jonathan clark fine art
LANDSCAPE OF THE SOUL
Although he was given a retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2004, and was beginning to receive a high degree of acclaim in his native Germany towards the end of his life, Karl Weschke (1925-2005) remains a strangely overlooked figure. In fact, with some justification he can be seen as one of the last post-war British artists of any magnitude whose career deserves to be thoroughly reassessed. Only occasionally do his paintings, drawings or prints surface at auction; equally rarely do works by him appear in dealers’ catalogues or on their stands at art fairs. It is high time that his remarkable achievement became better known to a wider audience. Weschke employed the language of myth in his paintings, and never shied from investigating it on a heroic scale, or risking grandeur in an age besotted by petty celebrity. Art had to be generated from real life, not derived from other art. Weschke chose allegory as a means of achieving this: a narrative describing one subject in the guise of another. He said: ‘I am a painter and the pictures I make are me reaching out to an audience to find a response.’ Although he lived and worked for most of his life in Cornwall, he was not one of the St Ives artists celebrated for their bright and decorative abstraction. His work is essentially figurative, though adopting and adapting the discoveries of Modernism. He made no effort to illustrate or record directly what he saw around him, but painted an equivalent to reality, a version of his own experience of life distilled through imagination and the formal demands of picture-making. Predominantly a painter of the figure, animals and landscape, he employed a sombre but thrilling palette of ochres, browns and blacks, enlivened with white and gunmetal blue. Many interpret his work as full of threat and foreboding. His evocations of the immensity of nature, its raw power, can verge on the apocalyptic,
and he is good at identifying man’s fear of the landscape – of the unknown, or at any rate the little understood. He is painting what it feels like to be in the landscape, not some picturesque distanced vista of it. Honesty was important to him. Intriguingly, although Weschke is known for his dour earth colours, two early paintings in this exhibition feature a resonant blue – Seated Figure (cat. 1) and Blue Horse & Black Form (cat. 2), both from 1957. The figure is nude and enhaloed in blue, the horse itself is blue, like some romantic legendary beast caught between darkness and light. Weschke said he used earth colours partly because they were cheap and he was poor, and partly because they were stable and he was painting pictures to last. But of course this was a simplification. A dark restricted palette suited his view of the world, though even the most cursory study of his paint handling will reveal an unexpected range and richness. And look at the bright cerulean band girdling Woman & Dog on the Beach I of 1967 (cat. 5). Weschke was always prepared to use refulgent colour when it was really needed in a picture. In 1960, Weschke settled at Cape Cornwall, beyond Land’s End. This is wreckers’ country, a remote and exposed headland, rugged and unforgiving. Weschke chose this spot because he needed the isolation. He was an outsider by temperament and choice. As a street child in Weimar Germany, he had grown up to be selfreliant and prepared to live off his wits. He knew real poverty and was drawn to the Hitler Youth because of the stability and security it offered. He volunteered for military training and fought for his country against the Allies, was captured in Holland in 1945, and imprisoned in England. His gradual rehabilitation (or ‘civilization’, as he himself called it) need not be recounted here, but the kindness he was shown enabled him to become an artist. However, when he renounced Germany for letting him down, he refused to take British citizenship. Displaced, he had no real sense of belonging anywhere, and chose to remain notionally stateless. In a very real sense, he had to create his own identity. Remote Cornwall was sufficiently isolated for him to maintain the fiction that he lived nowhere known. He was a registered alien who admired his rebel father – an anarchist and opponent of the political system who died in a concentration camp.
From his studio he could observe the changing weather and see storms approaching. Weschke had a healthy respect for his surroundings: the sea that nearly drowned him when he worked as a diver (he once had to make an emergency underwater ascent from 150 feet whilst diving for lobster pots), the rocks and cliffs which are so much tougher than the fragile envelope of skin and flesh. Weschke spoke of the sea in its violence raping the rocks. The dialogue between earth and water can be a fierce one, and he painted it in many moods. He also thought of the sea as amniotic fluid, ‘the very broth of life’. In effect, the sea was both life and death. At Cape Cornwall, the relentless wind threatens to steal your wits – or perhaps more accurately it strips off the veneer of civilized behaviour and forces the human to confront the primeval, the feral, the elemental. Nature is an unavoidable constant there, as is history. Bronze Age fields, desolate moors, the hump of Kenidjack hill are the landmarks. Rocks mark out the ancient fields, and there are boulders on the hills instead of trees. The poor soil nurtures only bracken, gorse, grasses and wild flowers. This is not picturesque postcard Cornwall, but the elemental one of blistering sun and winter gales, of fog coming down and not lifting for days. Doubtless this is what Wordsworth meant by ‘visionary dreariness’. Certainly it seems to have been the type of extreme beauty that suited Weschke’s temperament. Perhaps the very desolation of the landscape was its own reward: a spur to the imagination because not starting out from emotive lushness in the English tradition. The imagination was, in effect, forced to work, rather than simply to respond. There is a theory that the word ‘moor’ comes from the French for sea, ‘mer’, so Cape Cornwall is in a sense surrounded by sea on all sides. The moor is free land – not much altered or gentled by human hand – and above all Weschke wanted to be free, unallied and independent. He may have marvelled at nature but he pitted himself against it too. He painted epiphanies of alienation. His figures were mostly depicted in isolation, in what might be called inescapable solitude. (‘The isolated figure is me’, he said.) There is a ritual quality to his images. A figure lying on a beach may have been caught in the abandon of sunbathing, or in some post-coital stupor, or be dead, murdered or sacrificed. The ambiguity is deliberate.
