Paul Mersmann the Younger

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Paul Mersmann the Younger
in 2008

Paul Mersmann (born March 18, 1929 in Berlin-Dahlem ; † February 25, 2017 in Creglingen , Baden-Württemberg ) was a German sculptor , painter and writer .

Life

Paul Mersmann was born on March 18, 1929 as the son of the sculptor Paul Mersmann the Elder in Berlin-Dahlem. After he was briefly committed to military service in 1945 , he began a three-year training course as a sculptor in Münster in 1946 . From 1949 he worked there as a freelance sculptor and worked on the city's churches, the St. Paulus Cathedral and the prince-bishop's palace , which is now the seat of the Westphalian Wilhelms University . During this time, the artist's literary work began, whose first literary works are now in the original manuscripts, but have so far been largely undeveloped. Among them is, for example, his first novella entitled Die Zecke , in which an insect that has mutated into gigantic proportions clearly shows the early influence of Franz Kafka on the artist .

In the fall of 1950, Paul Mersmann undertook a study trip through Italy and Sicily under the direction of archaeologist Max Wegner, together with other art and archeology students , where he dealt intensively with Jacob Burckhardt's cultural studies .

In the 1950s, Mersmann's artistic relationship with his father, who now often came to Münster from Berlin , intensified . Through him Paul Mersmann acquired an intensive knowledge of the novels of Christoph Martin Wieland , dealt with the theoretical work of Friedrich Schiller and later with Thomas Mann . At the same time, he attended lectures in philosophy and art at the Westphalian Wilhelms University.

After spending a year near Rome , Paul Mersmann returned to Germany in 1961 . He moved to Wiesbaden , where his literary activity began again. From 1969 to 1971 he lived in Florence for two years . After his return to Germany, he began to work on the diaries, which he continued in annual calendars.

At the end of the 1970s he created larger wall paintings in the North cafeteria of the University of Marburg , in the Villa Glücklich and in the Altenstift Hildastraße as well as in the Paris court theater on Spiegelgasse in Wiesbaden . His own house on Wagemannstrasse was at the same time an artist's studio , gallery and goldsmith's workshop. Pictures of his wife, the painter Eleonore Däubler-Mersmann , woodcuts by Aristide Maillol and lithographs by the Russian-French sculptor and graphic artist Ossip Zadkine were exhibited here . Extensive wall paintings by Paul Mersmann were also created in this house.

Together with the literary historian and later Wiesbaden local politician Michael von Poser , Paul Mersmann founded the literary magazine Der Doppelbogen - A German paper window , published by Kristin Guha in 1979 . Until 1983 he published literary texts and drawings here. Mersmann's first own publication also appeared in 1979 under the title Bergblätter . It is a collection of short stories that make the concept of mannerism adopted by Gustav René Hocke into a literary prose program.

Sculptural works by Paul Mersmann can be found in Rotenburg an der Wümme and in Wiesbaden. The Eagle Man, influenced by reading Lautréamont's Die Gesänge des Maldoror , was created as a bronze cast for the station square in Rotenburg . For the city of Wiesbaden he designed the Celtic deities Sirona , Epona and Rosmerta , also in bronze .

In 2002, the Maximilian Society published a collection of fantastic, sometimes mystical-occult, short stories under the title Kaleidoscopic Writings . For an unpublished series of novels under the title Schattenforschungen , which emerged from 2003 , Paul Mersmann took up this complex of themes again.

Between 1988 and 2008, the so-called ABC books were created as alphabetically arranged watercolor sheets with incorporated text passages. A total of seven of these ABC volumes were created, two of which have been published as reproductions in book form. The other five are in the hands of various private collectors as well as in the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz . Paul Mersmann proceeded in the same way in his work on the Old Testament , Genesis , the Book of Ruth , the Book of Exodus (2005–2007) and the Revelation of John (2010).

plant

During his trip to Italy in 1960, Paul Mersmann had two decisive artistic encounters with Giorgio de Chirico and Gustav René Hocke . In contrast to the opinion often expressed in art history , Mersmann particularly valued de Chirico's late work, the baroque repertoire of forms and the neo-metaphysical period that followed. In the paintings of de Chirico, wrongly described as a relapse into traditional neo-baroque form traditions, Mersmann found a perfect figurative execution and composition . From this point on, Gustav René Hocke's concept of Mannerism became essential for Mersmann's artistic self-positioning between the irrational-magical element of surrealism and a humanistic-intellectualistic claim. He described and saw himself as a mannerist in the specific sense that Hocke freed from the narrowness of an epoch. He saw himself in the European tradition of an interference between elements of order and cosmic experience of nature, the “cult of the disharmonious”.

