Thoughts That Cure Radically: Eugen Schönebeck Paintings and Drawing 1957-1966 at David Nolan Gallery

The choice to pursue a career in art is personal and difficult. The chances for success are small, the financial rewards elusive at best. The decision to then stop making art, especially after you have begun to make a statement in your native country, is equally problematic. Such is the case with little known German artist Eugen Schönebeck, who is having a small but important New York exhibition of ten years of work at David Nolan Gallery. Born in 1936 near Dresden, Germany, Schönebeck first studied in East Germany after the war but soon moved to West Berlin. In West Germany, Schönebeck had the freedom to travel to Paris and acquaint himself with postwar French abstraction, discovering the work of Hans Hartung, Jean Fautrier and Henri Michaux. Influenced by the ideas of the art informal, Schönebeck developed a quasi figurative quasi abstract language that used the language of Parisian formalism with a heavily accented German irony. In the early 60s Schönebeck and Georg Baselitz published mock manifestos pilloring the German art establishment of their day. Shortly after his collaboration with Baselitz, Schönebeck began to make large figure head portraits of international communist figures in a looser version of Soviet Realist rendering. As his career expanded, Schönebeck felt unable to reconcile his politics with the demands on his work of a capitalist art market and Schönebeck renounced artmaking in 1967.

Eugen Schönebeck’s brief career can serve as a sort of talisman to contemporary artists who are trying to reconcile politics and art, painting’s relevance and the nature of figurative and abstract two-dimensional style. Unlike his friend Baselitz, whose career has attained stratospheric success, Schönebeck is little known outside of his native Germany, and according to David Nolan Gallery, this is his first exhibition in New York City.

The thirty odd drawings and several paintings have a gritty, Germanic character, clearly in line with the Expressionist’s trauma that originated out of Germany’s first national tragedy, World War I. The pen and ink drawings display both a direct tachiste approach as well as a conscientious social satire. The paintings have a dirty, mixed in color quality that is reminiscent of early Baselitz and a representational-gestural approach in line with Lovis Corinth.

Ultimately, however, Schönebeck’s mature career was truncated, a victim to his own ideological purity. Schönebeck, for whatever reason, did not believe that the energy of his drawings and paintings could compensate for the impurity of the postwar German art market. Artists choose whether to walk into their studio and start again each day. Myriad factors influence such decisions. Some artists will choose in the affirmative, facing success or indifference, breakthrough or stagnation, but continue to make work. Some, sadly, finally drift away.