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by Christian Immo Schneider
Central Washington University
5/22/98
Hermann Hesse stands in the
international tradition of writers who are capable of expressing
themselves in several arts. To be sure, he became famous first of all for
his lyrical poetry and prose. However, his thought and language is
thoroughly permeated from his earliest to his last works with a profound
sense of music. Great artists possess the specific gift of shifting their
creative power from one to another medium. Therefore, it seems to be quite
natural that Hesse, when he had reached a stage in his self-development
which necessitated both revitalization and enrichment of the art in which
he had thus excelled, turned to painting as a means of the self expression
he had not yet experienced.
"... one day I discovered an entirely
new joy. Suddenly, at the age of forty, I began to paint. Not that I
considered myself a painter or intended to become one. But painting is
marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not
have black fingers as with writing, but red and blue ones." (I,56)
When Hesse began painting around 1917,
he stood on the threshold of his most prolific period of creativity. This
commenced with Demian and continued for more than a decade with such
literary masterpieces as Klein und Wagner, Siddhartha, Kurgastup to Der
Steppenwolf and beyond. The reason or, rather, inspiration for Hesse's
first attempts at painting may have been his psychotherapy sessions with
Dr. J.B. Lang which indeed took place during the same time. In keeping
with thoughts of C.G. Jung whose student he was, Dr. Lang recommended to
his patient among other creative activities especially painting as a form
of self-expression through which integration and a renewed feeling of
one's own value could be achieved. The poet confirms this idea in a letter
of September 9, 1925, to Ina Seidel:
"... in fact I would have long since
given up living if my first attempts at painting had not comforted and
saved me during that most difficult time in my life." (II,120)
More important, however, than trying
to establish a correlation between painting and regaining his inner
equilibrium, is its influence on Hesse's future writings. At first a few
remarks concerning his development as a painter and his achievements in an
art so closely related to music and poetry are in order. Though his
reflections on the essence of music are articulate enough to surpass those
of many experts, he considers them as nothing but "musical notes of a
lay-man." With the same modesty he characterizes his painting: "I am not a
very good painter, I am a dilettante." (III,12)This definitely does not
apply to Hesse. Behind his miniature drawings as letterheads, the
illustrations of his own poems and his watercolors in larger for-mat one
discovers, in the words of Georg Bodamer, "a genuine painter and
draftsman, a magician with colors - in short an artist who masters the
technique of water coloring most brilliantly." (IV,133)
Talent for the fine arts is abundant
in Hesse's family. It is reflected in the remarkable sketchbooks and oil
paintings of Hesse's older sister, Adele, who received her artistic
education with Sofie Heck (1859-1919), a well-known painter in Stuttgart.
Furthermore, the artistic heritage reveals itself in Hesse's three sons:
Bruno be-came a painter, Heiner a graphic artist, and Martin a
photographer. It lives on in their children and grandchildren. As a visual
person, Hesse had always cultivated his friendship with painters. In his
early years in Basel he made the acquaintance of Max Bucherer; later he
met Otto Blümel, Ernst Kraidolf and Albert Welti in whose house in Bern he
lived from 1912 - 1919. He portrays his artist friend, Louis Moilliet, as
"Louis the Gruesome" in his narrative, Klingsors letzter Sommer. Moilliet
himself was a friend of Paul Klee and W. Kandinsky. It was he, too, who
undertook together with August Macke that journey to Tunesia fraught with
so many consequences for the future of modern painting. Moilliet also
served Hesse as a link to Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke. Hesse's
expressionist painter friend, Cuno Amiet, belonged to the latter.
However much Hesse appreciated August
Macke as his favorite watercolorist - he would have never thought of
imitating his style of painting nor would he adopt the more conservative
tradition of the cartoonist Olaf Gulbransson or of other contemporaries
such as Karl Hofer, Hans Purrmann, let alone Alfred Kubin, Ernst
Morgenthaler or Gunter Böhmer. Certainly Hesse may have learned a great
deal from the intensive exchange of thought and from the written
correspondence among all these prominent painters. However, he acquired
the technical skills of a painter, as those of a poet, in the first place
as an autodidact with immense diligence and determination.
