LUDWIG MEIDNER - a recollection by H. W. Sabais

One cannot recall, without emotion, the incident at Recklinghausen when during a lecture on the Jewish artists of the twenties, the speaker mentioned Meidner and expressed his fear that he too, like so many of his generation, had become a victim of the murderous hatred of Nazi mediocrity and now at that very moment a small corpulent gentleman rose from the audience and said that he was Ludwig Meidner. He had again been living for years in Germany without drawing attention to himself as a glorious rebel. Nor was he about to be opportunistic and have people canonize him after his rediscovery.

When someone, probably moved by a troubled conscience, wanted to praise the aged master as a German and a Jew, Meidner replied, declining sarcastically: "I am a fanatical Central Sillesian.''

He was born on April 18th, 1884, in Bernstadt, Kreis Oels, in a spot which the gods had set aside, as he put it, for potatoes and sugar beets. His parents ran a textile business that had been in the family for a century. The Meidners had come as Jewish refugees from Bohemia to Silesia during the fifteenth century. Silesian tolerance in which Germans, Poles, Jews and Czechs managed to live together gave them a new home. What Meidner owed to this new home was outlined in 1932 by the writer and mystagogue Theodor Fritsch: ''He owes it his mystic love of nature and landscape, his inwardness ("Innigkeit''), his intensity of feeling and the pious joy in the creation of his works… he owes it the purity of his heart, the honest acknowledgement of the traditions of his fathers and the great simplicity of his soul whose unswerving search was never troubled by considerations of want or fame. He owes it the strength to have dedicated, with resignation, his honest and straightforward artistic existence to the highest possible goal, the divine, at the moment when he was most productive and most widely recognized."

Undoubtedly, Ludwig Meidner was shaped by the spirit of his homeland; such influences were, however, supranational, and never provincial. But the artist's true homeland is art itself. When Meidner was still very young and a student in the Breslau Academy at the Monastery of Leubus (Oder), that cradle of Silesian culture, founded in the 12th century by the Piast Duke Boleslaus, he discovered his true origin when he looked at the Martyrdom of the Apostles by the great Baroque painter Michael Willmann. He described this awakening experience: "The monastery chapel with its painted marks of fire ignited a torch in my jubilant breast.''

Henceforth, ecstasy and vision, handed on like a torch from the Baroque Age to the unimaginative desert of the beginning of the century determined the creative pathos of Ludwig Meidner. In 1912, after years of study in Paris, he formed with the Silesian artists' group "Die Pathetiker" ("Men of Pathos") in Berlin. Exhibited by Herwath Walden and prophetically designated as a great talent by Kurt Hiller, the twenty?eight year old Ludwig Meidner assumed his unmistakable place in German art history. His hymnic prose poems Im Nacken clas Sternenmeer" and "Septemberschrei" which he wrote as a soldier in World War 1 had made him into a key figure of Expressionism. After the war, Berlin became his home. The dynamics of this metropolis which inspired his liveliest works made him into the portraitist of contemporary literature. His favourite subject was the passionate landscape of the human face. He painted an almost limitless number of self portraits, probably as a way of putting his conscience to scrutiny. At the same time he abandoned more and more boisterous fame of his early years. Ecstasy as creative impetus was filtered into religiosity. Alien enough to their own time, Meidner's works were called "entartete Kunst" ("degenerate art") in 1933, as if his German Baroque forerunners had never been exhibited anywhere. Until August 1939 Meidner worked as an art teacher in a Jewish school in Cologne. A British artist enabled him, virtually in the last minute, to emigrate to England. Visually he lived in the fantastic world of William Blake but his heart remained rooted in a poetic German atmosphere, which caused those around him to wonder. At age 55, friends invited him back and he returned in order to remain "where German is spoken and written". In a simple studio at Marxiheirn (Taunus) he made his peace with solitude. Paintings and drawings were his life, his only life, and for whom and why and toward what goal he was working are irrelevant questions. The last years of his life were spent in Darmstadt near Kasimir Edmschmid, a friend from his stormy youth. Before he could move into a studio apartment intended for his use he died on May 14, 1966. His son, a member of an Israel kibbutz, buried him according to the rites of his fathers in the Jewish cemetery.

Interviewed at eighty, Meidner confessed that he had wanted to become the third greatest (pencil) draftsman in art history after Ingres and Menzei but had realised that he could not make it. Not a word about his pen and charcoal drawings. We know that the resignation which comes with old age prevented his having his entire oeuvre before his mind's eye. Or was it rather the humility of the orthodox Jew? Or simply some cunning tomfoolery which he was always able to mask with complete seriousness? Be that as it may, whatever Meidner, from 1912 onward, gave to his age in signatures and drawings established him as an artist of the first order. And that is saying something in our culture where, for centuries, the good draftsmen have traditionally outranked the good painters.

It was in 1912 when Chagall remarked that Meidner was talented but crazy. Chagall was just as crazy, only in another way. During this most significant year in his personal life, Meidner, for whatever reasons, from hunger perhaps or from despair, had a private revolutionary vision of the Holy Spirit that made him into a life long hermit. This vision also protected him from following diverse demagogues, as did many of his contemporaries. Later Meidner would move his strange Baroque prophets into a white void. A primordial naive trust in God seemed to have delivered him from the apocalypses of his youth. He experienced the catastrophe of World War II and his Jewish destiny with hostility and deep pessimism in an enigmatic distance from his fellowmen. He was anchored in mysticism, outside of himself. In the end, being half prince of wisdom and half Diogenes, he gave to his portraits a consuming similarity of countenance, captured green?flowing desolation in his landscapes, and in his still lifes scattered light and colour upon precisely calculated banalities. They are late pictures, quite removed from time, and we should not lightly state that they are strange to us; perhaps it is we who are strange before them. The hand of the master is clearly discernible in them. Perhaps this is art in a state of suspension. Let this reflection accompany Meidner's late work. Who are we today to know of its ultimate destination.

H. W. Sabais, Darmstadt, September 1972