Anton Räderscheidt Gemälde Ilse Salberg Photographien Grenzgänger Flucht und Neubeginn 1936 – 1947 Anton Räderscheidt Malerei Ilse Salberg Photographie Grenzgänger Flucht und Neubeginn 1936-1947 Dieser Katalog erscheint anlässlich der Ausstellung: Anton Räderscheidt・Malerei Ilse Salberg ・Photographie Grenzgänger・Flucht und Neubeginn 1936 - 1947 Textbeiträge: Prof. Dr. Günther Herzog Anne-Ganteführer-Trier Copyright: Anton Räderscheidt VG Bildkunst Bonn, die Autoren Cover Layout und Editionen Ilse Salberg: Tilmann von Mengershausen, Mengershausen Editionen, München Portrait Anton Räderscheidt: Paul Multhaupt, 1928 Für die sachdienlichen Hinweise zu den photographischen Arbeiten Ilse Salbergs möchten wir uns bedanken bei: Galerie Berinson, Berlin M+M Auer Collection Umschlagabbildung: Ilse Salberg ・Portrait (Anton Räderscheidt), Vintage gelatin silver print, 40 x 30 cm, 1938 Inhalt Anton Räderscheidt Gemälde, Gouachen, Tempera, Skulpturen Günther Herzog 7 Katalog 19 Das „Photo-Auge“ der Ilse Salberg Anne Ganteführer-Trier 51 Katalog 53 Biografie 95 Ausstellungsverzeichnis 97 Anton Räderscheidt Paintings, gouaches, tempera, sculptures Günther Herzog After having travelled through France in the spring of 1936 in order to look for a new home in the countryside, Anton Räderscheidt, Ilse Salberg and Ilse's daughter Brigitte Metzger finally settled in Paris after all. Räderscheidt rented an artist's studio at 26, rue des Plantes and thereby became once again a neighbor of Max Ernst's who had resided in Paris since 1922 and lived in the same house. But, as Räderscheidt retrospectively wrote in his diary, "renting a studio and setting up an easel in a foreign country doesn't mean that one is ready to paint again." It takes him indeed a long time until he has settled in sufficiently to be able to concentrate on his canvases again. Räderscheidt needed almost an entire year to get his bearings in Paris' art scene, so very different from the German scene he was used to. In the mid-thirties, Paris, Europe's cultural capital, resembled more a cauldron than a melting pot, and seemed to Räderscheidt as attractive as menacing. So he, who would later cynically claim that "the mass grave is the only space I can think of where I wouldn't mind any company", started looking for a refuge in the country as a second residence to his Paris studio. During his search Räderscheidt could profit from his recent friendship with the sculptor André Bloc (1896 – 1966), who, in 1930, along with Le Corbusier and Mallet-Stevens, had founded the magazine L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui. Bloc owned a large building plot on the La Cride hill in Sanary-sur-Mer in southern France and had invited tenders for the construction of holiday homes on the site, finally choosing the designs of architects Maurice Grandjean and Joel Guenec. Räderscheidt and Ilse Salberg purchased a plot of land from Bloc and the plans for the house "Le Patio" from Grandjean and Guenec. "Le Patio" was a pavilion inspired by the architecture of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier, with an interior courtyard and a kitchen which particularly impressed all future visitors because it boasted a very modern built-in train galley. In the same year, 1936, Räderscheidt and his new family could move into their house and spend their first summer there. The construction of a house in Sanary and the rental of an artist's studio in Paris – in 1937, Räderscheidt had moved to a studio in the Villa Brune where Henri Laurens was his neighbor – show that Räderscheidt's financial situation was as advantageous as rarely before, thanks to Ilse Salberg's fortune. Whilst Max Ernst and others launched an appeal for donations on the occasion of Otto Freundlich's 60th birthday in 1938, which they hoped would raise funds permitting the artist who 7 lived on the edge of extreme poverty to purchase some paint, Räderscheidt had no financial problems. He was able to buy canvas and paint for extensive series of paintings and could even start a collection of works of art by Léger and Picasso. In 1937, the year of the Universal Exposition, Räderscheidt managed to establish himself as an artist in Paris, with the help of friends he knew from Cologne such as Otto Freundlich who'd moved back to Paris in 1924, and Jankel Adler who had returned from Poland in 1937. Räderscheidt met Hans Hartung and Fernand Léger and participated from then on in the annual exhibitions of the "Salon des Surindépendants". Whilst the vast majority of the numerous artists living in exile in Paris had to content themselves with participations in collective exhibitions in order to maintain their artistic existence, Räderscheidt managed to interest a major gallery in putting on an individual exhibition of his work. The Galerie Billiet-Vorms, run by the dedicated Pierre Vorms, had become since 1934 "the most important exhibition venue for neo-realistic tendencies". Vorms had already staged exhibitions of