Among the inventory found after his
death were piles of surplus Christmas cards for the prisoners of war he
had officially been in charge of during World War I. Hesse, as an
extremely economical and ecologically-minded person had used the empty
space on the reverse side of the cards for practicing the techniques of
design, perspective and contrast of colors within a painting. It must have
been along and laborious way before he finally developed that in which he
had always excelled as a poet: his own painting style.
His early pictures derived their
themes from architecture and landscapes. They were sketches in
earth-colored hues, drawn with affectionate pedantry with a series of tiny
little strokes as the painter Veraguth in the novel Rosshalde(1914) would
have done under the influence of Hans Thoma and other representatives of
Jugendstil. After his personal crisis following the Great War, Hesse's
care for the naturalistic detail cedes to a more vigorous self-confident
palette, as if Hesse had been associated with the young generation in
their revolt against late Impressionism and Naturalism of the collapsed
German Empire and other monarchies. With his seismographic sensitivity for
changes in politics and culture, he reacted accordingly through his
artistic style. Hesse did not deem it necessary that everybody would tune
into these fluctuations and would eulogize them. But in his understanding
it was neither accidental nor due to the whim of certain individuals that
within a few years Expressionism became of utmost importance all over
Europe. He recognized it as an organic, historical development.
Hesse went through similar phases
until he found that which he wanted to express in his individual style,
namely "... small expressionist aquarelles, very freely drawn from nature,
but carefully studied in their specific forms. Everything should be rather
bright and colorful." (III,104)
In Klingsor's Last Summer he speaks in
connection with the painter's self-portrait of a Farbenkonzert (symphony
of colors) and "a tapestry that in spite of its brilliant hues gives a
sense of tranquility and nobility." (V,211)
The tapestry-like, two-dimensional
features are characteristic of many of Hesse's watercolors and are
perfectly in harmony with the main motifs: Ticino landscapes, mountains,
lakes, trees, flowers, houses, churches, villages; frequently he draws
attention to a single object such as a chair with books, a winding
staircase, a blooming magnolia - all of which seem to be simple,
unpretentious things at first sight but radiant with symbolic meaning at a
closer look. Seldom do we find animals or human figures. If so, as in the
poet's illustrations accompanying his fairy tale Piktors Verwandlungen
they appear to be integral parts of nature which surrounds them like an
all-encompassing flower bed. (VI)
Hesse sometimes painted his
watercolors in a more abstract, sometimes in a more realistic style. Their
contours are asymmetrical and rhythmical, never very exactly measured.
Even the windows of houses look like leaves of a tree which resemble each
other but are mathematically never identical. Hesse's paintings convey
predominantly a sense of harmony, order and concentration. In keeping with
the pangs of an existence surviving two World Wars, they do not exclude
disturbing, even demonic features as can be seen in the dismemberment of
the "humanoid" (or clown) in the midst of naturalistic and abstract
figures in the gaudy watercolor Maskenball of 1926 reminiscent of Picasso.
Contemplating one of Hesse's
watercolors means never forgetting it as the quintessence of the sujet
represented through it. For example, the graciously bent stem of a peach
tree whose blossoms spread like rosy foam across blue mountains in the
background. It appears to be the transformation of Hesse's poem "Voll
Blüten" into the medium of shapes and colors - ut pictura poesis in the
truest sense of the word: "Voll Blüten steht der Pfirsichbaum/Nicht jede
wird zurFrucht/Sie schimmern hell wie Rosenschaum/Durch Blau und
Wolken-flucht" (Full of blossoms stands the peach tree, not every one
becomes a fruit, they shimmer brightly like rose foam through blue and
flight of clouds.) The first line of the following stanza "Wie Blüten
gehen Gedanken auf" (Thoughts sprout like blossoms) hints at the
existential truth behind the image - the symbol for which it stands in
poetry and in painting. (VII,415)Above all, it is the Magicder Farben
(magic of colors) in the poet's own words, which distinguishes every
single painting as one of Hesse's unmistakable creations.
