Art: Inside Out

Hans Erni is one of Switzerland’s most skillful and mysterious painters. Recently an Erni show in Geneva drew 3,000 people in two weeks, and raised a lot of questions. Why, the abstractionists wanted to know, did Erni sully the purity of his abstract compositions by introducing classical figures and anatomical charts? And why, asked the conservatives, did he scratch up his photographically accurate pictures with abstract shapes?

To get at the answers, a reporter visited Erni in his whitewashed Lucerne studio. He found the 40-year-old artist working under fluorescent light “because it’s steady and constant.” Black-browed Hans Erni, who looks like an attenuated Max Schmeling, was knee-deep in machine parts, geometrical constructions, drawings of crystals, and an assortment of scientific instruments, including a Cellophane-wrapped microscope. Because he thinks specialization is harmful, Erni devotes part of each day to studying chemistry, mechanics, biology, zoology and the Greek classics.

“Art for art’s sake,” says Erni, “simply does not exist. It’s the idea that matters.” The ideas that Erni tries to put on canvas are often understandable enough in themselves, but that does not make them any easier to picture. For example, how should an artist express the thoughts of a pregnant woman sitting on the ground somewhere in Europe? The first part of Erni’s solution was to get the woman on canvas as realistically as he could and give her ah expression of dull waiting. Then, just over her head, he drew a tangled cat’s cradle of white lines. He called the whole thing Young Woman in 1942.

Erni has painted his own wife and child playing in front of a forest of blood vessels, and himself chalking abstractions on the night air. What goes on inside the body and inside the mind, he says, is just as important as the outside. If it were also as easy to paint, Erni’s work would be much less mysterious to his admirers.