The rain falls with an unhealthy insistence. As a boy, I liked it because it left behind a trail of puddles to splash in. And, despite my father not allowing it, I couldn’t wait to slip out onto the street and shatter those mirrors that reflected the sky and the houses’ façades. Afterwards I had to hide my drenched clothes. Now I prefer the warmth of the sun. It helps me stave off the cold. With my eyes closed, motionless as a lizard, I can spend hours on the terrace in my deck chair. Soon, though, the autumn will start to do its thing. And then comes the long winter. I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to hold out until the days began to glimmer like they are now. I fear that, soon, I won’t know how to face up to the darkness. Perhaps if I could paint as a release. . But I’m too worn out to do anything that’d be any good.
I’ve often been asked why I paint. And I’ve never known how to respond. For me, painting is like breathing. Or speaking. There’s no reason to complicate things unnecessarily. I also paint to save myself the feeling of helpless vulnerability I get when I don’t. Besides, painting has allowed me to live in a way that’s worked for me. From a certain distance, as if there were no need to jump in with both feet. Out of fear, I suppose, because I’ve never been sure enough of myself. Even during my years at the Academy, I envied the drive of some of my classmates, their determination as they sought out their own path.
Of all of them, George Grosz was not only the most steadfast but also the most assertive. Even though we were very different, because George was as extroverted and fearless as I was reserved and prudent, we ended up becoming friends. And aesthetically we had nothing in common either. His truculent urban scenes, his risqué eroticism, and his aggressive political drawings were light years from my aspirations of balance and purity. But we got on incredibly well and I usually found his advice very useful. Besides, we had a great time together. Especially when we were living in Berlin. Our partying would go on all through the night, and the wee hours would often find us at his studio on Lichterfelder Strasse looking at his new paintings.
When I think about those years before the war, I realize that the urge that drives me to paint has always been basically the same. I’ve changed the way I confront it and express it, but the essence remains unchanged. Like Matisse says: making the colors sing. I’ve never aspired to anything more, from my first landscapes to the pebbles in Hauterive.
What most surprises me about my work in the Dresden period is the contradiction between the rigid academicism of my drawing and my bold use of colors that, despite some of my teachers not understanding it, progressively moved away from merely imitating reality and became increasingly more intense and strident. In the process of freeing myself from rules and prohibitions, color progressed faster than line, until I moved to Berlin. As if it were a variant of my father’s game where we asked each other what color certain feelings were, when I stood in front of a landscape to paint it, I didn’t just rely on my vision. I also listened, smelled, tasted. . Then a bell tower could have the color that the sound of its ringing evoked in me. Or a tree the tonality that the taste of its fruit inspired. It seemed a good way to express my emotions with the utmost faithfulness and conviction. And I still feel that way, because it continues to be a technique that works for me.
Berlin gave me distance from the Academy and from my father, and it brought me back in touch with George, who had moved there a year earlier and was instrumental in getting one of his professors at the School of Arts and Trades, Emil Orlik, to agree to give me lessons. Up until that point, no one had ever helped me to formulate the questions that would lead to useful answers. Emil Orlik urged me to draw without so many hang-ups and to let go of my fear of the immediacy of the results.“A drawing isn’t necessarily better because you spend two days working on it,” he would tell me. Making five-minute sketches helped me loosen up my wrist and achieve a more spontaneous, incisive line. Which was more coherent with the vibrant colors and chromatic contrasts of my previous works. So, almost instinctively, my work began to fill with more vigorous figures and objects.
Emil Orlik. . Who would have thought that he would become another link to the Alma I never met. The first day I went to her house, she enthusiastically showed me the poster from the opening of the Schall und Rauch. “I bought it at the Saint-Ouen flea market. It’s by Emil Orlik.” And she explained that, one night, after an evening at Max Reinhardt’s cabaret, Emil Orlik gave her a portrait he’d made of her while she was on stage. “And he captured me, in just the time it took to deliver my monologue,” she added. “It was amazing.” But when she got back from Ravensbrück, she found that they’d looted her apartment and the drawing had disappeared. They’d taken everything. She was barely able to recover a few photographs and books. So when she’d seen the poster, she couldn’t resist buying it. She saw it as a good way of closing a circle that had been left broken so many years prior.“And, Emil Orlik was from Prague too,” she said finally.
The years in Berlin were very intense. And productive. Possibly the most productive years of my life, since all I had to worry about was painting. But the war ruined all that. Like a furious hand, it crushed my few, hard-earned certainties about myself and about the world and the people around me. Nothing particularly extraordinary, but they had been useful enough to keep me going.
After a week of quartering in Combles, where we survived as best we could in the basement of a big, destroyed house, arriving at our positions in Guillemont was like entering Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death. All that was missing was the skeleton with the scythe riding through no-man’s-land. I had gotten a sense of what awaited me over my trip through the communication trench, but it wasn’t of much use to me. I’d seen trees reduced to splinter, craters filled with water, horses with their legs in the air and their innards smoking, blackened carcasses of abandoned vehicles but the front was nothing like that. No. Nothing at all. The front line was infinitely worse. A wasteland extended before us, of earth dug up by grenades, without a single blade of grass, where the dead on either side lay mixed together with rusty weapons and scraps of uniforms. The stench was nauseating. Legs and arms emerged from the parapet that protected us from the English; they were as rigid as the stakes prepared for stringing up barbed wire. We often had to step on corpses just to move around what remained of the trench. That was the worst, worse than the fear and the cold, worse than the uncertainty and the taste of gunpowder in our mouths. I never did get used to walking on soft chunks of rotting flesh.
On the third night, one of the soldiers in my company ran his bayonet through his hand so they would take him off the front. When Sergeant Forkel realized what he was playing at, he forced him out into no-man’s-land and toward the enemy trench. “Let’s see if you’re lucky and you can walk out of here through the big door. Like a true hero. Not like a cheat,” he said to him without blinking.“No, please, no. Please, no,” repeated the soldier over and over as he showed his bleeding hand. I have never seen anyone so vulnerable. Soon after, a flare lightened the sky with a ghostly glow and a shot silenced his voice. No one did anything to stop it. When I think about him, it turns my stomach, but then, afraid of Sergeant Forkel’s reaction, I didn’t lift a finger.“One more down!” shouted someone from the trench in front of us.