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In the 1950s and early 1960s, the „Informel“ style captivated art audiences, challenging not only classic realism but also the formal constraints of geometric abstraction.
Yet, despite its immense popularity and historical significance and recognition as the last international style, the movement’s prominence already faded from the late 1960s. Known artists quietly abandoned or even explicitly rejected “Informel”, swiftly reorienting their approach as the movement unraveled.
But Schlieker – like Emil Schumacher and other pioneers of the movement – doubled down.
To understand why, Dieter Ronte, the long-time director of the Bonn Museum of Art, provides a clue in an essay where he describes Schlieker as a „visual basic researcher“. By that he meant that his goal was not to reject the object but to observe and distill its essential qualities or aspects.
Schlieker often cited Impressionists such as Lovis Corinth and Oskar Kokoschka as influences. To him, „Informel“ was less a radical departure from earlier ideas and more a powerful new instrument to achieve a goal he shared with these masters: to capture the intensity of human experience.
Grounding the genesis of Schlieker’s work in the intent to see, unsee, and re-see the world makes it more than just a product of its time. For artists who interpreted the “Informel” not just as „freedom from“ conventions and constraints, but as „freedom to“ engage with the outside world anew, it became a gateway to true innovation.
"Procida", 1978
The visual basic researcher in him weathered the crisis of the movement by re-immersing himself in the real world – nature and landscapes in particular – re-confronting his subject, re-discovering its essence, and thus recalibrating his approach. He later reflected about this time as „inner necessity to renew my way of painting, to escape the risk of routine“.
Comparing two works on paper in the collection from this time – “Garmisch 77” (p. 38) and “Procida” (p. 39) – to the before discussed works from the 1950s illustrates this evolution. If the black and white work from 1959 could most aptly be described as abstract interpretation of a winter landscape, “Garmisch 77” approaches the theme from the opposite end, resulting in what could be called winter landscape infused abstraction.
Similarly, while the work on paper created on the small island of “San Pol” could be described as abstract interpretation of a Mediterranean setting, the work created on Procida in the late 1970s could instead be circumscribed as abstraction suffused with Mediterranean summer light.
It was rare for my grandfather and me to talk about his art. Yet I vividly remember one occasion when he insisted that one cannot master the „Informel“ without first mastering „Realism“ in all its facets.
At the time, I understood his stance as a comment on the craft of painting – something along the lines of, „You need to earn the right to play with color the way I do“ (possibly delivered with a wink and smile as we compared our childhood doodles on his studio wall with his canvases).
Today, I ask myself if his words were less about the „doing“ and more about the „seeing“ – Regardless, the importance of the objective world as a source of inspiration, a starting point, and a driving force for Schlieker cannot be overstated.