The artist expanded these approaches to combine the moment of the irrational with an intellectualistic, playful approach to academic science when he designed the ABC books . These books establish the connection between the writer Paul Mersmann and the visual artist. In alphabetical order, various topics from natural sciences and technology are broken down into surrealistic individual complexes and implemented in picture-text form as watercolors with incorporated text passages. In this respect, Paul Mersmann, as defined by Hocke, did not begin with the word, the sentence, or a literary linguistic whole. He started with the single letter. In the ABC books he tried to contrast a linguistic logic with the irregular possibilities of language - language as a “word weapon” ( Mersmann, Das ikonographische ABC ). Here, language does not only stand for a written form. In Paul Mersmann's work, it includes the visual representation. Image and text overlay each other.

The early works: Münster and Anticoli Corrado

In the works created around 1960, the transition from the late Surrealist early phase to the Hockean mannerism, which continues to be interpreted in a surrealist way, is understandable. The 1959 painting Furore with its prop-like details and a composition trained on Picasso's Guernica allows the horrors of war to emerge as horrors of the psyche without any realistic borrowing .

Saturnian Library

In 1960 Mersmann painted pictures with the Roman Dream , The Table of Lucullus and the Saturnian Library , whose formal language is indebted to the ›dark‹ side of neighboring European painting. In them Mersmann finds an early postmodern approach to the so-called protomodern . In place of programmatic modernity, there was a hermeneutics of modernity , as it was developed in the humanities in the 1960s . The drawings and graphics of those years show the transition of both phases in the tension between a dreamlike-mechanical-playful and a dynamic-phantasmagic line (Pantagruel's wife searching for her husband at night, first oracle machine, pulled wooden horse with muzzle, 1960, areas of tension in the Ruhr area, on the other hand the remains of the White House, snail architecture, the inventor). Here, too, the latter prevailed in the seventies (Black Lion Fire, Incomprehensible Lords).

The eighties: Wiesbaden , Marburg , Schaidt

Hic est finis maris
The Marburg Rotte
circus

A series of wall paintings was created in the 1980s. These include the paintings of the Wiesbaden Villa Glücklich including the Yellow Room , the monumental mural Hic est finis maris in Schaidt , the virtuoso painting of the exhaust ducts of the Marburg cafeteria north Die Marburger Rotte the mural Circus in the Wiesbaden Paris court theater , as well as impetuous journey in the passage between Wagemannstrasse and Grabenstrasse. In this context, the eight riddle pictures of the Hildastift should also be mentioned in terms of form and motif . Without reading them allegorically, one can regard these works as painterly lessons about art and its changing prerequisites in history . In them the painter succeeded in creating an aesthetic world plan of great power and originality. The birth of modernity is an example of this “compressed abbreviation of European conditions” . "The picture marks a high point in Mersmann's work: thanks to the originality and compactness of the composition, the intense and balanced colors, the worked-out details, the variety of symbolic and iconographic references and the complexity of its message, it is one of the most important works of the time."

The ABC books

Towards the end of the 1980s, Mersmann switched to the smaller format of the ABC books. The motifs of the individual sheets are loosely grouped around a thematic core that is given by the title. Image imagination and interpretation interlock and create a phantasmagoric whole. For the learned artist, the Mannerist principle "Obscurum per Obscurius, Ignotum per Ignotius" ("Darkness through darker, unknown through unknown") was fulfilled in this. This can already be read from the omissions in the print version of Water-soluble intermediate stages in the art of healing about the pseudo-truths of medicine and their relationships with art. Criticism of physicalism and moralism of the modern age , of belief in reason and facts, is combined with playful, alchemical erudition from a media-skeptical perspective. Programmatically, the tautognomic and iconographic ABC as well as the late Gutenberg leaves and the Farbwasser-Musical ABC are indicative of the motto of the last-mentioned book: "For unknown natures / musical / linguistics / an only audible / age with color / in cold water cleared ". The affinity to dream images, comparable to Max Ernst's collages , characterizes all ABC sheets, but: "Even their commentary-interpretive lettering signals distance to vision, reflexivity and the will to construct." The drawings for the Alphazet written together with Ulrich Schödlbauer and Anne Corvey (online since 2007) are related in form and motif to the ABC books . However, in accordance with the accompanying character of the drawings, the text takes a back seat.