For Weschke, painting should be disquieting rather than reassuring, it should make you question your moral certainties. German art was little known in England in the first part of the 20th century, and French influence remained dominant. Weschke reacted against this, talking of Expressionism as ‘putting the soul back into painting’. He was particularly struck by a canvas in the Tate by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff entitled Woman with a Bag (1915). The woman’s face has the elongation of West African masks, and the painting is dark in colour and rather tragic in mood. (Weschke also admired Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, a key example of the influence of primitive art, and a crucial painting for him.) Other Tate paintings he admired included Kandinsky’s Cossacks (1910-11), from which he absorbed the Russian’s belief that abstract art could convey spiritual and emotional values through the significant arrangement of colours and lines, and Matisse’s Nude Study in Blue (1899-1900). From the latter he learnt another way of simplifying the body and making it tell against almost abstract planes of colour. Although to begin with working in an Expressionist mode, Weschke did not think of himself as an Expressionist. Equally, he rejected the assumption that his early work was influenced by David Bomberg: he avoided the older artist and only met such of his followers as Dorothy Mead and Cliff Holden after his own expressive approach had begun to be formulated. He identified instead other English influences on him: especially James Ward’s sublime landscape painting Gordale Scar (1815), the dogs and horses of George Stubbs and the weather and light effects of JMW Turner. The considerable impasto and emphasis on the materiality of paint in his early pictures he later called ‘false acts of bravura’. He came to accept that these gestures were mainly window-dressing and didn’t actually make the work any more effective. Perhaps at this point he was inspired by the example of Nicolas de Staël, brilliant Franco-Russian painter of abstracted landscape who took his own life in 1955. (De Staël was being shown in London in the 50s, with a memorial show at Tooth’s in 1956, and his influence can be seen in the work of William Gear and Peter Kinley amongst others.) Weschke soon moved away from the use of thick paint, adopting a method of stating and re-stating an image in charcoal lines and
thin washes, re-making the image and distilling it to a final strippeddown potency. This gradual build-up and refining of evidence, and the jettisoning of much in the process, is similar to the ways in which Giacometti, Auerbach and Kossoff treat their subjects. But the closest comparison is with Francis Bacon. Bacon rented a studio in St Ives for four months in 1959-60 whilst preparing for his first show with Marlborough Fine Art, and during this period Bacon and Weschke became friends. Weschke found Bacon generous in his comments, and he was impressed by Bacon’s work. Revealingly, he felt that Bacon, who had had a relatively sheltered upbringing in Ireland, sought out violence in his painting, whereas he, who had experienced rather too much violence and brutality at first hand, sought shelter. ‘One could say Bacon paints violence, I paint the violated,’ Weschke said later. Weschke was compassionate where Bacon was pitiless. There are also parallels of subject. Weschke called Hanging (1961, cat. 4) ‘my tribute to Rembrandt’. It is ostensibly a flayed ox, based on drawings he made in the local slaughterhouse. It is a carcass but also a Crucifixion. Here he depicts the body as meat (with reference to Soutine as well as Bacon), but also as something else, something with a purpose other than food. It looks almost like a harness and saddle hanging in a tack room, or an unstrung corset. In one reading it’s all free vectors of energy: carcass as dynamic volume. In Painting, 1946, Bacon positioned a carcass / crucifix behind the umbrella-headed man, and more joints of meat on the arms of the tubular steel space-frame in front of him. In 1954 he painted Figure with Meat, the Pope bracketed by sides of beef. One of Weschke’s greatest subjects has been dogs. In the early 1960s, he was given a Borzoi, or Russian wolfhound, called Dankoff. (See his wonderful 1969 portrait of the dog, cat. 8.) ‘Somehow I never felt I owned him. We doppelganger-ed each other, we anthropomorphised.’ Dankoff lived at Cape Cornwall until 1976 and is buried below a mound of stones in the bracken near the house. The dog, the sea and the ancient hillside became a kind of trinity in Weschke’s imagery, which was inextricably linked with his other great subject, the female figure. As he recalled: ‘As an underprivileged and very poor child, I worked at times on the