In his later years, he no longer
emphasizes colorfulness and details in his drawings with India ink. He
prefers playing with more re-strained forms and colors and also knew by
then how to incorporate his handwriting with the ease of a graphic artist,
as in the illustration of his poem "Ein Traum" (A Dream) from the
collection of Mar-lies Bodamer née Schiler. His rhythmical yet always
readable lettering corresponds to the very motif of twilight expressed in
dreamy blue shades.
Hesse as a painter took the extraction
of solar energy seriously as Volker Michels points out in his brilliant
essay. (VIII,31-42)Similarto collectors of light, heat and sun, the
shining brilliance of Hesse's paintings stands in stark contrast to our
"gloomy and over-crowded areas", and thus gives us at least "an inkling of
summer, hope and joy of living." Precisely this was Hesse's intention.
By no means had he mastered the art of
drawing and color mixture from the beginning. Only in the course of his
extended experience with painting did he develop a theory of his own: "The
forms of nature", he writes in a letter of September 14, 1919 to Frau
Schädelin, "their top and bottom, thickness and thinness can be shifted,
subdued, transposed in a hundred possible ways. But if you want to
transmogrify a piece of nature, it is indispensible that the new colors
stand accurately, even most precisely in the same relationship and in the
same tension to each other as they do in nature ..." (III, 104)
During World War I, when funds for the
care of prisoners of war be-came more scarce, Hesse began illustrating his
manuscripts and type-scripts of poems and offered them to admirers,
collectors and patrons for purchase. With the proceeds he paid for
numerous books and care packages sent to the prison camps. For one
specimen of these hand-written poems he received at that time 250 Swiss
francs; typewritten ones were 50 francs less. At the end of the war, Hesse
still being a German citizen and financially almost exclusively dependent
on his German publishers, became impoverished to such a degree that he had
to maintain his family's livelihood in part through selling his paintings
and those illustrated manuscripts. Later on, even until his old age, he
used the earnings of his fine art for the support of needy colleagues and
destitute people in general. He seldom sold one of his many hundred
watercolors of large format. With the countless miniatures as letterheads
he delighted friends and correspondents.
Hesse's first book with reproductions
of his own paintings was Gedichte des Malers published in 1920. It was
followed in the same year by Wanderung: prose and poems with watercolors
and drawings based on motifs of his hike from northern Switzerland across
the Gotthard Pass into the southern Ticino and the surroundings of Locarno.
Elf farbige Aquarelleaus dem Tessin and Zwölf farbige Bildtafeln (Twelve
color plates) came out in 1955. The lover's fairy tale, Piktors
Verwandlungen (Pictor's Metamorphoses) written and drawn in 1922 for his
second wife, was sold or given away before 1954 only in manuscript form
each with different pictures. It appeared in 1954 first as a facsimile
edition, and the original version for Ruth née Wenger as an Insel
pocketbook in 1975. (IX) In 1977, the centennial of Hesse's birth, two
bibliophile volumes in large format entitled Hermann Hesseals Maler and
Klingsors letzter Sommerwere published by Orell Füssliin Zurich. They
contain, besides texts, watercolors in their original size. Since 1976, a
perennial calendar Mit Hesse durch das Jahris published by the Suhrkamp
Verlag as a pendant to the popular Goethe Calendar. Also available since
1977 are regular editions of Hesse wall-calendars in large format with
watercolors, poems and prose. In recent years also Italian, French and
Japanese publications of Hesse's paintings deserve special attention
(XII).
The lasting value of Hesse's works as
a painter was not fully recognized until the sixties. Since then, his fine
art has been exhibited with ever increasing success in various European
countries as well as in Japan and America. Accordingly, his paintings have
been considerably reevaluated and are sold now by autograph dealers for
more than a hundred times their original price.