The Bible illustrations

Mersmann's Bible illustrations are formally linked to the ABC books. These are watercolor drawings with z. Partly detailed text parts on selected passages of the Old Testament or the Apocalypse . The main difference to the previous work lies in the thematic area. More emphatically than on the ABC sheets, the artist presents himself to his readers in the persona of the Gnostic thinker Paulus Homomaris (Paul Mersmann '). With his ›very serious jokes‹ ( Goethe ), Mersmann visibly places himself in the tradition of Nietzsche and Lautréamont, which is critical of religion . Much of it relates more or less indirectly to the thoughts of Georges Bataille and French post-structuralism . Other things are reminiscent of the Christology of the resistance theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer . But here, too, the puzzling character of the sheets retains the predominance over the (pseudo) argumentative text interspersed with irregular word coining and bizarre language elements.

Catalog raisonné

Artistic works

  • 1957/58 - a sensation
  • 1958 - Leo Adam
  • 1960 - Roman dream. In memoriam Francesco Borromini, oil on plywood, 120 × 100 cm
  • 1960 - The table of Lucullus, oil on canvas, 95 × 120 cm
  • 1960 - Saturnian Library, oil on plywood, 122 × 80 cm
  • 1980s - Resting Faun, panel on wood, 21 × 13 cm
  • 1980s - miniature, paper, 7 × 8 cm
  • 1980s - portrait of Karl-Heinz Vesterling
  • 1980s - 3 murals
  • 1981 - Pan, panel painting, 25.5 × 34.5 cm
  • 1982/83 - The birth of modernity, panel painting, 570 × 245 cm
  • 1982/83 - Saint Sebastian the women, panel painting, 350 × 265 cm
  • 1983 - Marco Polo is commissioned to leave Venice, panel painting
  • 1983 - The Venetian Room, wall paintings
  • 1983 - Eight puzzle pictures, Hildastift Wiesbaden
  • 1983 - Seascape
  • 1985 - The Marburger Rotte, Marburg Lahnberge cafeteria
  • 1986 - Circus, theater scene, approx. 5 × 7 m, Paris Court Theater, Wiesbaden
  • 1987 - triptych
  • 1987 - The city on the mountain
  • 1988 - The seventh ring, watercolor, 22 × 25 cm
  • 1988 - Portrait of Nora Schütz, canvas, 74 × 84 cm
  • 1989 - Portrait of Jürg Köllmann, oil on canvas, 85 × 75 cm
  • 2007 - Arminius Magnus, oil on canvas
  • 2007 - Grasteufel, watercolor, 24 × 16.5 cm
  • without date - Der Domspeicherer, graphic

Sculptural works

  • 1978/79 - Two portrait reliefs: Joachim von Appen, Paul Mersmann (marble)
  • Celtic deities: Rosmerta, Sirona, Epona (bronzes, Wiesbaden)
  • Eagle man (bronze, Rotenburg / Wümme)
  • around 1979/80 - bronze portrait of Ernst Mühlendyck

Fonts

  • 1979 - Bergblätter (short stories)
  • 1982 - Foreword and poems in the Clifford Holmead exhibition catalog
  • 1998 - Darmstadt leaflet on artistic counter-enlightenment No. 1 u. 2
  • 2002 - Kaleidoscopic writings (short stories)
  • 2007 - Chirico (online, Grabbeau Museum online)
  • 2007 - A servant of Chirico (online, Grabbeau Museum online)
  • 2007 - Art and Robbery (online, Grabbeau Museum online)
  • 2007 - A Celtic Sign (online, Grabbeau Museum online)
  • 2007 - Goethe in a picture (online, Grabbeau Museum on the web)

