Who's afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue?
Images of the Exhibition
Description
The sublime is the human being who, as a viewer, is able to think the subjective content evoked by the artwork that the artist projected into it.
– Barnett Newman, 1949
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue? The title of the exhibition refers to four paintings by the American artist and leading figure of Abstract Expressionism Barnett Newman (1905–1970). With the original title Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, Newman referenced the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, which premiered on Broadway in 1962; this in turn was based on the children’s song Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Newman’s four variations, executed as monochrome fields in the primary colors, were created from 1966–1970, essentially as an art-theoretical dialogue with Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. They are considered major works of Abstract Expressionism and are now housed in four different collections between Los Angeles and Berlin.
Regarding his fundamental color field problem “Red, Yellow, and Blue,” the painter summarized in 1969: “It was shortly after I had established the red main body that the color problem became decisive—only the colors yellow and blue were possible. At that moment I realized I was facing the dogma that color had to be reduced to the primary constellation. Just as I had opposed other dogmatic positions of the purists, neo-plasticists, and other formalists, I was now confronting their dogma, which burdened red, yellow, and blue with a kind of mortgage, transforming these colors into an idea and thereby destroying them as colors. That gave me a double incentive to use exactly these colors to express my intentions—to use them more expressively than didactically and to free them from their mortgage. Why should anyone be afraid of red, yellow, and blue?”
Newman’s canvases became increasingly monumental thereafter. The fourth and final version, now in the collection of the Berlin National Gallery, is the largest of the unframed acrylic paintings, measuring 274.3 x 604.5 cm. In 1982, it was acquired from the artist’s estate despite massive public protests, including death threats against then-director Dieter Honisch. On April 13, 1982, the newly acquired work was so badly damaged by a student attack that it could only be re-hung in the Mies van der Rohe building in January 1985 after an elaborate restoration.
Not infrequently, Newman’s monumental images were declared the endpoint of painting. Everything said, everything painted. But for the Berlin artists who organized themselves from 1977 in the so-called Galerie am Moritzplatz, this new painting was by no means the end—on the contrary, it was just the beginning. Bernd Zimmer in particular repeatedly referred explicitly to Barnett Newman:
“My rapeseed fields were the answer to Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.”
The Galerie am Moritzplatz included, among others, Anne Jud, Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salomé, and Bernd Zimmer. In a floor space in Berlin-Kreuzberg, directly behind the Berlin Wall, an exhibition community emerged at the time that showcased not only painting but also photography, film, and performance. The adjective “wild,” often attached to these artists, really only applies in the sense that these mid-twenty-somethings led genuinely wild lives in the city that never slept—something that found its way into their painting as visual ideas.
The debut at Moritzplatz was given by Salomé (b. 1954 in Karlsruhe): in garters, on a bed covered in pink silk and roses. The performance was simply titled On the Rose Bed. Salomé made himself, his body, and sexuality the center of his art, continually developing his painting with new series and pictorial ideas. He is best known today for his swimmer and water lily paintings from the 1980s. Rainer Fetting (b. 1949 in Wilhelmshaven) showed his first wall paintings at his Moritzplatz premiere. His subject, one of the most famous structures in the world, was for him the view from his window: the gray Berlin Wall became the projection surface for his painting. He brought dynamism to the surface with a freer, more energetic brushstroke and expanded his repertoire to include the human figure. Of the Berlin painters around Moritzplatz, Fetting is probably the one most connected to the European painting tradition. He frequently works within the classic genres of portrait and nude, referencing figures like Vincent van Gogh, Francis Bacon, or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in his titles, compositions, and brushwork.
Helmut Middendorf (b. 1953 in Dinklage), like Salomé, studied under Prof. K. H. Hödicke. In his early years at the University of the Arts, he created short, punchy, conceptual films using a Super 8 camera. Eventually, he brought the experience of the “urban native” into focus in his painting. The flat, almost perspective-less painting reveals the origin of his motifs: whether photographic or mental images, Middendorf’s sources come from the nocturnal metropolis, which only appears to the eye as a silhouette in the dark. The electrified inhabitants, captured in snapshots—so-called “stills” or “frozen images”—complete the overall image of the city and the artist’s personal experience of it.
Just as we have accepted the new mathematics, the new symbolic logic, and the new physics as the beginning of a new worldview, we must accept the new painting as the beginning of a new understanding of beauty.
– Barnett Newman, 1945
Above the studio of Anne Jud (1953 Lucerne – 2016 Santa Barbara, USA) and Bernd Zimmer (b. 1948 in Planegg) on Naunynstraße in Berlin-Kreuzberg, painter Bernd Koberling was at work. He introduced Zimmer to dispersion painting. The emulsion mix was cheaper than oil and, due to the short drying time, promoted the fast, gestural brushstroke that became stylistically formative in Hödicke’s class.
With his landscapes, Zimmer developed a dialectical counterpart to the images of the punk and subculture scene. No less provocative, he sought to test how far “New Painting” could go. More than any of his Berlin peers, he oriented himself toward the proponents of color field painting that had emerged in the US around the New York School in the mid-1950s. Zimmer would later see his color fields as the actual breakthrough of his painting and, at the same time, as a kind of preliminary farewell to the Berlin scene around Moritzplatz.
While Fetting, Middendorf, Salomé, and Zimmer mainly stood out through their painting, Anne Jud was particularly interested in the performative act as artistic expression. The Swiss-born artist had trained in acting in Zurich and Vienna and came to Berlin in 1974. At the Wagenbach publishing house, which among others had published the Red Book On Armed Struggle in Western Europe (1971)—the so-called RAF manifesto—she met Bernd Zimmer. After a joint trip through Mexico and the USA, her first works with one-dollar bills were created in Berlin. She created entire paintings with US currency, designed dollar fashion along with matching catwalks, and covered high heels and furniture pieces—one-dollar bills all over.
When Thomas Kempas, then director of the Berlin Haus am Waldsee, offered Middendorf, Fetting, Salomé, and Zimmer an exhibition in the Zehlendorf villa in 1980, it was the first time the gallery was split into a group of painters and a group of non-painters. The exhibition marked a breakthrough for some of the artists. Heiner Bastian, buying for the Marx Collection, purchased works by Salomé and Fetting. From Switzerland came gallerists Thomas Ammann and Bruno Bischofberger, Yvon Lambert arrived from Paris, and Enzo Canaviello from Milan. Zimmer returned in the midst of the boom to paint in the Bavarian uplands, Fetting and Salomé traveled the world, and Middendorf rented a studio in Berlin where he produced large-format paintings. Anne Jud finally met her future husband on a flight to visit Salomé, who from 1984 split his time between Berlin and Los Angeles, and she moved to the USA.
The natural longing of humans to express their relationship to the Absolute through the arts was identified and confused with the absolutism of perfect creations—with the fetish of quality—so that ever since, the European artist has been caught in the moral conflict between the idea of beauty and the longing for the sublime.
– Barnett Newman, 1948
Text: Franziska Leuthäußer
Photo credit: Produktion Pitz