As mentioned above, Hesse was several
times his own book illustrator, but commissioned also Peter Weiss and
Gunter Böhmer with illustrations. Once invited to Montagnola, G. Böhmer
stayed forever in the Casa Camuzzi and became both Hesse's friend for life
and most congenial illustrator, as can be gleaned from Volker Michels's
edition Gunter Böhmer-Hermann Hesse. Dokumente einer Freundschaft(1988).
"As a poet I would not have made so
much progress without painting." Hesse wrote in 1924 to his patron, the
art collector Georg Reinhartin Winterthur. Painting had enabled him, as he
points out, to take "a detached view of literature" (III,110) And much
more. His increasingly differentiated - and also more conscious -
treatment of color gradations, their valeurs finds its poetic expression
in the structure and narratives such as Klein und Wagner and Klingsors
letzterSommer. Hesse's subtle knowledge of color symbolism serves him like
an artistically handled spotlight with which to illuminate the course of
the plot from outside and inside.
This phenomenon has been elucidated by
Reso Karalashvili (1940-1989) in one of his last lecture-essays on Hesse
under the spell of Goethe," Tatendes Lichts" (Feats of light). An entire
chapter in Karalashvili's book on Hesses Romanweltdeals with the poet's
"astonishing capability of designing colorful landscapes of suggestive
power."(XI,117-120) However, that which Hesse as a colorist achieved in
his Klingsor novella, Karalashvili emphasizes, "goes beyond all possible
limits." With a few brushstrokes Hesse succeeds in designing images
through the medium of language which remain ineffaceably in the reader's
memory: bluish mountain slopes with tiny white villages on the mountain
crest, or red houses which look like jewels in the deep green of their
gardens. In the same novella, more than 50 different shades of color
occur; among them common ones like snow-white, gray-white, lilac, violet,
dark blue and light blue, red, red-brown, light pink, dust-green etc.
However, we also find colors which belong exclusively to the jargon of the
professional painter such as cadmium and cobalt, rubiate, vermillion,
Chinese blue, Neapolitan yellow and Veronese green.
It took him years, Karalashvili
continues, before Hesse realized the "poetic value" and "way of
functioning" of the numerous colors. On the one hand, the many
designations of specific colors in the Klingsor novella contribute to
livening up the dazzling images of a southern Ticino landscape in the
summer. On the other hand, the individual colors have a particular
function and are fraught with symbolic meanings closely related to the
basic structure of the narrative.
Consider for instance red which,
according to R.J. Humm, constitutes Hesse's favorite color. It signals
first of all a connection to earth and eros, symbolizes the color of the
pulsating blood and of fire. However, red is also symbolic of spiritual
love, as the term "passion" with its reference to Jesus Christ's suffering
suggests.Accordingly, Klingsor's style of painting is characterized as
being "lodernder Flammenstil" (a style full of blazing flames) analogous
to van Gogh's expressionism. Furthermore, red appears both as an epitheton
ornans and a noun attribute characterizing the "rote Königinder Gebirge"
(red Queen of the Mountains) who is Ruth Wenger. She was dressed all red,
"eine rote Flamme", when she cut bread and served wine. This analogy to
the Last Supper is a subtle reminder of Klingsor's "last" summer, his
imminent death. It was on a hot day in "Kareno" (that is, Carona near
Lugano) when Ruth had put on indeed a "feuerrotes Kleid" (a fire red
robe), as Hesse reports to Louis Moilliet.
Similar examples of color symbolism
can be found in the novella Klein und Wagnerin which yellow dominates. The
"Yellow" or "Blonde" one is the name of Klein's young mistress, Teresina.
Yellow signifies also the hair color of the Great Mother as well as of
Demian's and Goldmund's mother and many other female figures in Hesse's
works.
