The world is a centrifuge
Euphoric times, and fear lurks behind them: The fascinating work of the suppressed and then quickly forgotten painter Sascha Wiederd in the New National Gallery in Berlin
Not every treasure is made of silver, gold and precious stones. One has to say this in view of the few pictures that have survived in the last 100 years of an unjustly almost forgotten place. The motifs now displayed in the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin were painted by Westphalian Sascha Wiederd (1904–1962), who immersed himself in the avant-garde of the capital of the Weimar Republic in 1924.
The aspiring young painter from the circle of Herwarth Walden’s Berlin gallery “Der Sturm” had left the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Modernism played in Berlin. But he was thrown out of the capital’s art academy because of his brazen vagabond life: the initially unaccommodated had slept in the school illegally. But soon after the scandal, success came with his brightly colored abstractions.
Wiederd’s visual language shows what young people felt after the war and in the young republic: hunger for life, speed, dynamism and simultaneity. Space and time seem to literally penetrate each other. The modern, technological world is set in the picture. One discovers echoes of Braque, Malevich, and also of the Orphistic Frenchman Robert Delaunay. And Italian Futurism. These stylistic devices express a belief in progress.
But if you stand in front of repeaters for a longer period of time, they don’t come across as naively idealizing, rather ambivalent, in a mixture of youthful euphoria and a vague fear of the unknown.
He had exhibitions at the popular art dealer Walden and theater shows with his constructivist stage designs even in New York. In 1929 he was appointed theater equipment manager in Tilsit (then East Prussia). An artist trip to the Soviet Union in 1932 turned his head towards the ideals of communism. He moved to the USSR, but got caught up in Stalin’s terror machine when Hitler’s Germany declared war on the Soviet Union in 1941 as a German and, in dire need and disillusioned, returned to Berlin – where his painting was now considered “degenerate”.
He gave up painting as if Nazism had stifled his passion. Wiederd did not want to conform to the cultural dictates of the Nazis. But in order to remain in the spiritual world, he trained as a bookseller in the shop of an acquaintance from the Sturm gallery, the Jewish dealer Lachmann on Bayerischer Platz in Schöneberg. The bookshop was “Aryanized” and repeatedly confiscated in the last year of the war.
In the British prisoner of war until 1946 he drew a little more. These figures, spread out in the cabinet of the Neue Nationalgalerie, are the ultimate artistic expressions of this long-overlooked talent. In 1951, Repeated opened his own bookstore in Moabit. Today we perceive his paintings in an integrated way as phantoms from a time when everything seemed possible for art.
As a repeat star in 1962, none of his customers knew that behind the well-read man in world literature was one of the most exciting artists of the 1920s, the painter of the “Jazz Symphony”, which just dominated the front of the cabinet in the New National Gallery, a 4.65 by 3.60 meters projecting masterpiece in oil paint, tempera, gold and silver bronze on paper, mounted on canvas.
This orgiastic reminiscence of a November group party in Berlin in 1927, borrowed from the Swiss Isaak Collection in the estate of the repeat collector and Holocaust survivor Carl Laszlo, resembles what is now, 100 years later, described as “Berlin Babylon”: brightly colored clown figurines , delirious points and discs, numbers, pencils, violins, spinning flower instruments, stairs, cones, waves. And again and again the shape of the letter C appears – the Cyrillic character for Sascha. In between, lashed goggle eyes perform a constructivist “dance on the volcano”.
Everything seems nested, interwoven, sewn together like a flowing patchwork collage. Dada hat masks, as Hugo Ball once wore them, and a fast psychedelic constructivism melt into a time image in the spin cycle, stripped of all certainties, bequeathed by a painter of the “dead generation”.
Now that time seems to be getting out of joint once again, we are quite flabbergasted by the paintings by the art historian and sociologist Dieter Scholz, curator of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and rediscovered them. Some were on display at the Berlin gallery owner Brockstedt in 2013, after which Scholz began to research more intensively who was such a painter of kaleidoscopes. In the 1970s there were two small, inconsequential gallery exhibitions in West Berlin.
Gradually, a widely scattered treasure trove of art became apparent. The majority is in the estate of the Hungarian-Swiss collector Lazlo, others in private collections, in the Sprengel Museum in Hanover – and in the Berlinische Galerie, i.e. the stage designs for plays and operas by Ibsen, Verdi, Gogol, Lehár or Shakespeare.
In 2021, shortly before its reopening after general refurbishment, the Neue Nationalgalerie was able to purchase Repeatd’s painting “Archers”, 1928, from a private collection with financial support from the Ernst von Siemens Foundation. Since then, the centrifugal hunting scene has marked access to the permanent exhibition “The Art of Society 1900–1945” and features striking brush strokes and details related to the “Jazz Symphony”. The “figures in space” from the same year – obviously the most painting-intensive – also make one think of the machine people Schlemmers, Schwitters and Légers. However, Wiederd built his scenery on a checkerboard pattern. And that seems to dissolve, wafting almost surreally. As if there were no longer a firm, reliable grip on the ground for man, city, country.
And also the “Sailboats in the Port”, 1929, are dismantled into parts of the hull and radial rigging, a fast prismatic construction, just as the Bauhaus painter Feininger operated it, except that with repeating everything seems as if a wild force would immediately swirl the geometric order . But it is precisely in this way that the dismantled formal ornament becomes a kind of mythological world narrative of life – as a perpetual cycle.
New National Gallery, Berlin. Until January 8, 2023. smb.museum