The painting is only 25 x 20, but I could spend hours looking at it. The whole top part is filled with gray, dense clouds, heavy with rain, over a crest of snowy mountains. Behind the Madonna, to the right, among the birch trees, there is a town beside a lake. Despite the distance, you can make out the red roofs, the ogival windows, the spire of the bell tower, the smoke from the chimneys. . Someone, sitting by the water, contemplates the reflection of the homes on its surface. Further on, atop a cliff, stands a castle. A short wall separates the three figures from the idyllic landscape in the background. My father was right when he spoke about the balance between the whole and the parts: the threatening clouds and the placidity of the town intensify the loneliness and helplessness of the fugitives fleeing toward Egypt. To the left, on one of the stones of the wall, Cranach had placed his unmistakable signature: a dragon with its wings outstretched. Later, after the death of his eldest son, he folded them as a sign of his mourning. I wish I had such a simple and eloquent image to express the weight of all the absences in my life.
What color is longing? My father and I would play at assigning feelings a color: hunger, jealousy, anger, shame, melancholy. . As we strolled along the street or watched the flames in the fireplace, one of us would say a word and the other would answer with a color. “Thirst?” “Purple.” “Boredom?” “Gray.” And when, in the evening, it got late, my father would always end the same way. “Bedtime?” I never knew how to answer. I would get into bed and fall asleep thinking about it. Not like now, when insomnia has me trapped in a wasteland, lost between day and night. What color is insomnia? Fear? Sadness?
Contemplated from its end, when the vision of the whole endows each moment with its true importance, existence transforms into a geometric figure. In my case, a six-pointed star, like Laugel’s chromatic one, in which each vertex, instead of a color — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet — points to an irrefutable epicenter of my life story. Perhaps, I now realized, the moment that would give meaning to my life isn’t a keystone, but the point where the lines uniting the vertices of the star meet. And, as in my father’s game, I would like to die knowing the color of each one. Right now, I only know the color of Alma’s. Blue, not just any blue, but the blue of the quarries in Badakhshan. Or the skies in Rubens’s paintings. The color of breathable air.
Shapes and colors. Like always. As a boy, I could spend hours copying postcards, posters, and illustrations found in the most unlikely places. I especially loved the drawings by Grützner and Von Menzel in magazines like Universum, Gartenlaube or my favorite, Jugend, because I believed they achieved the highest aim of painting: the faithful reflection of reality. I filled up a pile of folders with family interiors, gallant scenes, and streets with carriages and couples walking arm in arm. All very stilted and tawdry. Until my father insisted I study. “If you do it, do it right” was one of his favorite sayings. On my fifteenth birthday, his gift was private drawing classes to prepare me for the entrance test to the Fine Arts Academy.“You like to draw, huh? Fine, if you do it, do it right. You can’t learn it all from copying magazines.” For weeks, I had to wrestle with a bunch of plaster figures. I was used to working from illustrations and at first I didn’t get the appeal of drawing from those dusty little statuettes but, little by little, I began to enjoy it. For the exam, which lasted a couple of days, I had to copy a bust of Seneca, and I suppose, even though I found it quite difficult, that I did a pretty good job, because they admitted me into the introductory course.
I don’t have fond memories of my three years at the Academy. The worst was Professor Müller’s class because his military severity made things very difficult. We could spend days and days doing the same still life over and over. He would walk between our easels and all he had to do was point to some detail in our drawing to leave us breathless, waiting for his verdict, which was almost never favorable.“That’s not art or anything even remotely close to it” was his way of saying “Start again.” He was an inflexible and spiteful man, for whom there was only one way of understanding art: his way. And he defended it tactlessly, with an insulting disdain for those who didn’t share his view. I wasn’t surprised that, when the Nazis came to power, he used his position as rector of the Academy to enthusiastically collaborate in the purging of teachers hostile to the regime. Sooner or later, everything fits together. The pieces of the puzzle, as if attracted by a magnet, assume their rightful places. Before Hofer’s visit, I had never faced a gaze as penetrating and evil as Professor Müller’s. Or maybe I had, but only one. The gaze of Sergeant Forkel in the trenches at the Somme.
Yet over time I’ve realized that, although I didn’t agree with the way he expressed it, Professor Müller was right when he lectured on technique and discipline. In order to learn how to paint, or anything else, you have to be humble enough to recognize your weaknesses and persistent enough to overcome them. It would have been good to have other Professor Müllers to teach me how to forget, how to lose, how to resign myself. . And how to die. Because none of the deaths that I’ve experienced is useful now, as I try to confront my own. Other people’s deaths don’t count. Not even my father’s or Alma’s. The deaths during wartime don’t count either: the instant death from a bullet to the head; the slow, mournful death of an injured man abandoned in no-man’s-land; the death of a mutilated body eased by morphine. . Or the worst of all deaths, when you can no longer take any more: the one that ignores you and leaves you alive among corpses. Not a scratch on you and feeling guilty for the air that, whether you want it to or not, insists on entering and leaving your lungs in jagged bursts. Perhaps then I could have used Professor Müller’s severe gaze as he said “This isn’t death or anything even remotely close to it,” but, alone and lost like now, all I had to cling to was a horizon of flames.
Luckily, the artistic scene in Dresden made up for the weaknesses of the Academy. At the cultural gatherings and exhibitions we forgot the rigidity of the classes and shared, with no explanations necessary, our need to take risks. Any and every experiment was received with curiosity, and our eagerness to learn had us running from one gallery to the next. If someone asked me which were my favorite exhibitions, there were two essential ones: the Van Gogh at the Galerie Arnold and the Matisse at the Palais de Tokyo, at the 1910 Salon d’Automne. Even though I’ve never seen them displayed again, my pulse starts racing when I think of Music and Dance. The five figures. The three colors: the blue of the sky, the green of the hills and the red of the bodies. That was all. But it was enough to get me talking a blue streak about them. About their simplicity, the balance, the light, the purity. . Until my father stopped me. “Thank goodness there were only three colors. .” he said with a smile, because, deep down, he was proud of my enthusiasm. He couldn’t hide it. After all, he was the one who had nurtured that excitement. Ever since I was a very small boy, he had taken me to museums and art exhibitions all over. He could have left me with my grandparents and traveled on his own, but instead he chose to share his passion with me. And he made an effort to make it appealing to me. He would transform the characters in the paintings into stories: Orpheus’s descent into hell, the death of Beatrice, Ophelia’s madness. . And the names of the pigments, often so enigmatic, infiltrated the dimly-lit museum galleries. Even though I couldn’t understand how the urine of an Indian cow could become a “sublime yellow” or how the burned bark of a birch tree could survive, as if by the art of magic, in the shadows of a Van Dyck, I was dying to know more. I could never get enough.