Murnau Castle Museum displays HAP Grieshaber’s handprints

Fortunately, there are Murnau As a major Munich newspaper recently revealed, not only did many corona deniers watch a conspiracy theory film about the pandemic in the local cinema, but also in the castle museum. This is a credit to the Blue Land community with 12,000 inhabitants. Sandra Uhrig, who runs the gallery, which focuses on the paintings of Gabriele Münter, is currently facing a budget freeze and Murnau has to save money. But it is not easy to be open all year round. Recently, 50,000 visitors have come to visit every year.

Since 2016, Uhrig has been searching for the Grieshaber prints now on display. crown She also abandoned her plans. A small revival of Grieshaber has now begun, with recent exhibitions dedicated to the artist in Wiesbaden and Kinzelsau. The Castle Museum features 30 exhibits in two rooms, mainly woodcuts by Helmut Andreas Paul Grieshaber, who was born in Rot an der Rot in 1909 and created between 1950 and 1960.

During these years he taught at the private Bernstein School in Sulz am Neckar and in 1953 he married Riccarda Gohr (stage name Ralf Gregor), with whom he raised two children. In 1954 he held his first major solo exhibition and in 1955 Grishaber moved to the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts as successor to Erich Heckel. In 1960 he became embroiled in a controversy over examination regulations dating back to the National Socialist era. His students, most notably Horst Antes, praised Grishaber’s teaching ethos – he would not impose anything on anyone.

At the age of thirty, jobless Grieshaber moved around the world for two years: England, Greece and Egypt. The trained printer and typesetter made ends meet with odd jobs, but the Nazis fired him in 1933, considering him a politically insecure canton. In Germany, in his hometown of Reutlingen, he was banned from any artistic activities and was the victim of harassment on several occasions. Grieshaber continued to work under the radar, printing very small prints. For example, the shepherd god Pan from 1939, a theme he returned to again and again. He survived the war and captivity in Belgium and moved to the local Achaemun in Reutlingen.

Despite the sparse living conditions of Grishaber, there was one thing he would never give up – his political instincts, his contradictory spirit. He was a pacifist, peace activist and conservationist. The day after the outbreak of the Korean War, he hung up the picture “Korean Mother” in Reutlingen. It showed a shrunken face in a black headscarf, with only lines for eyes and a mouth, and five lines of text below, beginning with “Peace to all mothers!” Signed by the “Local Committee of the Reutlingen Peace Fighters Committee”. It had only one member.

In the 1950s, Grieshaber took the art of woodcutting, which had flourished only sporadically since the Middle Ages, to new heights. Working in unprecedented large formats, he created prints measuring one by two meters, and through his expressive application of color, he brought the genre into a league of its own, somewhere between panel painting and sculpture. The exhibition includes a SWR video showing Grieshaber at work in 1964, a violent man, manipulating wood with knives, circular saws, bender, milling machine, and soldering irons, and applying paint repeatedly to printing blocks using high-energy physical effort. He cited sadness as the primary driving force of his art.

But Grishaber also made room for erotic, often biological, elements. He used motifs from the many animals that live on the Aham River, including chow chows, pot-bellied pigs, and rhesus monkeys. He repeatedly considered the changing seasons; his autumn pictures used moss green, fawn, pale ochre, Russian green, terracotta, and Indian yellow.

One of the most convincing works is the triptych “African Passion”, whose side panels show dancing Africans and dancing Arabs, and are wider than the narrow “Rocket Man” in the center, a technological robot, a symbolic figure pointing out that Africa will neither suffer from the Cold War nor escape it. The colors of the prints are fixed to the era in which they were created, but have enough gestural potential to be detected by those born later. Grishaber’s attitude is very much in keeping with our times. One would like to see his posters against the corona deniers.

Printing is an adventure. HAP GRISHABER (1909–1981). Handprints from the 1950s. Murnau Castle Museum, until November 10. No catalogue.