100th birthday of Erich Buchholz - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1991 - 60 Pfennig

Erich Buchholz, born in 1891 in the then Prussian Bydgoszcz, continued his studies as an elementary school teacher from 1911 to 1915 with the training in painting with Lovis Corinth in Berlin. His graphic and painterly work begins in the time style marked as expressionist. Franz Marc is his role model. But in 1918, as he himself reports, the first abstract, that is to say non-objective, drawing arose during the first public concert after the end of World War II in Berlin. "My real birth was in 1919, at the age of twenty-eight, in self-procreation through torture," he writes in his life report. "My very beginning began in the times of the great birth pangs: the interim period in which man found himself was in no way bound to certain circles, despite all concern for the everyday. The cut went straight through the human substance itself. The time was out of joint. "With the exhibition in the gallery" Sturm "in Berlin, Potsdamer Strasse at Herwarth Walden in December 1921, he presents an overview of his work with 46 works, including six Paintings titled "Lines of force" and 16 wood reliefs, for discussion. His studio, Herkulesufer 15, will be the meeting place for such important artists and architects as Richard Hülsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Péri, Moholy Nagy, Mies van der Rohe, Hilberseimer, Poelzig and the Taut brothers. In his pictures, Erich Buchholz aims at a surface order made up of equal-ranking geometric elements. He succeeds in creating a pictorial form that he characterizes as »concrete« and »absolute abstraction« independently of the results of the Dutch Stijl movement by Mondrian and van Doesburg and of Russian suprematism around Malevich and Lissitzky. In these years, Berlin is the center of a development of the art of this century, which sets the artistic forms of expression in painting, sculpture, typography, product design, and architecture in relation to one another as a prerequisite of planning design against the gestural expressionism of Expressionism. Berlin is the center of an "international" of the arts, as El Lissitzky confirms on the occasion of a studio visit in 1922 to Erich Buchholz. The significance of the artistic work is determined by the intensity with which it was developed in a few years from 1918 to 1924. Equally independent and communicable with the great designs of visual thinking in the sphere of a "non-objective world," it represents a major contribution to twentieth-century art. »Three Gold Circles in the Full Circle of Blue«, 1922: This composition of the basic forms circle and rectangle with their phase-like, interlocking movements, the interaction between reason and figure, is an exemplary work in the oeuvre of the artist and for the beginning of the concrete art of this century. In the arrangement of the forms of the wood relief prevails the risky order, which is produced less by computable rules, but according to the claim, which sets each partial moment to the cohesion of the whole. Such order, determined by Erich Buchholz as "organic," remains in the state of becoming. The image idea is an attempt to find identity between the two contradictory forms of circle and rectangular field, which counteract the contradictions of form in the balanced harmony of a fictitious figure. The observation that the wood relief "Three Gold Circles in the Full Circle Blue" reveals, namely that the surfaces stacked in three levels and the interlocking of the forms yield what the artist himself calls an "irrational space" transmits this rationally comprehensible through and through the experiential level of the poetic. The arrangement of the gold - ground circles, the staggering of the rectangular forms, the blue circle in the blue picture background in front of the framing field of white and the framing background of staggered rectangles at the same time, the alternation of opening and closing framing forms, each of the individual figures inserted is in the area geometry dimension and in the illusion spatial position to each other not clearly determinable. The image becomes the scene of a vision continually moving and yet in the entirety of the image figure harmoniously closed states. Lingering and duration of the form movement is shared with the observer as a meditation content of psychic sensation. In the observer, what is difficult to achieve in acting reality succeeds in the experience of a unity of thought and feeling. (Text: Dr. Friedrich W. Heckmanns, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf)