Visual arts: Werner Tübke: A potentate in his own dream realm

Werner Tübke, born in 1929 in Schönebeck on the Elbe, traveled to Italy in 1971. As a delegate for GDR art, he comes to a country that needs foreign currency, otherwise the grapes in Arcadia will grow too high for the East Germans. The south belongs to the west. But Tübke is not coming as a vacationer anyway, but as a business traveler, albeit on his own behalf. Tübke, who is notorious for his meticulous craftsmanship and productivity, finds the subjects here that he searched in vain between Leipzig and Magdeburg.

Italy has been a controversial topic in German art since the 18th century. Some traveled because they wanted to see the traces of the Renaissance (reborn antiquity) with their own eyes, these were the classics – but others, the romantics of the 19th century, experienced the South with all their senses as an alternative to the cold and dark Germany. Here, if necessary, you could just lie lazily in the sun (or, if it was too strong on the viewer’s head, in the shade) and indulge in your dreams. This is the fantastic image of Italy that Eichendorff cultivated with his story “From the Life of a Good-for-nothing”. In the south, most things grow on their own, you don’t always have to work, you have the leisure to look around! This is all part of the complex longing image of Italy that haunts us.

Above all, Tübke came to Milan in 1971 because his first exhibition in Italy was taking place here. Emilio Bertonati (whom he portrayed as a thank you in 1975) organizes this in his Galleria del Levante. The exhibition then travels via Florence to Rome and makes Tübke famous in one fell swoop. What an award for the painter, who was to be released from the University of Graphics and Book Arts in Leipzig in 1968! The suspicion of formalism, that is, of deviation from Zhdanov’s socialist realism, which determined the entire Ulbricht era, still hangs over him – and if he is honest, not without reason. For him, art is by no means a replication of an external reality, but rather the creation of his own inner world. The painter acts according to his dramaturgical requirements, as if in a theater of images. Art can hardly be more artificial. The Theatrum mundi, the world theater that he would effectively stage in the Bad Frankenhausen Peasants’ War Panorama in the 80s, is already preoccupying him here.

His painting cycle “Memoirs of Dr. jur. Schulze« (1965–1967) uses collage elements and explodes the given space-time frame in a previously unknown way. At this first exhibition in Italy, Tübke insists that his cutting-edge historical narrative about the complicity of the intelligentsia in the crimes of fascism, which he describes in “Dr. jur. Schulze« is the subject of the exhibition – and the audience is impressed. Because this also hits the nerve of Italy in dealing with its own history.

So here comes no mere Italian enthusiast, but a clear analytical mind whose pictures reveal history’s demonic side. And here he continues to advance the synthesis of world theater and self-staging. What is only inadequately described by the label Mannerism, which is often attached to him to this day, opens up a new – double – perspective on Italy and himself as a German painter in the midst of this contested imaginary historical landscape.

You can now see this for yourself in the impressive exhibition “Tübke and Italy” (curated by Frank Zöllner and Stefan Weppelmann), which is being shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig. Two tendencies become visible. The first: Of Tübke’s approximately 400 paintings, around 60 have an Italian subject. The second: There are 288 self-portraits by Tübke, some of which have been distorted in a historical manner. The latter seems record-breaking. Is he a narcissist? He obviously sees it as a proof of himself as an artist: I put my image against that of everyone else. Correspondingly self-confident, often downright vain – as in “Self-Portrait with a Red Cap” from 1988, he looks down at the viewer from the canvas. Even with a gold crown and a red royal cloak in “Family portrait with Sicilian puppet armor” from 1977. But this kind of hubris, which was in no way meant to be ironic, seems to have been a form of emancipation for him: someone doesn’t want to be a servile painter at court, but a potentate in his own dream kingdom .

The exhibition organizers repeatedly complement Tübke’s pictures with corresponding works by other artists who inspired him, such as the “Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand” by Jacopo Pontormo and Agnolo Bronzino from 1529, which became a model for Tübke in his composition of crowds, or – from the GDR painting – Wilhelm Lachnit’s “Italian Landscape” from 1957, which radically breaks with the traditional picture perspective.

Tübke gets his self-confidence in Italy. It follows the Renaissance painters, roaming through times and regions as if history were one big carnival. One painting becomes particularly important for the transition into the regions of the grotesque: “Death in Venice” from 1973. The canals and gondolas of the lagoon city become the backdrop for a hellish trip: two blue horses pull the gondola of an already skeletal cardinal, the giant bat wing grow from the shoulders.

With unbridled stubbornness, Tübke now paints one symbol after another. The simultaneous nature of life and death fascinates him, inspired not least by the mummies that he sees in Sicily, exhibited like attractions. He also sees his art as an oscillation between worlds, as a baroque memento mori. It is typical for Tübke that he brings the broadening of his horizons that he experienced in Italy with him to the GDR. In 1975 he painted the triptych “Man – the Measure of All Things”, a commission for the Palace of the Republic. Using the painterly means like an old master, he acts with unheard of impudence against the simple ideology of a bright socialist future. Here we see an upper and a lower part of the picture panels. The cheerful upper world of the living rests on the dark underworld of the dead!

A central work of Tübke’s is his famous “Sicilian Landowner with Marionettes” from 1972. A view as if through a peephole onto a stage, which shows an elegantly dressed figure leaning casually against the parapet of a terrace. A dandy with upper-class airs. Behind him, the image section reveals the classic Italian landscape, to the right and left of which bizarre dolls hanging from threads against a red background guard the highly artificial arrangement. This late period is very humid – and you wait for the thunderstorm in which it will discharge. This large-format work unfolds a magic in the original that no reproduction even comes close to conveying.

Here the painter is already working on his major late work, which he will create over years of work in Bad Frankenhausen. As with Hieronymus Bosch, people in the story are plagued by visions in which death and the devil wreak havoc. But he continues to struggle for an expression that identifies him as an actor in the world theater.

“Tübke and Italy”, Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig, until June 16th