local tennis courts as a ball-boy, not for fun but for the money from tips and levies on the players. One of the local nabobs had a beautiful actress friend, very blonde, very tall and very, very stylish, always smelling of Paradise. She was outrageously charming and completely aware of the effect she had on this particular ball-boy. This splendid woman had a leash of two Borzois – just as splendid, and I was allowed to befriend them. So at the age of 12, I was in love with a goddess and two dogs, but I was also extremely streetwise and washed with many waters – though never a clean one. I knew that my goddess with her two beautiful Borzois lived in another world.’ Weschke talked of the barbaric splendour of women and clearly his figure paintings offer a Romantic celebration of flesh. He always said he painted nakedness, not the nude, and described it as ‘the most directly physical statement of mankind’. He never employed a professional model and painted the figure mostly from memory – as he said: ‘the best model is your lover’. His paintings are characterised by poses which derive from living with a woman and knowing her intimately. They are not fantasy images but fact. At the same time, Weschke does not stress the facial features and the head is often turned away, offering no encounter or confrontation with the viewer, and implying a sense of privacy. In this way he aimed at relinquishing the particular and moving towards the universal. He had the courage to try to make universal images from his own experience of the relationship between the sexes. His early years of extreme poverty sharing a bed with a mother who brought her lovers home gave him direct insight into one aspect of human sexuality: appetite slaked by transaction. Yet in his paintings women can appear sensual, defiant and in control of the situation, as well as vulnerable or violated. His women are as various as reality. His 1968 Maya (cat. 7) is about the adoration of a beautiful woman, all sensuality and soft rounded flowing forms. How different from the angularity of Painting of Jan (cat. 3), or the boxy lumpishness of Reclining Figure (1962), reminiscent of William Scott’s 1950s nudes. Although Weschke frequently depicts animals in what looks like sexual conjugation with humans, his work is not about some sort
of erotic bestiality. He used animals to symbolize the unrestrained urges of the body (hunger for food or sex), and instinctive responses (fighting over food or a mate), but there is another aspect of their relevance. Animals have a directness – what you might call an honesty (uncomplicated by devious motivation) – which is often denied humans. You know where you are with animals, they don’t have to contend with ‘the foul rag and bone shop’ of the human heart. They are trustworthy, like dogs or horses, or at least straightforward. A crocodile might eat you, but it won’t break your heart. Unless, of course, it is a god. Weschke’s paintings tend to be big and overwhelming. Their scale is clearly influenced by the New American Painting that began to be shown in England in the later 1950s, the vast arenas of Abstract Expressionism. Faced with these big canvases, the viewer was expected to imagine walking into them – they became an all-over physical experience, a total involvement, rather than just the visual one of looking. Weschke’s intensely-felt paintings are events in just this way. But it’s not the Tourist Experience of Cornwall he offers. His paintings are all about the spirit of the place, the spirit he has himself experienced, rather than its outward appearance. Nor are his paintings in any ordinary way topographic. If anything is mapped, it is the landscape of the soul, the inner life. Karl Weschke did not fit in. He was a European, with a continental intensity, producing dense, dark work. This was not English. In a 1998 interview he admitted that he thought being an artist was ‘a messianic occupation. And I haven’t uttered enough.’ That too wasn’t English. Like Rembrandt, he had to find the human in the darkness; also, distinguish the human from the bestial. There is a moral darkness to much of his work, and a moral ambiguity to even the lighter subjects: a surprising mixture of majesty and carnality. He was capable of tapping into a feeling of deep-seated discomfort, but also of transforming individual experience into universal statement. ‘What the artist does is to try to make the very mundane facts of life somehow sublime,’ he said. At his best, this is what he achieved.
Andrew Lambirth February 2016
1 Seated Figure 1957 oil on board signed & dated verso 37 Ă— 30 in / 94 Ă— 76.5 cm Provenance Private Collection
FOLDOUT 1 CLOSED (RIGHT HAND FOLDOUTS)
2 Blue Horse & Black Form 1957 oil on canvas signed & dated verso 54 × 60 in / 137 × 152.5 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited New Vision Centre Gallery, Karl Weschke, London, 1958, no. 3 The Matthiesen Gallery, Karl Weschke: Paintings and Drawings, London, 1960, no.1 Literature S. Daniel-McElroy & S. Hughes (ed.), Karl Weschke: Beneath a Black Sky, Tate Gallery, London, 2004, p.10
3 Painting of Jan 1958-59 oil on board signed, titled & dated verso 48 Ă— 60 in / 122 Ă— 152.5 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited Woodstock Gallery, Weschke, London, 1959, no. 3 Literature Jeremy Lewison, Karl Weschke: Portrait of a Painter, Petronilla Silver, Penzance, 1998, p. 42, illus. p. 41 H. P. Saupe, C. Liebig & M. Stiebert (ed.), Karl Weschke, Kunstsammlung Gera, Germany, 2001, p. 43, illus. p. 42
