Wolfgang Heidenreich (1992)
I’m envisioning an artist whose work, in all its motifs, phases and manifestations, is to be understood not as a changeable composite enterprise, but as an entity, as different forms of expression of a single genuine ‘vital impetus’. And in this instance I am actually referencing the key concept of Henri Bergson’s élan vital; and while it may have since fallen by the wayside, during the era of artistic and literary Expressionism it was truly on everyone’s lips. The idea referred to a creative force which, in evolution for example, drives life forwards against the resistance of brute matter, towards the diversity of forms or, in the myriad forms of expression in art, counteracts all disintegrating elements.
Karlsruhe, 1919 – the year of the artist’s birth in a Residenzstadt devoid of a grand duke following the failed revolution. What does a child who has fled the Goethe School and wishes to become a stage set designer feel and experience? And whose influence? In 1935, aged 16, he is admitted to the Karlsruhe Academy to study under Trübner’s disciple Hermann Goebel and finds himself growing up before his time, in a most un-bourgeois way.
In the ideological clashes between the Spitzpinsler and the Flachpinsler [sharp-brush vs. flat-brush artists], the Hakenkreuzler [Nazi sympathisers] of the calibre of Hans Adolf Bühler and the Französlinge [French sympathisers] in the style of Courbet or even Corinth, he learned from his well-informed tutor Hermann Goebel how to enhance whites, how to glaze and how to acquire the mettle to develop his own, unencumbered gaze; he also had his first exhibition and sold his first portrait.
Bert Jäger then enrolled in the ‘school of life’ at the Vogels, a cultured Jewish family where he learnt about many things, many ways of thinking as well as discovering spiritual and intellectual horizons. When these friends emigrated in 1936, the seventeen-year-old travelled to Heidelberg to the Karlsruhe-born Jewish poet Alfred Mombert, in a bid perhaps to atone for the prevailing evil spirits that had forced his mutual friends to take flight abroad – a test of maturity in non-conformism, a pivotal moment for the risky step towards the frowned-upon side of partisan humaneness.
Then came the outbreak of the war, German aggression, military service and occupation in Poland and Russia. Traumatic experiences of inhuman violence. A bullet that shattered his leg. Convalescing at a military hospital in Vienna, Jäger would secretly drag himself over to the Art Academy on crutches.
During his captivity, he had begun to draw once again: on postcards, the faces of his fellow POWs, portraits sketches of recollections and survival, as accurate and lifelike as possible.
Aged 30, he returned to something called home that was now foreign to him.
From 1954 onwards, he participated in group exhibitions at home and abroad; from 1958, he received a number of ‘art-in-architecture’ commissions; then, from 1960, solo exhibitions.
During his sojourns in Liguria, he experienced a place where he was able to step out of himself and set in motion ‘from the outside’ a particular world, a world of his own. He produced 25,700 slides, 25,700 rays of light cast into the momentary state of reality. He wrote stories, two extensive novels, and poetic texts. All of which represents the survival oeuvre of an artistic consciousness that never loses touch with itself, whether photographing, writing or – as now – sketching and painting once more in an incredibly relaxed and self-confident manner. On this new chapter in the oeuvre of Bert Jäger I would like to quote from Elias Canetti’s notebook jottings (The Human Province – 1942 to 1972): »A principle of art: to rediscover more than has been lost.«