation in various different forms. as well as the psychic toll of these experiences on The Target is Man series responds primarily survivors. Sometimes these grim reflections are to the Vietnam war. It acquires its edge from the fact tempered by more whimsical musings on everyday that Australia still had conscription at the time and domestic life. Sellbach once explained, for instance, the conscripts being sent to the Vietnam war offered 93 popularised ‘target’ paintings, yet the American’s is that Smith praised Sellbach for having achieved a approach lent the motif ‘a visual frisson’ because similarly forthright and challenging form of art years the ‘brilliant concentric coloured circles … contract before Bell, but in the sphere of white cultural-political and dilate as we stare.’ In contrast, Smith notes that expression. Years later, in a catalogue essay for a Sellbach eliminates colour (as did ‘Goya and Picasso 1993 exhibition of aquatint etchings, called Nightwatch, in similar situations’).6 The resulting black and white Smith singled out Sellbach’s aesthetic—and this print images often juxtapose the target motif with that cycle in particular—as presenting ‘a bleak vision of of the human body. Even the surfaces of the works the human condition rarely encountered in white appear to bear the burden of the subject matter Australian art.’8 depicted for they are scratched, worn or speckled. In Sellbach’s target works, his uniquely powerful The result is stark. Sellbach zeroes in on a ‘moral ‘bleak vision’ derives from combining the abstract disgust’, according to Smith, disgust at the way motif of the target with depictions of torn or mutilated humans become a target—‘a target to use, persecute, figures. The body is explored as a battleground, as humble, chain, exhibit, scorn, sacrifice, execute, dump, Sasha Grishin once suggested, thereby a subject of ignore and forget.’ All of which, as Smith reminds us, distortion, destruction, and also of depression.9 As are the titles of Sellbach’s works in this series.7 aforementioned, And Still I See It takes Dante’s Inferno as inspiration and derives its title from lines 118–129 of Canto XXVIII, which is translated in Sellbach’s publication as: I saw it in all certainty—and still I see it— A headless body advancing Moving with the sad crowd 10 It easy to imagine Sellbach responding to this particular line as a constant, haunting refrain: and still I see it; and still, … I see it. Dante’s Divine Comedy— Inferno in particular—reflects upon the perils of human Udo Sellbach, (Untitled 29) (from Night Watch, a print cycle of thirty etchings portfolio), divisiveness. The perpetrators of blind intolerance, 1990, etching and aquatint on Arches paper, 22.5 × 19.5 cm (plate), 40 × 30.8 cm excessive sectarianism or opportunistic power politics (sheet). Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane. Purchased 1991 through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation, photograph: Natasha are found condemned to eternal damnation, brutally Harth, QAGOMA, courtesy of the Estate of Udo Sellbach wounded and tortured due to their fractiousness. Their torment is as much psychological as they face eternity an uncomfortable parallel to Sellbach’s own youthful confronting the brutal consequences of their actions experience. In her short statement for The Target is in life with its countless victims. Tackling Dante’s Man exhibition catalogue, Ursula Hoff makes the art- theme allowed Sellbach to consider his own early historical connection between Sellbach’s project and life experiences in a wider, more universal context of Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–1820) human history with its constant struggle to mitigate (a link most critics at the time tended to follow). Hoff violence and intolerance in human association, while insisted, however, that the works were not ‘literal accepting difference. records’ of the Vietnam War, but ‘meditations on the The figures in Sellbach’s And Still I See It theme of annihilation.’4 Whether the generation of are often drawn with a frail, quivering line. Humans pre-World War II emigres and exiles, such as Hoff, the inhabit these scenes, but they barely inhabit the Viennese Franz Philipp, and Gertrude Langer, or post- worlds they find themselves in. They are desperate, Udo Sellbach, To persecute (from The Target is Man portfolio), 1965, etching and war emigres such as Sellbach or Polish-born Stan aquatint, 25.2 × 20 cm (plate), 44.2 × 34.6 (sheet). National Gallery of Victoria, clinging, half-buried, lost. Another predominant Ostoja-Kotkowski, this threat of annihilation was not a Melbourne. Purchased 1966. Courtesy of the Estate of Udo Sellbach stylistic feature is the depiction of figures wrought by matter of distant aesthetic reflection but one that had heavy cross-hatching. This effect makes the figures come perilously close to reality, leaving an indelible It is interesting that Bernard Smith singled out look heavy, fractured and riven, both physically and mark over their lives. Sellbach for registering the political significance of the psychologically, whether victim or perpetrator. Nearly Sellbach’s use of the target in The Target is Man target image in visual art because years later in 2007 all are maimed or disfigured. While the scenes closely may have referenced Goya, but it equally draws upon Richard Bell would use the theme of the target to Udo Sellbach, To persecute (from The Target is Man portfolio), 1965, etching and follow Dante’s epic work, Sellbach also includes aquatint, 25.2 × 20 cm (plate), 44.2 × 34.6 (sheet). National Gallery of Victoria, contemporary developments in art, such as colour- highlight how Indigenous Australians were a target of Melbourne. Purchased 1966. Courtesy of the Estate of Udo Sellbach images that evoke the ‘inferno’ of the twentieth field painting—in particular the ‘target’ paintings of the federal government’s policy Intervention. The idea century from which he—as a German citizen of his American abstract painter, Kenneth Noland. While of an Intervention was rhetorically aimed at supporting generation and also as a child-soldier in Hitler’s praising Sellbach for his portrayal of ordinary people the Indigenous population, while once again rendering regime—cannot avoid when contemplating such a as sacrificial victims of war, Bernard Smith made this them a target of cumbersome paternalistic policy and theme, the Holocaust. At one point, And Still I See link in a 1966 review.5 Smith asserted that Noland thus of discrimination. The reason for mentioning this It contains a graphic image of a vast pile of human 94 95 bones.