How do you paint the stillness of a dead bird? It took me a long time to answer that question and, when I think about it, I realize I wouldn’t have been able to, not before I shifted direction after Variation on a Theme by Bruegel. That painting represented the end of a period, since it was the culmination of my research into the figurative reproduction of reality. I no longer needed to go any further. Almost without realizing it, and thanks to Kandinsky’s influence, I veered toward abstraction. Reading Concerning the Spiritual in Art, with its allusions to the inner life of the creator and renouncing figuration, was a jolt. No other book has ever opened so many doors for me.
After Variation, color became the primary focus of my research. After many years, everything started to come together: my father’s stories, my rejection of the academy, the lessons of Matisse, my fascination with chromatic color harmony. . The large canvases — stretched out on the studio floor so I could work on them from the inside — became bursts of color, in seemingly chaotic compositions of splotches and forms with no link to reality, but which aspired to convey everything that was bubbling up from my viscera. They weren’t very popular, but the support of a small group of collectors and galleries allowed me to keep working. I don’t know what I would have done without the enthusiasm of people like Hans Goltz, Alfred Flechtheim, Ida Bienert, and Eugen Kirchhoff, who, one day, when I thanked him for buying a painting, answered: “Without painters like you, the world would be more gray and desolate.” I had never been told anything so lovely.
But I didn’t find my definitive path until Alma came into my life. Without meaning to, when she recalled her modeling sessions with the SS in Ravensbrück while I painted her body, she gave me the solution. Finally, everything fit. Her wish for the colors of the SS officer’s palette to embellish her pained body, the sordidness of the barracks, and the arrogant gaze of the officer coincided with my desire to transform the reality of the trench in order to bear the stench of the half-buried bodies, and putrefying no-man’s-land. Soon after, taking advantage of increasingly longer stays in Hauterive, I began to work directly on the landscape, painting tree trunks and branches, fern leaves, rocks in the forest, and snow in the garden. I had never worked on such a vast canvas. Endless. And I was able to close the circle my father had opened when we went on walks to gather the elements we needed to make our own paints. I was returning to nature the pigments it had given me.
The work I am most pleased with is the river that skirts the studio and leads into the forest. One day, seated on the bank, I was inspired to begin painting its pebbles. I’ve been doing it ever since. Stretch by stretch, yard by yard, I have turned the riverbed into a canvas of unpredictable stone, because the water, the iridescence of the colors, shadows, and reflections make every moment unique and surprising. It was also Alma’s favorite project. That was why she asked me, if she died before I did, to mix her ashes in with the pigments and paint the pebbles of her beloved spot, beneath the poplar where she liked to sit and read, or look out at the landscape.
I’m sure Erika would have found it ludicrous. Particularly once her typical bursts of enthusiasm had begun to lead her down into the catacombs. It started with isolated, abstract references to “the new birth of the fatherland” and the “renewal of lost hope.” Rhetoric that, gradually, became more concrete in the “great events that await us” beneath the protection of the “glorious leader” and the need to “cleanse society of undesirable elements.” As undesirable as Konrad’s Jewish friends, whom she wouldn’t allow into the house. It turns my stomach when I think of it.“Why won’t you let me play with Heini?” Konrad would ask her, confused.“Because it’s what’s best for you,” Erika would respond. And she considered the matter settled.
Her family wasn’t much help. When Erika’s father got wind of the profits involved, he didn’t hesitate to put the family factory to work for the war machine, disguising his eagerness to increase his personal fortune with an unbearable charade. It left my father very disenchanted; he never understood how his lifelong friend could be so unscrupulous.“We can never truly know people,” he declared. Then he shook his head, his disappointment written on his face.“Who would have thought it,” he added. “Bürckel sucking up to those scoundrels.” He died without ever comprehending it. And without forgiving him.
And there I was, in a fine fix. Living with Erika, protecting Konrad, painting against the grain, trying to detach myself from the fanatical crowd, keep myself on the margins of all that senselessness. . I still don’t know how I was able to stand it for so long. The hardest part was living with Erika when we no longer shared anything. We barely even shared responsibility for Konrad, because each of us, firmly convinced of our own ideas, went our own way. Poor Konrad. I remember as if it were yesterday the first time I secretly brought him to my studio so he could play with his friend Heini. I’d never seen him so confused. “What about Mom. . What’s Mom going to say?” he asked me. “Nothing. Because she doesn’t have to know about it, right?” I answered him. But not everything was that simple. At school, the marching lines of little Hitler admirers, the uniforms, his classmates, his lessons. . Everything was reason enough to get into an argument with Erika. It is hard to accept that someone you’ve loved madly can become a stranger. Or worse than a stranger: an enemy.
My father said that he had only argued with my mother once. It was over the photograph of the three of us on Rügen. It seems it vanished shortly after the photographer they’d met on the island’s cliffs sent them the copy he’d promised. Convinced that it was my mother’s fault, since she’d been spending all day rummaging through drawers and folders to put together my album, he goaded her so much that they ended up fighting. He admitted that he should have held his tongue, but he was so agitated that it fogged his judgment. “It’s so hard to meet the challenges of each situation,” he told me.“Your mother was dying and I got mad over something so inconsequential.” Actually I have a hard time believing that was their only disagreement. And that my mother, as he claimed, was the only love of his life, because it doesn’t tally with the contents of a bundle of letters, written by someone named Birgit, that I found when emptying out my father’s study after his death. But memory is like that. It tends to deform our recollections to adapt them to the image we’ve created or want to give of ourselves, or of the people we’ve loved.
I don’t know how many times Alma fell in love before she met me. It wasn’t exactly one of her favorite topics of conversation. She only mentioned Jakob Reger, whom she described as “my own private vaudeville” the first time she told me about him. She met him shortly after arriving in Vienna, during the first rehearsals at the Literatur am Naschmarkt, and, from what she said, it was like nothing she had ever experienced before. The minute she saw him she felt she could have done anything for him.“As stupid but marvelous as that,” she added with the ironic tone she used when she wanted to protect herself from the sadness some memories evoked in her. Jakob had what she most admired: convictions and enough imagination and courage to turn them into furious attacks against everything he found reprehensible, but he was a hothead and a womanizer. They lived together for a few weeks in Alma’s attic with views of the Danube where, as she told me, they “fucked as if there was no tomorrow,” but he dumped her callously for another actress in the cabaret. Horribly jealous, Alma humiliated herself to get him back, to such an extent that she remembered it with a mix of rage and shame. She followed him around, threatened him, screamed at him. I find it hard to believe when I think of the Alma I met a few years later, so distant and even-keeled but, as she would often say,“it’s frightening how love can dredge up the worst in us.”