Two nudes hang above the dining table, lost in thought, they look out into a cool, abstract city. On the other walls a stylized bull’s head, colorful bodies, landscape scenes. Cornelius Back hung numerous pictures of his grandfather in his apartment. He also still has hand-carved furniture from Mexico. And when he talks about Walter Back, it seems like he still communes with him.
Walter Back, who died in 2018, was not a well-known artist. But one who took art very seriously. His grandson takes care of the extensive estate. More than 800 paintings, drawings, woodcuts and monotypes have been preserved. Cornelius Back is now looking for a gallery that would be willing to exhibit part of it. Then he wants to have the works auctioned off for a good cause. Except for his private favorites, of course.
A self-portrait by Walter Back. When he was twelve, his parents sent him to a boarding school in Germany.
(Photo: private)
“My grandfather did it himself, he kept donating the proceeds for his paintings,” says the grandson. Walter Back was born in Mexico in 1923. When he was twelve, his parents sent him to Germany to the reform pedagogical boarding school in Urspring in Baden-Württemberg – which was a mistake, because the boy was drafted into the Wehrmacht at the age of 17. He was seriously injured in the war and suffered from the consequences throughout his life. “He had nervous tremors and couldn’t stand any noise,” says his grandson.
After the war, Walter Back completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter and toolmaker and attended drawing courses at the Technical University of Stuttgart. In 1950 he returned to Mexico. There he founded a company with his brother, had three children with his wife and only returned to Germany when he had reached retirement age.
“We settled in Reutlingen and I began drawing, etching, woodcutting and painting ‘full-time’,” he writes in his memoirs. “Unfortunately, I only discovered these memoirs after his death,” says his grandson, “otherwise I could have asked him many more questions.” For example, how he processed the experiences of the war, what he experienced on his extensive travels, during which he never took photographs but always recorded his impressions in sketchbooks, what the country of Mexico and its people meant to him.
Walter Back spent half his life in Mexico and learned life drawing there.
(Photo: Repro: Robert Haas)
Cornelius Back pulls out some folders from behind the sofa and leafs through his grandfather’s work on the table: nudes, body studies, portraits of people he met on his travels and of politicians whose faces obviously impressed him – Barack Obama, Angela Merkel , Pope John II, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But also rural scenes, market women in Peru, sumo wrestlers in Japan and, again and again, musicians.
For him, art was a constant confrontation with his surroundings. A dry tree that is still not dead, maybe a late war experience? A series that always shows the same street musician with an empty hat, subtitled “No hay cosecha” (no harvest). Or “Glasnost”: a suggested yellow wall in front of a black background with open window sashes.
“We didn’t talk much about his paintings,” says Cornelius Back. But he remembers some exhibitions in the Kunsthalle Tübingen, in smaller museums or galleries. Grandfather was interested in everything until the very end. When Cornelius Back said he was now studying Cognitive Science, “he always wanted to know what new findings there were. He sent me brain research articles that he had read and discussed them with me.”
Cornelius Back, 36, works for an international IT company and has been living in Munich, where his mother’s family has its roots, for two years. He finds that art is taking up more and more space in his own life. His partner also paints, her pictures hang next to his grandfather’s.
Cornelius Back himself created a digital work of art some time ago. No NFT (non-fungible token) that you carry in your pocket on your cell phone, copied a million times, even if only one person can claim ownership of it. No, he doesn’t believe in that. His work of art is based on a logical mind game. He gave it the title “Framed Infinity,” and the former Waldorf student had the idea for it when he was 16, he says. “But I wasn’t able to program them until I was 35.”
For those who want to try and understand the idea, it goes like this: “Anything that I can visually imagine exists or can be painted. Anything that exists or can be painted I can photograph with a digital camera. Anything that I can photograph with a digital camera, but it’s limited (by finite pixels and colors). So anything I can think of visually is limited.”
Back never let go of this rule of three and the reverse. He also discussed it with his logic professor at the university. Eventually he began programming all possible combinations of a digital camera’s pixels and colors – an unimaginably large but finite number. And every possible image is already present in this calculation. The algorithm can calculate it, even if it takes years to do it. A crazy, but very real idea. Back implemented them in a digital, interactive installation.
The sporty, serious man, who deals professionally with artificial intelligence and privately prefers to do endurance runs through the mountains, has also written a novel that deals with free will and is still unpublished in the drawer. But that is going too far here. First of all, it is now about the pictures of his grandfather. Cornelius Back hopes that someone will contact him who will exhibit a selection of the pictures so that he can auction them off for a good cause ([email protected] ). It would be entirely in the spirit of their creator, he says.