Art ǀ “Know fear in order to tame it” – Friday

by time news

As a child, the artist Tomi Ungerer once reported in an interview, he liked to visit the Isenheim Altarpiece in his Alsatian hometown of Colmar on rainy days. Admission to the Musée Unterlinden was free at that time, everyone had access to the world-famous work, instead of getting wet waiting at the bus stop, he took refuge in the protective museum.

The disturbingly beautiful altar by the artist Matthias Grünewald (and the carver Nikolaus von Hagenau), created between 1512 and 1516, shows the suffering of Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection on numerous hinged panels, but also pictorial fantasies that seem to have arisen as if he were drugged. Psychedelic, almost modern and playing with the delusions that arose from the accidental consumption of “ergot” at the time of its creation. The sacred masterpiece oscillates between worldly suffering and divine promise of salvation, playing with the fear of death. In its time it makes pseudo-comforting offers. Tomi Ungerer rejects it and thus makes a life decision.

Characterized by breaks

The result of this decision leads us to an exhibition with the subtitle two years after Ungerer’s death It’s All About Freedom in the Falckenberg Collection in Hamburg. Over 400 exhibits are presented on three floors, leading through an artist’s life that is characterized by breaks and new beginnings. Children’s drawings, graphics, object art, works from private collections show the unhealthy fantasy cosmos in all its abundance and conciseness.

The exhibition, which was largely curated by Tomi Ungerer’s daughter Aria, proceeds chronologically, starting with his children’s and youth drawings from the 1930s. Many of them were found quite late in a box in his Strasbourg apartment. On view are, among other things, in a comic-like style, pictures of the invasion of German troops into his Alsatian homeland. Skeletons address death and the fear of death. A motif that runs like a red thread through later work.

Born 90 years ago in Strasbourg as the son of an art-loving mother and an artistically gifted watchmaker, Ungerer began at an early age to break the grip of Protestantism through drawing and creative spinning. Art as liberation and a way out. He decides in favor of the real world because he understands that one can actually only escape restrictions in personal development if one walks away from narrow-mindedness and a restrictive dogmatism. Early on he resolved to take a closer look and, using the means of art, to create an imaginative counter-world. But is that enough? How can you physically get out of the small town in the middle of Europe, whose core artistic offering, “The Altar”, is so stark and large. How to free yourself from the region between two countries, whose identity was historically shaped by insecurity and bilingualism, which was downright shaken, from National Socialism? Where and how can the path to personal freedom begin? What is “freedom” for Tomi Ungerer anyway?

His biography is shaped by letting go, by breaking new ground and by protesting against established constructs and structures. Places of residence, even continents, are changed, wives are exchanged, and life in the country for that in the city. Short documentary films, which will also be shown in Hamburg, illustrate this side of his personality. Reasons for his inner restlessness are certainly his rebellious, unsteady nature, but also experiences of loss (his father died when Ungerer was three years old) and the feeling of being and wanting to be something different. Free, and yet in search of security and perfect happiness. Perhaps a contradiction in terms, but not one that will break Ungerer.

At the end of the 1950s, the USA became his dream destination. Merely endowed with his artistic talent and completely burned out, he dares to move to New York after failing his Abitur, a short time in the Foreign Legion and a few months at the École Municipale des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg and pursue his career there, using one’s own strength and confidence. He leaves landscapes and people behind in order to break through fearlessly. Later he once said: “Know fear in order to tame it.” He tames it by hugging the stranger.

New York is his promise that self-realization is literally possible. Quickly successful as an illustrator, he takes the risk of exploring his personal limits of freedom. Most of the exhibition is dedicated to this time. His ironically biting observations in New York’s “high society”, to which he suddenly had access because he had money and prestige, are reflected in numerous papers. Nevertheless, it is initially inspiring for him to be in a country that lets him be the way he is. His freedom, he feels at first, is based on the fact that there, in this country, there was once a fight for equality, for unlimited possibilities. Racism and the resulting civil rights movement in the 1960s obscure this picture. He therefore begins to design political posters as well. In the retrospective, for example, is his iconic drawing Apocalypse (1970), on which a riding skeleton cowboy counteracts any western romance.

In his children’s books from this period like The three robbers (1961) or No kiss for mother (1973), Ungerer assumes that a parent-child relationship can only succeed if it is based on mutual respect and if justice is a struggle. At eye level. A demand that the ’68 generation wanted to put into practice, as opposed to their Nazi parents, when the first children’s shops and new theories of upbringing arose. This shows what distinguishes him in his work from the moralizing tone of conventional children’s literature. The original drawings of his world bestsellers can be seen in the exhibition.

“What you don’t want, what people do to you, don’t do that to anyone else”, this abbreviation of Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” runs through Ungerer’s growing work, even at the time when he began, alongside writing for them Small ones and the classic that is still particularly popular today The great songbook (1975) his sexual fantasies in Fornicon (also from 1975) and Eroticon (1971) to illustrate.

A scandal in the USA, by the way, parents and publisher do not bring both sides of the artist together, although he always makes sure to remain appreciative and humorous in his representations. As a result of this scandal, he fled to a farm in Canada with his family. Originals from this phase are also represented in the exhibition. They show rural life unadorned.

How, one wonders, would Ungerer have positioned himself in times of pandemic, was he still alive? Would he have interpreted the concept of freedom in the sense of those who, in view of the increasing number of infections, still insist on looking at themselves first, who carry the big “main thing I” in front of them and jazz up to the solidarity act of freedom for the general public? Unlikely, because Ungerer always conceded too much to others what he claimed for himself. In the last years of his life he begins to love a certain song in particular, as his daughter Aria reports: Thoughts are free, he once had it in Great songbook illustrated. It was sung by all the guests at his funeral.

Tomi Ungerer: It’s All About Freedom Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg-Harburg, until April 24, 2022

.

You may also like

Leave a Comment