My grandfather belongs to the second generation of abstract painters in Germany – one whose formative years unfolded in a land of barbarism and a world at war.
In the post-war era, these artists pioneered a distinctly German style of abstract expressionism, in the art world also called „action painting“, Tachism, or Informel (I will use the term Informel as it is most commonly used in relation to Schlieker).
The style embraced non-objective, gestural, and spontaneous expression, freed from formal constraints, and focused on the tactile, material quality of colour itself.
No longer subject to the aesthetic dictatorship of the Nazi regime, where such art was banned and called “entartet”, painting should exist purely as painting: free from the illusion of perspective, unburdened by didactic content, unencumbered by untruths. An artwork should require no hidden mythology, and it should only reach completion in the mind of the viewer.
While my grandfather’s artistic expression remained primarily figurative until the late 1940s, the 1950s marked a decisive shift to abstraction. That decade was also one of significant personal transitions: he married, relocated from Hamburg to the beating industrial heart of Germany – the Ruhrgebiet – and welcomed his first and only child, Claudia, my mother.
It was during this transformative period that some of the earliest works in the Geneva collection were created, including a small, vibrant oil-on-canvas painting from 1958, and several works on paper produced between 1957 and 1959.
To truly understand my grandfather’s art (if that is possible at all), and that of many artists of his generation, it is essential to grasp the profound longing for – and lived experience of – liberation and new beginnings that defined their time.
But of course, none of this was evident to me as a child. Born more than twenty years after his first foray into abstraction, my memories of him are primarily those of a man who spent hours creating a joyful chaos in his studio – at times, one could wade knee-deep through piles of colourful kitchen paper – and of someone who delighted in slipping in an inappropriate joke, much to the dismay of the “normal” adults trying to teach us proper behaviour. My grandfather’s firm yet light-hearted defiance of convention extended far beyond the brush and canvas. My siblings and I loved being around him.
And yet, to attribute his work solely to the“Zeitgeist“ would be to tell only part of the story. A comparison between his 1957 painting “San Pol” – created on the small island San Pol off the coast of Naples in Italy – and his predominantly black-and-white work from 1959, likely painted on a winter day in his hometown of Bochum, highlights how profoundly his art was influenced by the environment and atmosphere in which it was conceived.
Critics would later frequently observe that my grandfather’s ability to perceive, internalize, and reinterpret nature and landscapes through his works was a defining hallmark of his creative process. This brings me to my second learning.