4 Hanging 1961 oil on canvas 72 Ă— 60 in / 183 Ă— 152.5 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited Fore Street Gallery, Karl Weschke, St Ives, 1964, no. 3 Arnolfini Gallery, Karl Weschke, Bristol, 1964, no. 2 Grosvenor Gallery, Karl Weschke: Recent Paintings and Drawings, London, 1964, no. 3 City Art Gallery, Karl Weschke (retrospective), Plymouth, travelling to Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Park Square Gallery, Leeds, 1971-72, no. 7 Whitechapel Art Gallery, Karl Weschke: Paintings of Women, Landscape and Allegory, London, 1974, no. 2 Newlyn Art Gallery, Karl Weschke: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Penzance, 1974, no. 2 Tate Gallery, Karl Weschke: Beneath a Black Sky, St Ives, 2004, no. 2 Literature S. Daniel-McElroy & S. Hughes (ed.), Karl Weschke: Beneath a Black Sky, Tate Gallery, London, 2004, illus. p.11
5 Woman & Dog on the Beach I 1967 oil on board signed & dated verso 60 Ă— 48 in / 152.5 Ă— 122 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited Arnolfini Gallery, Karl Weschke, Bristol, 1968, no. 11, illus. p. 4 Exe Gallery, Karl Weschke, Exeter, 1969, no. 4, illus. p. 2 City Art Gallery, Karl Weschke (retrospective), Plymouth, travelling to Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Park Square Gallery, Leeds, 1971-72, no. 20, illus. p.14 Whitechapel Art Gallery, Karl Weschke: Paintings of Women, Landscape and Allegory, London, 1974, no. 13 Newlyn Art Gallery, Karl Weschke: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Penzance, 1974, no. 7 Kunstsammlung Gera, Karl Weschke, Gera, Germany, 2001, no. 8, illus. p. 74 Literature Jeremy Lewison, Karl Weschke: Portrait of a Painter, Petronilla Silver, Penzance, 1998, p. 62, illus. p. 83 H. P. Saupe, C. Liebig & M. Stiebert (ed.), Karl Weschke, Kunstsammlung Gera, Germany, 2001, p. 60, illus. p. 74
6 Study for Sea Painting 1967 oil on board signed & dated verso 36 Ă— 48 in / 91.5 Ă— 122 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited Arnolfini Gallery, Karl Weschke, Bristol, 1968, no. 8, illus. p. 1 City Art Gallery, Karl Weschke (retrospective), Plymouth, travelling to Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Park Square Gallery, Leeds, 1971-72, no. 19
7 Maya 1968 oil on board titled & dated verso 48 Ă— 68 in / 122 Ă— 172.5 cm Provenance Private Collection Exhibited Arnolfini Gallery, Karl Weschke, Bristol, 1968, no. 2 City Art Gallery, Karl Weschke (retrospective), Plymouth, travelling to Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Park Square Gallery, Leeds, 1971-72, no. 23 Whitechapel Art Gallery, Karl Weschke: Paintings of Women, Landscape and Allegory, London, 1974, no. 15 Newlyn Art Gallery, Karl Weschke: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Penzance, 1974, no. 8 Literature Jeremy Lewison, Karl Weschke: Portrait of a Painter, Petronilla Silver, Penzance, 1998, pp. 42-44 & p. 84, illus. p. 43 & p. 85 H. P. Saupe, C. Liebig & M. Stiebert (ed.), Karl Weschke, Kunstsammlung Gera, Germany, 2001, pp. 43-44, illus. p. 45 & p. 73
8 Dog Dankoff 1969 oil on canvas 48 Ă— 60 in / 122 Ă— 152.5 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited Exe Gallery, Karl Weschke, Exeter, 1969, no. 10 City Art Gallery, Karl Weschke (retrospective), Plymouth, travelling to Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Park Square Gallery, Leeds, 1971-72, no. 25, illus. p. 7 Whitechapel Art Gallery, Karl Weschke: Paintings of Women, Landscape and Allegory, London, 1974, no. 17 Newlyn Art Gallery, Karl Weschke: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Penzance, 1974, no. 10 Kunstsammlung Gera, Karl Weschke, Gera, Germany, 2001, no. 8, illus. p. 75 Literature Jeremy Lewison, Karl Weschke: Portrait of a Painter, Petronilla Silver, Penzance, 1998, p. 63, illus. p. 61 & p. 87 H. P. Saupe, C. Liebig & M. Stiebert (ed.), Karl Weschke, Kunstsammlung Gera, Germany, 2001, p. 61, illus. p. 75
9 Study of Cats 1973 oil on canvas 48 Ă— 36 in / 122 Ă— 91.5 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited Whitechapel Art Gallery, Karl Weschke: Paintings of Women, Landscape and Allegory, London, 1974, no. 27 Newlyn Art Gallery, Karl Weschke: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Penzance, 1974, no. 19
10 Figure in the Night 1976-77 oil on canvas signed & dated verso 72 × 54 in / 183 × 137 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited Kettle’s Yard, Karl Weschke: Paintings and Drawings since 1974, Cambridge, travelling to Victoria Art Gallery, Bath and Spacex Gallery, Exeter, 1980-81, no. 4, illus. p. 5 Literature The Times, review by John Russell Taylor, 16th September 1981
11 White Horse 1978 oil on canvas signed & dated verso 72 × 54 in / 183 × 137 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited Kettle’s Yard, Karl Weschke: Paintings and Drawings since 1974, Cambridge, travelling to Victoria Art Gallery, Bath and Spacex Gallery, Exeter, 1980-81, no. 12 Moira Kelly Fine Art, Karl Weschke, London, 1981, no. 10
12 Nude by the Window 1981 oil on canvas 72 × 54 in / 183 × 137 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited Moira Kelly Fine Art, Karl Weschke, London, 1981, no. 13 Literature The Times, review by John Russell Taylor, 16th September 1981, illus.
