Art: Captured Vitality

At 45, Bernhard Heiliger is West Germany’s foremost sculptor, but until now U.S. gallerygoers have been able to see bits of his work only in large group shows. Last week his first U.S. one-man exhibition opened at Manhattan’s Staempfli Gallery. Whether a head, a torso, a bird-like creature, or some abstract shape borrowed from nature, Heiliger sculptures have one common quality: though the artist’s hands left them long ago, they still seem to move and change and grow, as if there were something alive inside.

Heiliger began his studies at the Berlin Academy in a bad year for German art: 1933, the year Hitler not only took over Germany but began to dictate to its artists. Heiliger was young, naive, and possessed of “the necessary skill to conform with the exaggerated realism the Nazis wanted.” Fortunately, the Nazis still allowed a few top students to study abroad, and Heiliger was lucky enough to spend 18 months in Paris. There he met Sculptors Charles Despiau and Aristide Maillol, was elated by their preoccupation with the human figure. To Heiliger, nature, particularly the human figure, is the beginning of everything.

Returning to Germany, Heiliger spent six wretched years in the Nazi army, entering as a private and emerging as the same. But as early as 1946 he got his first show in Berlin, and his fortunes have been mounting ever since. His 1938 BMW sports car gave way to a beige Porsche 1500. This, in turn, was replaced by a white Porsche 1600 Super, and finally by a couple of Jaguars, in which Heiliger speeds around Berlin’s Avus race course whenever he feels depressed.

Some critics have compared him to Britain’s Henry Moore, but the chief similarity is that both men find their basic inspiration in the human body. Even when Heiliger is at his most abstract, his work gives a strong sense of life. His heads are not only striking portraits, but pieces of humanity stripped to the bone. Some of his torsos give the eerie impression that they are just being born. In his group sculptures he is able to play off his figures in such a way that they all seem to be engaged in some imperceptible dance, weaving around each other in ever changing relationships.

Any experience can start off the chain of events that lead Heiliger to a sculpture—an encounter with a person, the sight of a tree, the shape of a stone. He works not from drawings but directly with the clay, changing his idea about the final sculpture as new associations spring to mind. But the initial impulse must come from life, and that life is never frozen. To Heiliger, sculpture is “vitality captured,” and his pieces often have a tensely fragile look, as if whatever was locked up inside was about to burst out of its smooth bronze skin.