Expressive Realism, such as "Le Retour au Sujet" (January 1934) and "Le Réalisme et la Peinture" (July 1936). The latter had been accompanied by a series of debates which had attracted much public attention, organized in the gallery by the Maison de la Culture, and whose goal it was to "stir humanity from its apathy", as Georges Besson wrote in the Commune of August 1936. From May to June 1937, and further to exhibitions of George Grosz, Lind and Frans Masereel, Pierre Vorms exhibited Anton Räderscheidt's approximately forty paintings – not quite dry when they were hung – of the series "Les Monstres", nearly all of whom had disappeared and were only recently partially rediscovered. The well-known art critic Louis Chéronnet opened the exhibition with an introductory speech reproduced on the invitation: "One has to paint dangerously. Räderscheidt, who's come here from Cologne, via Berlin, and who exhibits for the first time in Paris, continues to paint dangerously. None of the old eruptive forces of German Expressionism have calmed down in him. He is still possessed by a dark interior fire. Out of a still agitated, restless and insubordinate matter he skilfully creates his fierce compositions. Without any intention to seduce. Not even by his choice of colours. Räderscheidt paints in powerful, pure tones, but almost entirely without exterior light, and it is just this organic difficulty of the whole creation which captivates us in these paintings. They contain the whole pathos of our primal origins. And in his bulks of naked bodies, opposing the mighty arabesques of the ocean, I see the synthetic emergence of Man, dominant yet always in revolt. Half-way between abstraction and realism and driven by a particular metaphysical will, Räderscheidt's art appeals to our profoundest sensitivities: in those regions of our self where reflection on our existence is a numb pain." Considering the scarce and extremely fragmentary information about Räderscheidt's years in exile, marked by loss and escape, about which the artist himself has mostly refused to speak and which therefore have to be painstakingly 8 retraced from different sources, this clearly identifiable painting is a stroke of luck. Along with three other paintings from 1936 which were found only recently – but also only in the form of black and white photographs by Marc Vaux – it sheds light on a phase of Räderscheidt's work in exile which was so far virtually unknown but is clearly extremely important for the evaluation of his future development. The art historian Paul Westheim, who had emigrated to Paris in 1933 and who had been one of the most important personalities in the German art scene which he now tried to keep alive in Paris, saw in Räderscheidt's paintings exhibited at the Billiet-Vorms gallery the result of three years of restless wandering outside of Germany, which, according to him, had ushered in a new phase of "enrichment and maturity": "He has acquired this decisive discipline which has much in common with modern architecture and which creates clearly outlined forms and reliefs out of the construction. This is a form of art which works with sharply outlined plane contours, which opposes obscurity and brightness and creates the space by means of contrasting different surface areas. This discipline, this "sens constructif", which transforms a painted surface into artistic creation, allows him to work more freely and more skilfully with his means. He doesn't have to renounce the charms of the picturesque anymore, nor the personal touch, the brilliance of colours, the diversity of nuances. This new posture comes accompanied by a force of expression; a vision which is enhanced by light, colour and life. He is showing for example two big compositions, tightly constructed, a pyramid of bodies in a wide orchestration which is almost baroquely expansive and which exudes a verve and a vibrancy that are deeply sincere. The fact that Räderscheidt had to leave the limited and confined German scene in which he evolved has definitely been beneficial to him." Westheim too refers to Räderscheidt's big format painting "Les Noyés" with his "pyramid of bodies", of swollen and distended bodies without face or with an amorphously mutated physiognomy, crushed by their own weight. The pyramidal composition of this archaic end times painting is inspired by traditional representations of deluge and wreckage, from mannerism to Théodore Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa". Although the agitated, round and voluminous forms make Westheim think of a "wide orchestration which is almost baroquely expansive" and Franz Roh of "a kind of gigantic baroque", Räderscheidt proves in this multi- figured painting that he is still a master of reduction. He doesn't narrate the catastrophe by a multitude of motives and details, but interprets it Les Noyés, 1936 essentially as a catastrophe befalling the human 9 being who is reduced to the state of creatureliness and bare existence.