13 Column of Smoke – Kenidjack 1982 oil on canvas signed & dated verso 48 × 60 in / 122 × 152.5 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited Redfern Gallery, Karl Weschke: Recent Paintings and Drawings, London, 1984, no. 4
14 The Sleepers 1980-82 oil on canvas signed & dated verso 75 Ă— 54 in / 190.5 Ă— 137 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Exhibited Redfern Gallery, Karl Weschke: Recent Paintings and Drawings, London, 1984, no. 1, illus. p. 1 Kunstsammlung Gera, Karl Weschke, Gera, Germany, 2001, no. 21 Literature H. P. Saupe, C. Liebig & M. Stiebert (ed.), Karl Weschke, Kunstsammlung Gera, Germany, 2001, illus. p. 105
15 Lovers in the Night – Psyche & Eros 1988-89 oil on canvas signed & dated verso 75 × 60¼ in / 190.5 × 153 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Private Collection Exhibited Redfern Gallery, Karl Weschke: An Exhibition of Paintings & Drawings, London, 1989, no. 7 Literature Jeremy Lewison, Karl Weschke: Portrait of a Painter, Petronilla Silver, Penzance, 1998, p. 63 H. P. Saupe, C. Liebig & M. Stiebert (ed.), Karl Weschke, Kunstsammlung Gera, Germany, 2001, p. 61, illus. p. 110
16
17
Stretching Figure c.1957
Seated Figure c.1957
charcoal on paper 22 × 30 in / 56 × 76 cm
charcoal on paper signed lower right 30 × 22 in / 76 × 56 cm
Provenance Estate of the Artist
Provenance Estate of the Artist
18
19
Fire-eater 1986
Sleeping Woman c.1993
charcoal on paper signed & dated lower right 30 × 22 in / 76 × 56 cm
charcoal, pencil & chalk on paper 30 × 22½ in / 76 × 57 cm
Provenance Estate of the Artist
Provenance Estate of the Artist
20
21
Sobek c.1989
Leda 1988
pencil, coloured pencil & crayon on paper 26 × 21 in / 66 × 53.5 cm
charcoal, pencil & chalk on paper signed & dated lower right 20 × 16 in / 51 × 40.5 cm
Provenance Estate of the Artist
Provenance Estate of the Artist
A PORTRAIT I first got to know Karl in the late 1980s, and, as our friendship became established, I visited him from time to time at Cape Cornwall. In physical aspect he resembled Picasso: short in stature, though well set-up and with a similar strength of gaze, but more apparent mischief. He was dapper and possessed of considerable charm. His conversation was very definite and his opinions sharply honed, though he was always interested to hear about new books, new exhibitions, new art-world gossip. Living on the tip of England was isolated even by the standards of most artists, who, by necessity, lead solitary lives, mostly in the studio. Karl was a sensualist – he liked women, good food and wine (though he drank sparingly by the time I knew him) – and he had to import most of these to Land’s End. But he had organized his life well, and the converted engine shed (former site of the generator for the nearby big house) in which he lived was a powerhouse of artistic endeavour. He may not have painted quickly or been especially prolific, but he looked and thought about his work a great deal, and behaved towards it with condign seriousness. Karl was physically tough. He’d been a diver and a part-time coastguard, and before coming to England he’d been a street thug and a member of the German fighting force. His embroilments with various women had resulted in several children, and he looked after some of them at various times, continuing to paint and teach despite his role as a single parent. If it meant painting by night, then so be it. Anyway, what was all this fuss about the wonderful Cornish light? Over-exaggerated, like most answers to artistic problems. Karl frequently painted by electric light. Perhaps this helps to account for his unusual colour mixes – the earth colours that should have been ordinary but were often unexpected in their richness and juxtaposition.
Tom Driberg, communist, writer and politician? Driberg wrote a biography of Guy Burgess and was suspected of being both an MI5 informant and a KGB agent. And didn’t Karl also know John le Carré? Spy by association, perhaps? Certainly in Karl’s company there was always much unsaid, but then he’d had a varied and eventful life, and you don’t pour that out unprovoked even on good acquaintance. Not if you’re Karl you don’t. He may have been reticent, but he was warm and funny, very good company, and even his frequent grumpiness (high standards again – other people often didn’t come up to them) was unlikely to spoil a day, only add savour to it. But perhaps he was more dedicated to indirection than at first appeared. He was a myth-maker in his paintings, so why not in his life? Maybe that was his preferred method of signification, his way of facing the world and finding out its truths, of living with reality. Dr Johnson said that he wrote in order ‘a little better to endure the world and a little better to enjoy it’, and I can imagine Karl saying the same about painting. Being an artist was something you were stuck with, probably it was the way you were born. As Weschke himself said: ‘You can’t learn to be an artist, you can only learn to be a better one.’ And this he did. Andrew Lambirth Andrew Lambirth is a writer, critic and curator. Well known as the art critic for The Spectator, he was also contributing editor of RA, the Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, from 1990 to 2002. He has written for a wide range of publications including The Sunday Times and The Independent, and is author of numerous art books, including Roger Hilton: The Figured Landscape of Thought (2007), Eileen Agar: an Eye for Collage (2008), and
I always thought that there was something unsettling and slightly hidden about him. A girlfriend of mine was convinced he was a secret agent – wasn’t he sponsored after the war by the maverick
John Hoyland - Scatter the Devils (2009). His work as a curator has included exhibitions featuring works by Karl Weschke, notably ‘Order and Event - Landscape Now’ at the Art Space Gallery, London, in 2000.
