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Auction 096C: Richard Matouschek - Paintings and Graphics from a private collection of Hamburg - 31.05.2011

Richard Matouschek (1920-1976)
– paintings drawings and graphic works from a Hamburg private collection

The phantastic painting constitutes a genre of its own that has been a part of art history from its beginning in the Renaissance, starting with the worlds of Hieronymus Bosch, populated by hybrid creatures, up to the visionary experiences in the works of Ernst Fuchs. „There have always been artists who expressed their eras; and at the same time there have been other artists who only wanted to express themselves.“ said Wieland Schmied about the nature of this ostensibly anachronistic art movement when he inaugurated the exhibition of phantastic art in Germany in 1968. He continued: “Phantastic art is an acknowledgement of subjectivism, of oneself, of the singularity of oneself. Who creates phantastic art looks inward not outward, thus somewhere no one can primarily follow.“¹ Thus, Nicolas Poussin for example, expressed the baroque hierarchical understanding of the world depicting heroic landscapes with unscathed antique temples, while Piranesi, at the same time, reinterprets the motives of antique architecture as the gloomy, dark, desperate maze of the ‚Carceri’. Rococo painter Fragonard would portray the gallantry of the Court while his contemporary Johann Heinrich Fuessli depicted the depth of the subconscious as one can see in his famous painting ‚The nightmare’. The list of artists who base their motives on their own psyche can be extended adding renowned artists like James Ensor and Odilon Redon.

Richard Matouschek, too, belongs to these loners who were not affected by artistical trends and tendencies. His artistical talent was discovered by Ernst Fuchs, who, next to Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hutter and Anton Lehmden was one of the founders of the „Viennese school of phantastic realism“. Influenced by these four alumni of the Viennese academy of art who were expressing tragic incidents like war or death using religious or mystic symbols in an old-master glaze technique, the autodidact made his first artistic attempts. It is said that he needed nine months to finish his first drawing.² Ernst Fuchs helped the budding painter to exhibit at a gallery in 1958. Earlier, Matouschek who came from modest circumstances and grew up with a single-mother had lived on occasional labours. During the day he entered service as coachman, farm labourer and coal carrier, while dancing the night away as a Boogie dancer of legendary reputation in the Adebar Jazz bar. ³

In the 1950s, Matouschek dedicated his new life to art. In the beginning, his fine, detailed drawings and graphic works circled around the power of evil and the dark side of sexuality, like in lots 23 to 25. His experiences during the second World War were very formative on his inventions. He lost his right eye getting wounded in 1943, one finds that motive in the men’s heads in some of his paintings, sometimes depicted in profile showing only one eye, or sometimes given frontal with one eye closed. Throughout his career, landscapes constituted a large portion of his work as one can see in the 22 works of divers formats in this catalogue. Matouschek created impressive phantasy landscapes in meticulous brush strokes showing hills, mountain ranges, stones and grasses that remind of inhospitable steppes, deserts or winter landscapes. Above these deserted, uninhabitated regions, seemingly not from this world, hangs a strongly contrasting night-blue sky. „I paint, I paint whatever my eye lets me see when I close it. Nature, landscape, uninhabitated, freezing, without the mercy we crave“, the artist comments his depictions of nature, that is only rarely animated with insects or birds and that remind the expert and author on phantastic literature, Rein A. Zondergeld, of the primeval landscapes of the history of creation.

The female nude, too, plays an outstanding role. In his early works, an aggressive erotic aura dominates the often deformed bodies, whereas in his late work, women’s bodies seem to represent harmony and beauty. The so-called segment-paintings have an exceptional position in his oeuvre (lots 34 to 37). They present quasi a summary of his symbolic world. The landscape, the female nude and the one-eyed man’s head had always been depicted in single pictures. Although being influenced by Ernst Fuchs and his artist friends, his paintings differ a lot from the works of his mentors who use symbols of cabbala and occultism. Matouschek’s works cannot be decoded. Since 1965, the painter deliberately had given up to title his paintings, to leave a larger range of interpretation to the beholder. In the middle of the 1960s, Richard Matouschek moved from Paris to Düsseldorf and tried out a new painting technique using oil that gave him a larger creative freedom. Especially in his later landscapes the pursuit of abstraction can be seen (lots 20 to 22). The paintings of his late work represent harmony. In painting his worries, negative experiences and visions, Richard Matouschek found an inner peace that can be seen in his work, as Rein Zondergeld resumed.
 

^{_{1 Wieland Schmied, Phantastische Kunst in Deutschland, in: Brusberg Berichte, Informationen der Galerie Brusberg, Vol. 2, 1968, p. 13-16.
2 Cf. Exhibition catalogue Matou gallery Hamburg, Richard Matouschek, text by Friedhelm Volbach, Hamburg 1971.
3 Rein A. Zondergeld, Der Weg aus dem Labyrinth. Überlegungen zum Werk und Leben Richard Matouscheks, exhibition cat., no place given, no year given.}}