The avant-garde used to be better too. In his diary, the painter HP Zimmer tells how he visited Hans Platschek in his attic in 1960. “There he also paints, somberly graphic images on dark blue and dark brown backgrounds. When he wants to see the picture he is working on, he takes off his shoes and gets on the bed. The picture is lying on the ground, he draws black lines on it , dribbles turpentine over it and prints everything out with newspaper. In between, he makes phone calls in Spanish, English and French….”
At that time the avant-garde lived in the attic, but at least in Schwabing. In the beer garden, it was thoroughly moistened and annoyed the citizen, whose traditional hat flew off his head. In the best case, the gallery owner offered her a monthly payment for abstract art, but then complained if something concrete in the picture stood out against the dark brown background.
Hans Platschek had no qualms about fulfilling the La-vie-de-Bohème cliché, i.e. being chronically unsuccessful apart from the prescribed polygamy, living on water, bread and self-praise if necessary, having debts with everyone and making himself unpopular in general . At the opening of the exhibition, the art historian Claus Mewes explained how Platschek once celebrated the New Year’s reception that Hamburg evening paper every year for the local dignitaries to piss on three mainstays of this society with relish. If they wanted to know how he imagined hell, he asked the party and said it straight to her face. “Freddy Quinn plays the guitar, Siegfried Lenz reads, and I have to kiss the actress Helga Feddersen.” Lenz, Hamburg’s greatest author, was of course present.
Even with the tried and tested enfant terrible, this Platschek would not be able to be grasped. The exhibition “Hell Falls. Cockfights. Nice Evenings” in the Kunsthalle Schweinfurt tries to present the long overdue work of the artist, who was born in Berlin a hundred years ago. At the same time, it is a look back at the bohemian smoking and drinking days, at the austere era before the art market murmurs, million-dollar deals and countless painter princes. Some of the images can be seen here for the first time. They come from the Otto van de Loo Collection and the Hans Platschek Foundation. From the Lenbachhaus comes a powerful portrait of Heimrad Prem in every respect, and from a private collection a no less engaging one by Helmut Heissenbüttel.
The painter and author Hans Platschek was born in 1923 and died in 2000. The photo shows him in 1998 in front of works exhibited at the Galerie van de Loo in Munich.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
This not easily comprehensible work between surrealism and social satire shows someone who can do far too much to be assigned to one direction. Platschek begins with caricatures, then paints in a confusing way like Paul Klee, becomes part of the abstract reconciliation painting of the fifties, approaches the Spur group in Munich, gives up abstraction and becomes socially critical with panel paintings like George Grosz, paints Erich Fried as a Hegelian and that Mayor couple Weichmann as a dancing couple at a ball of lonely hearts, paints themselves in the port of Montevideo in a way that is difficult to remember.
There, in exile in Uruguay, in 1943 he drew the Jew-hater Julius Streicher ready for prison, with a chain on his foot and a swastika instead of a lead bullet. Platschek survived him because he fled in time while part of his family was murdered. In 1953 he returned to Germany, where life went on as if nothing had happened. He was surrounded by collaborators and accomplices; his faithful gallery owner Otto van de Loo had been a fighter pilot.
Platschek didn’t just tease his fellow citizens for fun. He was bothered by the refinement of the Nordic Nazi Emil Nolde into a Nazi victim, which Siegfried Lenz had succeeded in his “German lesson”. For Platschek, the novel was part of the criminal literature; in his novel, former soldier Lenz compares seagulls to the JU 87 dive bomber.
Hans Platschek painted “The Manager”. The acrylic painting dates from 1970.
(Photo: bpk/Nationalgalerie, SMB/Jörg P. Anders, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023)
In 1957 he wrote his parents in extreme exaggeration to Uruguay: “I finally had resounding success, I am counted with my friend Emil Schumacher among the young German painters of international standing.” But he was invited to the Biennale in 1958, to the Documenta the following year, and he even made it as far as Minneapolis for group exhibitions, but he never achieved great success.
Of course, it was not without resentment when he found himself in the 1964 Süddeutsche Zeitung made fun of the “daring of the allotment gardener who undertakes expeditions in his allotment garden” on the occasion of the Documenta III. The allotment gardener was the director of the Documenta, the art historian Werner Haftmann, who is now known to have been involved in the torture of partisans in Italy. Platschek knew about it from his friend Emilio Vedova, who had fought with the partisans against the German occupation. As a splash then also in the Time Ernst Wilhelm attacked Nay, the favorite abstract artist of the post-war period, and claimed that Nay was “thinking an abomination”, that his allegedly abstract art, the famous colored discs, were merely “far-off whispered fables”, he was finished.
He was serious, but never serious enough with his painting to be successful with it. “I hope you were annoyed,” he wrote to van de Loo. Mewes, who curated the exhibition together with Selima Niggl, estimates the number of Platschek paintings, which are largely scattered among collections and in private ownership, at 180. There are also the invisible paintings that the painter himself made disappear. “I painted over most of the ones you saw in London,” he reported to his gallery owner.
The picture “Wunschkind” was created in 1970. At that time, Hans Platschek was married to the writer Gisela Elsner.
(Photo: Peter Vopelius, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023)
The writer Gisela Elsner left Mann and her small child because of Platschek. It should have been an ideal relationship according to all the rules of the art legend, but it was probably just an artistic marriage hell again. He went with Elsner, changing countries more often than shoes, from Munich first to Italy, then to London and finally to Hamburg, where they parted. Only in the catalog do the pictures appear that Platschek painted for the woman he married in 1967 because she wanted to win custody of her son, who is now director and author Oskar Roehler. As the literary scholar Christine Künzel shows in her catalog contribution, Platschek was not safe from Elsner’s satire. In her novel “Abseits” (1982) she calls him Fred Meichelbeck and scoffs at his lack of success – something that connected them both.
“All over his apartment, screens up to two meters wide hung close together, covered with black pretzel-shaped squiggles.” She didn’t spare him, scoffed at his high heels, which were supposed to make him taller, and at his extracurricular activities: “For the fact that his artistic products were largely ignored, Fred Meichelbeck took revenge with his art-critical essays, in which he was sometimes gall-bitter, sometimes scoffing at the country’s prominent art critics and his successful peers.”
But that’s exactly how he was: Platschek was very happy to make enemies. His aversion to the world market leaders Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys is reliable, but in the long run that wasn’t enough for him. Anyone who claims that only “chicks and animal rights activists are interested in Franz Marc” has not only the art poster industry against them, but also good taste, which does not want to let their blue rider be taken away. Anyone who insults art critics as advertising copywriters because of their review prose and can at best recognize stooge services for the art market no longer has anything to laugh about or bite excessively. Fritz J. Raddatz claims in his diaries that he doesn’t know anyone who owns a picture of Platschek, but he regularly lets the unemployed artist take him out to dinner.
His most famous essay bears the title “On Stupidity in Painting” (1983), which approximates Adorno. Perhaps, a terrible thought, Platschek wasn’t stupid enough to paint. The Hamburger Kunsthalle demonstrated how restorative today’s art world works when it showed a work show by Ernst Wilhelm Nay last year. In 2023 there was no museum in Hamburg dedicated to the rediscovery of the incredible, perhaps a bit insane and in any case unique Platschek, who died in 2000. The avant-garde is dead, but it lives in Schweinfurt.
Hans Platschek. hell falls. cockfights. Nice eveningsuntil June 11, Kunsthalle Schweinfurt, catalog 29 euros