Eugen Schönebeck
Das Frühwerk
14 September – 21 December 2019
Bildnis
Pitt chalk on paper
Graphite and oil pastel on paper
Disput
Epitaph für Arturo Martini
Pitt chalk on paper; on verso: graphite and Pitt chalk
Ink on paper; on verso: ink, crossed out with wax crayon
Bildnis 1955 Pitt chalk on paper 57 × 38.7 cm
Untitled 1956 Graphite on paper 62.5 × 77.2 cm
Untitled 1957 Graphite and oil pastel on paper 75.2 × 99.5 cm
Disput 1962 Ink on paper 21 × 29.5 cm
Park 1960 Ink on paper 20.8 × 29.5 cm
Bildnis 1961 Ink on paper 29.7 × 20.8 cm
Epitaph für Arturo Martini 1961 Ink on paper 29.5 × 20.9
Untitled 1962 Ink on paper 29.7 × 21 cm
Untitled 1960 Watercolor on paper 23 × 12.1 cm
Bildnis 1955 Pitt chalk on paper; on verso: graphite and Pitt chalk 56.8 × 40 cm
Bildnis 1961 Ink on paper; on verso: ink, crossed out with wax crayon 29.6 × 20.8 cm
Eugen Schönebeck (*1936) is one of the most significant post-war German artists. All the major social, political and artistic upheavals of the time are reflected in his life and work. He grew up in Saxony at the end of the Second World War, where he begun his artistic education as an apprentice in decorational painting. He continued his training in East Berlin, before leaving the young GDR for West Berlin – then the epicenter of non-representational art. Together with fellow student Georg Baselitz, he developed a new style of figurative painting. With the large-format portraits of socialist leaders he made in the mid-1960s, the artist pre-empted issues raised by the protests of 1968.
Only a few years after graduating, Schönebeck withdrew himself from the art market. He shifted his art to a private sphere, not least because there was no sociopolitical utopia to follow the movement of 1968. He stopped painting in oils, but continued to draw – and became the mythical pioneer of new German figuration.
Schönebeck produced about 60 paintings, and in recent years these have been published and partly exhibited, but the drawings, of which there are more than a thousand, remain largely unknown. As a result, no light has yet been shed on Schönebeck's stylistic and thematic development, for the drawings form a corpus of work that is, for the most part, sufficient unto itself and rarely mirrored in his paintings.
This exhibition of the artist's formative years, confined to selected series of works on paper, is hence a departure into uncharted territory. We follow the artistic beginnings of the young Schönebeck – from his apprenticeship as a painter-decorator in Saxony, via his training at the school of decorative art in East Berlin, to his study of fine art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin. During that time, he absorbed the influence of his teachers, but was also inspired by art movements in Germany, the United States and France, walking a tightrope between his own and borrowed content, between East and West Germany, and between the figurative and the abstract. His early work thus reveals all the ingredients that gave rise to his iconic major works of the 1960s, to which we have dedicated a small selection of works – exhibited as a "preview" of sorts.
The Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings
Volume 1: 1950 to 1960
Juerg Judin and Pay Matthis Karstens
Text by Pay Matthis Karstens
Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, Cologne 2020