ABC books

  • 1988 - Water-soluble intermediate stages of the building (watercolors and commentaries)
  • 1989 - Water-soluble intermediate stages in the art of healing (watercolors and commentaries)
  • 1988 - The tautognomic ABC (book in loose pages, watercolors and commentaries)
  • 1988 - The iconographic ABC (book in loose pages, watercolors and commentaries)
  • 2004 - La doux marmelade (book in loose pages, watercolors and commentaries)
  • 2004 - Twenty-six sheets to promote the creation of legends about Gutenberg (book in loose pages, watercolors and commentaries)
  • 2007/08 - Musik ABC (book in loose pages, 26 watercolors and commentaries and 5 additional sheets)

Illustrations

  • 1996 - Gérard de Nerval, Aurelia (10 original etchings)
  • 2005 - Gustave Flaubert, book madness (etchings)
  • 2005/06 - The Book of Genesis (watercolors and commentaries)
  • 2007 - The Book of Ruth (watercolors and commentaries)
  • 2007 - The Book of Exodus (watercolors and commentaries)
  • 2007 - G 8 - A mass in Heiligendamm (8 sheets, watercolors and commentaries)
  • 2007 - Heinrich Heine, Germany a winter fairy tale (watercolors)

Illustrations and flyers for The Bear Press, Bayreuth

  • to Wolfgang Hildesheimer, report of a trip
  • to Gustave Flaubert, book madness
  • to Salvator Rosa, diatribe of an insulted monkey against the art of painting
  • The magic king of the time wheel. From the Kalacakra Tantra Raja: (woodcuts)
  • to Friedrich Georg Jünger, The Archivist
  • Christ knocked out - text and picture by Paul Mersmann
  • The collector - text and picture by Paul Mersmann
  • to Emanuel Swedenborg, Hell of Flames
  • to Franz Kafka, on the gallery

Graphics

selection

  • 1982 - patience, etching
  • 1994 - Orlando furioso, etching, 9.7 × 9.7 cm
  • 1995 - Tabula contra simulatio et odium dui germaniae and others, 6 sheets, etchings
  • 2000 - A walk of a well-read deer, etching, 10.8 × 7 cm
  • 2003 - From Bible to Babel. Cassandrian devotional sheets, etchings

drawings

selection

  • 1954 - Portrait of Benno Kersting
  • 1987 - The distant Hand Mountains

literature

  • Reinhard Düßel, image of hope breaking in. Thoughts on Paul Mersmann Circus , in: Steffen Dietzsch / Renate Solbach, Pauls Mersmann - Diffusion der Moderne, Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-934877-67-2
  • Ulrich Schödlbauer, Paul Mersmann European
  • Ulrich Schödlbauer, Occuli santi. Paul Mersmann's contribution to the sacred history of art, Mersmann Forum
  • Ulrich Schödlbauer, Homomaris or the Birth of Pictures , Museum on the Net
  • Steffen Dietzsch / Renate Solbach (eds.), Paul Mersmann - Diffusion der Moderne, Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-934877-67-2
  • Content (selection):
  • Ulrich Schödlbauer, Diffusion of Modernity. Paul Mersmann and Art, page 7
  • Reinhard Düßel, image of hope breaking in. Thoughts on Paul Mersmanns

Circus, page 65

  • Monika Schmitz-Emans, Paul Mersmann's ABC books, page 89
  • Gabi Rüth, Homomaris and the elements. Hic est Finis Maris: Notes

on the symbolism of an image, page 120

Web links

Commons : Paul Mersmann the Younger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ (GR Hocke: Mannerism in Literature . P. 302)
  2. ↑ Ulrich Schödlbauer, Diffusion of Modernity. Paul Mersmann and art, in: Dietzsch / Solbach, Paul Mersmann - Diffusion der Moderne, Heidelberg 2008, p. 57.
  3. ↑ Catalog raisonné Paul Mersmann: The birth of modernity
  4. ^ Motto of the Gutenberg leaves. Catalog raisonné Paul Mersmann: Twenty-six sheets to promote the creation of legends about Gutenberg
  5. ↑ Wiesbaden 1989, foreword .
  6. ↑ Catalog raisonné Paul Mersmann: Farbwasser-Musikalisches ABC
  7. ↑ Monika Schmitz-Emans, Paul Mersmanns ABC-Bücher, in: Dietzsch / Solbach, Paul Mersmann - Diffusion der Moderne, Heidelberg 2008, p. 110.
personal data
SURNAME Mersmann, Paul the Younger
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mersmann, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sculptor, painter and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Dahlem , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH February 25, 2017
Place of death Creglingen , Baden-Württemberg , Germany