Biographical Details Karl Weschke was one of the last of the St Ives school of artists, and one with a distinctive international focus. He moved to Cornwall in 1955, settling later at Cape Cornwall, at the western tip of the county. His figurative and mythic stance placed him at the edge of the main St Ives group, though he was a close friend of Bryan Wynter, Roger Hilton and the poet W.S. Graham. He was born near Gera in Germany in 1925, and was abandoned to an orphanage at the age of two. He joined the military in 1943, was captured and made a prisoner of war at Radwinter, Cambridge, eventually enrolling at St Martins School of Art in 1949. A major retrospective of his work was held at Tate St Ives in 2004. 1925 Born 7 June, Karl Martin Weschke in Taubenpreskeln, near Gera, in Germany. One of three illegitimate children. As a boy he met Fritz Dix, the brother of Otto Dix, who encouraged him to draw. Left school at the age of 14 with the ambition of becoming an ornamental blacksmith. 1942 Applied to join German Air Force. 1945-8 Prisoner of War in Britain. Began to paint and sculpt. 1947 Sent to Radwinter Student Camp, run by Charles Stambrook (formerly Karl Sternberg), where he designed for the camp theatre, and attended Extra Mural Board of Studies history of art course at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and graduated to Wilton Park. Met Tom Driberg MP, through whom he met Alison de Vere, a student at the Royal Academy of Arts. 1948 April, released from Prisoner of War status. Registered as an alien working for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Scotland. Married Alison de Vere.
1949 One term at St. Martin’s School of Art, London, where he met Dorothy Mead, a member of the Borough Group. 1950 Made series of drawings at Vera Volkova’s Ballet School. 1952 Set Designer for Berto Pasuka’s Les Ballets Nègres. 1953 Lived in Spain and on return to England worked for Circus Knie as a lion feeder. 1954-5 Lived in Sweden. 1955 Birth of daughter Rachel (to Lore Grage). As a result of a meeting with Bryan Wynter, moved to Zennor, Cornwall. Met the poet W.S. Graham. 1956 Birth of son Ben (to Alison de Vere). 1957-9 Member of The Penwith Society. 1957 ‘A Selection of Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture and Pottery’, The Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall, Arts Council touring exhibition. 1958 Birth of son Lucas (to Janet Green). ‘Karl Weschke’, New Vision Centre Gallery, London (solo). 1959 ‘Weschke’, Woodstock Gallery, London (solo). First public acquisition: Deposition Triptych bought from Woodstock Gallery by The Art Gallery of New South Wales. Met Francis Bacon. ‘11 British Artists: A Selection of Gouaches, Drawings and Prints’, The Jefferson Place Gallery, Washington.
‘Fullard, Weschke, Davison’, Woodstock Gallery, London. 1960 Moved to Cape Cornwall. ‘London Group Annual Exhibition’, Royal Society of British Artists Galleries, London. ‘Karl Weschke Paintings and Drawings’, Matthiesen Gallery, London (solo). ‘Tenth Anniversary Exhibition’, The Penwith Society of Arts, Cornwall. ‘Painters in Cornwall 1960’, City Art Gallery, Plymouth. ‘Contemporary British Landscape’, Arts Council touring exhibition. 1961 ‘Resolution 42’, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne; Bethnal Green Library, London. 1962 ‘Malerei der Gegenwart aus Südwest England’, Kunstverein, Hanover, Germany. ‘House Show - Recent Paintings and Sculpture’, Matthiesen Gallery, London. ‘West Penwith Painters and Sculptors’, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol. 1963 Married Liese Dennis. ‘Contemporary Landscape Painting’, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. ‘British Painting in the Sixties’, organised by the Contemporary Art Society, Tate Gallery, London and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. 1963-4 ‘First Image Paintings and Sculpture by Artists of the Gallery’, Grosvenor Gallery, London. 1964 Acquired dog, Dankoff. ‘Karl Weschke’, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (solo). ‘Karl Weschke Recent Paintings and Drawings’, Grosvenor Gallery, London (solo). ‘The Dickin Moore Exhibition 1964’, Haileybury and I.S.C.; Malvern College; Cheltenham College; Repton School; Marlborough College; Blundell’s School. Fore Street Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall.