One subtle observation of Karalashvili
may have eluded most Hesse readers and researchers. For sure, Klein's
suicidal death in the lake is depicted archetypically as a return into
mother's womb. But it is accompanied by a vision in which all opposites,
also of contrasting colors, dissolve in view of a "transparent dome of
sound" in the midst of which God sits, "a bright star, invisible from
sheer brightness (...), the quintessence of light" (V, 143)That which
before - Feats of light! - had disintegrated into the different colors of
the rainbow is now being unified in the pure, undivided light of God.
(XIII,283)
There is, in the final analysis, no
discrepancy between Hesse's painting and writing, for in both closely
related arts, Hesse was always concerned not with "naturalistic", but with
"poetic truth." (III,106) Which truth, however?
A reflection on a possible answer of
this intriguing question is given to us by Albert Schweitzer. In his
chapter on "Poetic and Pictorial Music" as part of his book on J.S. Bach,
he writes about the complexity of every artistic idea and claims that
neither in painting, nor in music, nor in poetry is there such a thing as
"absolute art". For in every artist dwells another who wishes to have his
own say, the difference being that in one his activity is obtrusive, in
another hardly noticeable. Therefore, Schweitzer seems to be close to a
solution by stating that "art in itself is neither painting nor poetry nor
music but an act of creation in which all cooperate."(XIII,8)***
This essay is the revised version of
my chapter on Der Maler, in C.I. Schneider, Hermann Hesse, Munich: C.H.
Beck, 1991, pp. 151-160. Translated with permission of the publisher by
Christian I. and Sylvia L. Schneider. The Roman numbers refer to the book
titles below, the Arabic ones to the pages quoted from. Unless specified,
the English translations are our own. CIS. The essay is reprinted by the
Hermann Hesse Page with the author's permission. GG
Consulted Literature and Bibliography
I. H.H. Autobiographical Writings.
Edited by Theodore Ziolkowski and translated by Rika Lessler. New York,
N.Y. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 1972.
II. H.H. Gesammelte Briefe. In
Zusammenarbeit mit Heiner Hesseherausgegeben von Ursula und Volker Michels.
Frankfurt, Main (Suhrkamp) 1979, Bd. 2
III. H.H. als Maler. 24 Aquarelle.
Ausgewählt von Bruno Hesse und Sandor Kuthy mit Texten von H.H. Frankfurt,
Main (Suhrkamp) 1977.
IV. Begegnungen mit H.H.
3.Internationales H.H. -Kolloquium in Calw1984. Herausgegeben von
Friedrich Bran und Martin Pfeifer. BadLiebenzell (Verlag B. Gengenbach)
1984.
V. H.H. Klingsor's Last Summer.
Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York, N. Y. (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux) 1970
VI. H.H., Pictor's Metamorphoses and
other Fantasies. Edited by Th. Ziolkowski and translated by Rika Lessler.
New York, N.Y. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 1982.
VII. H.H., Die Gedichte. Erweiterte
Ausgabe von V. Michels. Frankfurt, Main (Suhrkamp) 1980, Bd.1.
VIII. In: H.H. als Maler. 80
Aquarelle. Milano (Edizioni G.Mazzotta)1996. Italian-German translation by
Hellmut Riediger.
IX. H.H., Pictors Verwandlungen.
Frankfurt, Main (Insel Verlag)1975.
X. For the Italian edition, see above
under VIII. Furthermore: Les Promenades de H.H. Texte: Jean-Philippe de
Tomac. Photographies: Daniel Faure. Aquarelles: H.H. Paris (Editions du
Chene) 1996. H. Hesse. Tokyo (Mainichi Newspaper Co.). 1995.
XI. Reso Karalaschwili, H. Hesses
Romanwelt. Köln (Bohlau Verlag)1986.
XII. "Die Taten des Lichts", in: R.
Karalaschwili, H.H. Charakter und Weltbild. Frankfurt, Main (Suhrkamp),
1993, pp.274-284.
XIII. Albert Schweitzer, J.S. Bach.
Translated by Ernest Newman, Lon-don, G.B. (A.& C. Black Limited) 1938,
vol. ll.****
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