Art: Madcap Moralist

The headmaster at Kassel’s esteemed art academy took one look at the messy paintbox presented by the tousle-haired young applicant. “Nein,” said he. After all, would a violinist treat his instrument that way? It was a bad moment for the awkward Hessian farmer’s son until he remembered a good school in Karlsruhe on the Rhine. There the examiner, with more tact, looked over the madcap paintings on cardboard, asked, “Do you really think we ought to take you?” “With my talent,” the youth burst out, “you’ve got to!”

Poor Plumbing. Today Horst Antes is well on the way to becoming Karlsruhe’s most illustrious alumnus. As a student he captured the Hannover Grand Prix, at 24 had his first one-man show, and today, at 29, he is considered Germany’s most powerful postwar painter (see color), a natural link in and continuator of the great tradition of German expressionism. Outwardly at least, his impetuosity has somewhat subsided. The neighbors in his six-story walkup on a truck-choked thoroughfare in Karlsruhe are often treated to blasts of rock ‘n’ roll he plays to drown out the traffic noise. But outside his studio stand two British perambulators, quiet symbols of the treasured domesticity with his wife and two children into which he retreats to work on a dozen canvases at once. There, with vehemence, he paints an image of man as timeless as Stonehenge, as topical as The Wall.

Like his expressionist forebears, Antes aims to destroy man’s outward appearance in order to illuminate his inner profile. “In this age of technology,” he says, “man to me is a pitiful and poor creature. Endowed with poor plumbing, a disorderly mind and much mental blindness, he is the only imperfect being in an increasingly computerized environment.” As he takes shape in Antes’ oils, man is consistently deformed, his body pudgy with baby fat, a spineless creature whose torso is nonexistent. At times he has a single eye that seems to see too much, at other times even three cannot focus on reality. But, insists Antes, “I am trying to make man perfect again, attempting to take him again into the center, rediscovering him.” Strangely, it works, for out from under the brilliant artistic device crawls a human being not merely fascinating but often touching.

Stunted Growth. “Pictures must talk by themselves,” Antes says, but many critics see a clue to his stunted gnomes in their resemblance to the deformed dwarf, Oskar Matzerath, of German Novelist Günter Grass’s bestseller, The Tin Drum. As Antes seeks to show life from a different perspective, so Grass’s Oskar, a moral hunchback who reaches his third year and refuses to grow any more, sees the world from chair level. There are striking parallels, too, between writer and painter. Both were born in the decade that spawned Nazism, both learned their ABCs in Hitler schools, both burst on the cultural scene in 1959 to become symbols of Germany’s postwar conscience. Both, too, have been remarkably productive, Grass with nine published works, Antes with an astonishing 14 one-man shows in a scant three years.

But no matter how prolific he is, Antes is slow to release his paintings. Even when finished, he keeps them for six months, until finally he can turn to a spectator and pronounce “Ist ja prima, nicht?” (First class, no?). Any really serious doubts that Antes’ prodigious pace might be slackening were completely dispelled by his current exhibition at Munich’s Stangl Gallery. To the delight of his growing following, Antes gave some of his imps a third dimension, produced a merry lot of polychromed bronzes and ceramics—as well as paintings and drawings. “I never waste an idea,” he explained.