Art: Cinderella Without Shame

He had an understandable horror of his own bamboo-jointed name: Horst Rüdiger Karl August Ernst Georg Cristoph Fabious von Gugel Brandt und Dippolsdorf. True, it showed his patrician lineage, but it would never squeeze into a corner of his surrealist canvases. So he reduced it to plain Rolf Gugel. Plain Rolf’s name is being heard often these days in Germany.

Like Salvador Dali, Gugel is perfectly capable of producing art, when he chooses to, that makes sense to everyone, with universal significance, and a craftsmanship that everyone can applaud. Unlike Dali, he often does. And he can duplicate old sculptures and paintings. He makes his living that way. When the baroque church at Diessen decided recently to replace its nine missing Stations of the Cross, Gugel was chosen to do the job. The three he has finished so far are indistinguishable from those made 200 years ago. But he would rather illustrate his Catholicism in his own way. And now, at 37, he has the chance. He has been commissioned to do a surrealist altar triptych and Stations of the Cross for a tiny Catholic hill chapel in Bavaria.

“I was always a surrealist at heart,” Gugel says, “When I was a child I drew all kinds of transformations. Things like Daphne turning into a tree, and Actaeon into a stag. Surrealism is a very beneficial revolution in painting. It results in conscious exploitation of elements which used to be overlooked because of bourgeois shame.”

To illustrate what he means, Gugel waves a sheaf of his drawings of the Cinderella story: a Fairy Godmother in the form of a tablecloth with eyes and feathers, dangling a spider; a cast-iron Cinderella flagging down an old-fashioned locomotive (see cut) with clocks for wheels, representing her father.

It would take a Freudian to detect what shame-free message Gugel has thus found in Cinderella, but churchgoers will be likely to find his surrealist chapel disturbing. By last week Gugel had completed the two side panels for the altar. One of them showed a ship built up from a thumb and forefinger keel, with its sail tattered and twisted about half a face. The title: “Resurrection” (see cut). The other panel, “Martyrdom,” was even more obscure. It consisted of a mask, a bloody accordion, and some high-heeled shoes in the snow.