1965 ‘Impressions on Paper’, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol. ‘Artists in Cornwall’, Leicester University Arts Festival, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. 1966 Birth of daughter Lore (to Janet Green). 1967 ‘Pleasure for Learning, Learning for Pleasure’, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol. 1968 ‘Karl Weschke’, Dartington Hall, Devon; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (solo). ‘The Dickin Moore Exhibition Paintings and Prints’, Harrow School; Cheltenham College; Uppingham School. Moved to Gloucestershire. 1969 ‘Karl Weschke’, Exe Gallery, Exeter (solo). Bath Festival. 1970 ‘Karl Weschke’, Lancaster University (solo). 1971 ‘Karl Weschke Paintings, Drawing, Prints’, Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford (solo). ‘Art Spectrum (South)’, Arts Council of Great Britain. Moved back to Cape Cornwall. 1971-2 ‘Karl Weschke Paintings’, City Art Gallery, Plymouth; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; Park Square Gallery, Leeds; Compass Gallery, Glasgow (solo). 1972 Birth of second daughter Rachel (to Madelaine Frye). 1973 Falmouth College of Art, Falmouth (solo). 1974 ‘Karl Weschke - Paintings of Woman,
Landscape and Allegory’, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance (solo). ‘Paintings, drawings and prints’, Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance (solo). ‘An Element of Landscape’, works bought for the Arts Council by Jeremy Rees, Arts Council of Great Britain touring exhibition. ‘St Ives Retrospective 1940-1974’, Wills Lane Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall. 1976 Death of Dankoff. Arts Council of Great Britain, Major Award. ‘Artists from the West Country’, Warehouse Gallery, London. 1977 ‘Englische Kunst der Gegenwart’, Palais Thurn und Taxis, Bregenz, Austria. 1978 South West Arts, Major Award. ‘John Moore Exhibition’, Liverpool, Prizewinner. ‘Karl Weschke Recent Paintings’, Bodmin Fine Arts Gallery, Bodmin, Cornwall (solo). ‘The London Group Annual Exhibition’, London. Royal College of Art, London. 1979 ‘Top Ten South West Arts - Major Award Winners in Fine Art’, Cirencester Workshops Gallery, Cirencester; Victoria At Gallery, Bath; Dorset County Museum, Dorchester; Spacex Gallery, Exeter; City Museum and Art Gallery, Plymouth; Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance. ‘The British Art Show - Recent Paintings and Sculpture by 112 Artists’, selected by William Packer, Arts Council of Great Britain touring exhibition: Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Royal West of England Academy in conjunction with City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol. 1980 Arts Council of Great Britain Purchase Award. 1980-1 ‘Karl Weschke Paintings and Drawings since 1974’, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; Spacex Gallery, Exeter (solo).
1981 ‘Karl Weschke’, Moira Kelly Fine Arts, London (solo). 1981-2 ‘The Subjective Eye’, Arts Council touring exhibition, selected by Edward Lucie-Smith and Moira Kelly, promoted by Midland Group, Nottingham. 1982 ‘Artists of the Colony Room Club. A Tribute to Muriel Belcher’, Parkin Gallery, London. 1982-3 ‘A Mansion of Many Chambers: Beauty and Other Works’, Arts Council collection exhibition of purchases and loans selected by Dr David Brown, Assistant Keeper of the Modern Collection at the Tate Gallery, London; Cartwright Hall, Bradford; Art Gallery, Oldham; Gardner Centre Gallery, Brighton; The Minories, Colchester; Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield; City Art Gallery, Worcester; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea; Southampton Art Gallery, Southampton. 1983 ‘8 in the ‘80s - An Exhibition of New British Painting’, The Soho Building, New York, organised by Moira Kelly for ‘Britain Salutes New York’, New York. 1984 ‘Karl Weschke Recent Paintings and Drawings’, Redfern Gallery, London (solo). ‘New Vision 56-66’, Warwick Arts Trust, London; Bede Gallery, Jarrow. 1984-5 ‘The National Open Art Exhibition’, organised by Television South West Arts, Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance and Penwith Galleries, St Ives; Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Chapter, Cardiff; Mostyn Art Gallery, Llandudno; Third Eye Centre, Glasgow; Bede Gallery, Jarrow; Camden Arts Centre, London. 1985 ‘St Ives 1939-64. Twenty-Five Years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery’, Tate Gallery, London.
1986 ‘British Prints of the Post-War Years 1945-60’, Redfern Gallery, London. ‘New Vision 56-66’, Regents College and the European Business School, Regents Park, London. 1987 ‘Karl Weschke Paintings and Drawings’, Redfern Gallery, London (solo). Chicago Art Fair. ‘Looking West’, Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance; Royal College of Art, London. ‘Landscape and Figure – Twenty Watercolours and Drawings’, Redfern Gallery, London. 1988 ’65 Years of British Painting’, Rotunda, Hong Kong. ‘A Memory of Sweetness’, television documentary made by Television South West. 1988-9 ‘Artists in National Parks’, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal; Stafford Art Gallery, Stafford; Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield; Berwick Borough Museum, Berwick-upon-Tweed; Hexham Abbey, Hexham; York City Art Gallery, York; The Gas Hall Gallery, Birmingham; National Parks Conference, Lynton; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes. USA tour: including the White-Meyer Galleries, Washington D.C.. 1989-94 Collaborated with Alison de Vere on ‘Psyche and Eros’, an animated film commissioned by Channel 4. 1989 ‘Karl Weschke - An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings’, Redfern Gallery, London (solo). ‘Images of Paradise’, in aid of Survival International, Terrace Gallery, Harewood House, Leeds. ‘A Century of Art in Cornwall 1889-1989’, County Hall, Truro and County Museum and Art Gallery. 1990 Visited Egypt. ‘Spring Exhibition 1990’, Redfern Gallery, London.
