Lot 12: EUGEN SCHÖNEBECK

EUGEN SCHÖNEBECK B.1936 BILDNIS (LIKENESS) signed, titled, and dated 1964 on the reverse oil on canvas 162 by 129.8cm. 63 3/4 by 51 1/8 in.

Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, 14 mal 14, 1973, n. p., no. 1, illustrated

Exhibition Catalogue, Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Eugen Schönebeck 1957-1967, 2011, p. 32, no G26, illustrated in colour

Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne
Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich
Acquired directly from the above in the mid 1980s

"In 1964 Schönebeck painted up a storm...he broke through to an aesthetic that within a year would be refined into a trademark style. It not only had no real antecedent but remains largely without a successor"
Pamela Kort in: Exhibition Catalogue, Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Eugen Schönebeck 1957-1967, 2011, p. 125

Within the context of the modes of figurative painting that developed in a divided Germany during the first decades of the Cold War, the art of Eugen Schönebeck is as historically significant as its extant physical vestiges are today outstandingly rare. During a career barely a decade long he produced just thirty-five paintings, most of the best of which are today held in prestigious collections, including Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich, Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Museum Wiesbaden, Frankfurt's Städel Museum and others. As a consequence, despite a profound, seminal contribution to the trajectory of post-war Art History, which has been critical in shaping the output of peers such as Baselitz and subsequent generations of artists, his oeuvre has only been exhibited on a significant scale three times, each twenty years apart: once at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in 1973; once at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover in 1992; and once at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt just earlier this year. However, despite this deeply unbefitting lack of exposure, his ground-breaking and visionary painting has served as a source of inspiration for decades. The appearance of Bildnis at auction, without question the most significant and impressive painting by the artist ever to be offered for public sale, is thus a spectacularly uncommon event.

Born in 1936 in Heidenau, just south of Dresden, Schönebeck's formative experiences were indelibly stained with the unspeakable catastrophes of war, before he eventually arrived in East Berlin on a scholarship to a school of applied arts aged eighteen. Accepted by the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin in 1955, Schönebeck started to formulate an aesthetic and in 1957 first met Georg Baselitz and Antonius Höckelmann. For five years thereafter Schönebeck and Baselitz exchanged views, ideas and even artistic motifs. They staged their first collaborative exhibition in 1961, for which they published their outrageous and incensed treatise Pandämonium I (Manifest). Through a voracious appetite for the latest cutting-edge trends and a knack for ambitious shoestring travel, by 1963 Schönebeck had been exposed to the remarkable invention of Wols, Fautrier, Pollock, and Bacon together with a tide of others. Inspired by this precedent, Schönebeck turned his art to confront the past head-on: as Pamela Kort has deftly explained, "More radical than his colleagues dared to be, he began to give a concrete, unambivalent face to the dismantling of pride in German identity that arose as a result of the crimes of the Second World War" (in: Exhibition Catalogue, Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Eugen Schönebeck 1957-1967, 2011, p. 120).

Schönebeck was twenty-eight years of age when he painted Bildnis in West Berlin and, as he has recently described, around this time he was motivated "to try to let a certain tenor rise to the surface in such paintings – a consciousness of crisis, pervasive sadness, gruesomeness, and even perverseness – that I found missing in the work of my colleagues" (the artist in conversation with Pamela Kort, 12υth December 2010, cited in: Ibid., p. 100). While the precise environment of the protagonist in Bildnis remains beyond specific identification, with the recessed decorative balustrade and low barrier the structure around the figures affords one interpretation as a courtroom dock designed to house the accused. With the oversized, heavily articulated body shielding a younger version of itself in the shadow of a spectral, grotesque caricature whose maniacal grin surely bears some talismanic power, this extraordinary painting is the precise embodiment both of the artist's keen sense of crisis, as well as signifying something of the overwhelming burden of his nation's tragic past.