Art: Notes from Underground

For German painters denounced as “degenerate” by Hitler, there were only two choices if they were to continue as artists: get out of Germany or gounderground. Painters Paul Klee, George Grosz, Josef Albers and Architect Walter Gropius managed to escape; one of the few who chose to remain and survived is Fritz Winter, today rated as Germany’s leading abstract-expressionist. To celebrate Winter’s 50th birthday, Munich’s Günther Franke Gallery is staging a showing of 46 of his paintings, ranging from 1929 to the present. The Munich retrospective, and a current exhibition now on display at Chicago’s Fairweather-Hardin Gallery, show that Winter’s years underground have left their mark, but they have also given to his work a strength and conviction unmatched by any German painter of his generation.

Fritz Winter left his job as a miner in a Westphalian coal shaft when he won a scholarship at the Bauhaus. When the Nazis clamped down, Winter scraped together enough money to buy a hillside farmhouse in Bavaria. As a front, he set up shop as a maker of wooden knickknacks. His real work he did at night, painting abstractions that reflected the grimness of the times. Says Winter of one typical painting, which shows four heavy, black hammer forms relentlessly assaulting a doomed crystalline structure: “I was a seismograph; I was under a heavy weight in those years.”

Drafted in 1939, Winter fought in Poland, later in Russia. He kept his talent alive by filling his soldier’s sketchbook with nearly 500 postcard-sized abstractions, which he regularly mailed home to his wife. Later, he spent five years a Siberian labor camp, where he kept on sketching.

Back in Bavaria, Winter’s brush exploded with fireworks of color, recalling in whiplash lines the wartime echoes of barbed wire, bombed buildings, prison life. But Winter was not merely evoking the kind of turgid nightmare images that Painter George Grosz (TIME, Nov. 21) used to purge himself of his tortured World War I memories. In his abstractions, Winter feels that he is groping toward a universal language increasingly understood everywhere.

“Nonobjective art has an incredibly big function,” Winter passionately argues. “We can no longer perceive our world purely optically. Matter itself disintegrates into ever smaller particles. Atoms are smashed, time and space eliminated as barriers. The world has become transparent; we look through trees and know that a piece of iron is in hectic movement. I must, therefore, try with color and form to give expression to this world, my world, just as Renaissance painters did to theirs.”