’21 Years of Contemporary Art 1969-90’, Tramway, Glasgow. 1991 ’16 British Artists, 45 Works 1928-1991’, W.K.P. Kennedy Gallery, Ontario. Contemporary Art Society Market, Smiths Gallery, London. 1992 Visited Egypt for second time. ‘A Memory of Sweetness’, Redfern Gallery, London; Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow. ‘Drawing from the Imagination – Works by Modern British Masters’, selected by Andrew Lambirth, Morley Gallery, London. ‘Artists from Cornwall’, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. Central Office of Information film for ‘U.K. Today’. 1993 Completion of studio on Cape Cornwall. 1994 Awarded Honorary Degree by University of Plymouth. ‘Recent Paintings, Watercolours and 10 New Etchings’, Redfern Gallery, London (solo). ‘The Constructed Space. Painting, Sculpture and Verse Commemorating the poet W.S. Graham’, The Manor House, Ilkley. ‘Summer Exhibition’, Royal Academy of Arts, London. 1995 ‘Three Artists’, Belloc Lowndes Fine Art, Chicago. ‘Contemporary Printworks’, Spacex Gallery, Exeter. ‘Newlyn Art Gallery Centennial Exhibition’, Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance. ‘Endangered Wildlife’, in association with WWF, Lamont Gallery, London. ‘Jerwood Painting Prize 1995’, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh; Royal Academy of Arts, London. ‘Four British Artists’, The Leindwandhaus, Frankfurt. ‘Absolute Secret’, Royal College of Art, London.
1996 ‘Prints and Drawings – recent acquisitions 19911995’, British Museum, London. Extended display (7 paintings), Tate Gallery, London, 21 May - 9 October. 1996-7 Extended display (6 paintings), Tate Gallery, St Ives, 16 November - 21 April. 1997 Visited Egypt for third time. Chicago Art Fair. ‘British Figurative Art Part I: The Human Figure’, Flowers East, London. 1999 ‘Echo of Egypt’, Six Chapel Row Contemporary Art, Bath (solo). 2000 ‘Order and Event - Landscape Now’, curated by Andrew Lambirth, Art Space Gallery, London. Documentary film entitled ‘Karl Weschke - Myth of a Life’ by Thomas Grube, BOOMTOWNMEDIA INTERNATIONAL. 2001 Painting Retrospective, Kunstsammlung Gera, Germany (solo). Works on Paper Retrospective, Kunstverein Gera e.V., Germany (solo).
Public and Corporate Collections The Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Texas Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland (print collection) Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery British Museum, London Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge National Museum of Wales, Cardiff C.S.O. Contemporary Art Collection Contemporary Art Society, London Cornwall Education Committee Dorset County Hospital Government Art Collection Ferens Art Gallery, Hull Kunstsammlung Gera, Germany Tate Gallery, London National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Minorco Services (UK) Ltd Museum of Modern Art, New York (print collection) Pearl Assurance plc Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery Stockley Park Consortium Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
2003 Awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit by the Federal German Government. Married Petronilla Spencer-Silver. 2004 ‘Karl Weschke - Beneath a Black Sky’, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (solo). 2005 Karl Martin Weschke dies, 20 February. 2012 ‘St. Ives: a Middle Generation: Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham, Paul Feiler, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, John Wells, Karl Weschke, Bryan Wynter’, Beaux Arts Gallery, London.
22 Fear 1948 pen & ink on paper titled verso 13 × 9½ in / 33 × 24 cm Provenance Estate of the Artist Literature Jeremy Lewison, Karl Weschke: Portrait of a Painter, Petronilla Silver, Penzance, 1998, illus. p. 17 H. P. Saupe, C. Liebig & M. Stiebert (ed.), Karl Weschke, Kunstsammlung Gera, Germany, 2001, illus. p. 19
With very many thanks to Ben Weschke, Lucas Weschke, Lore Weschke Boyd, Rachel Daske, Petronilla Silver Weschke & Jeremy Lewison for all their help in preparing this catalogue.
Photography by: Justin Piperger & Douglas Atfield Frontispiece: Karl Weschke, Cape Cornwall, 1962 © The Estate of Karl Weschke & Jonathan Clark Fine Art Designed by Graham Rees Printed by Deckers Snoeck Text © Andrew Lambirth Catalogue © Jonathan Clark Fine Art Published by Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the gallery.
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