Rondine 5. März 62 g
Southgate, M. Therese
2005-03-16 00:00:00
The German painter Julius Bissier (1893-1965) was born and raised in Freiburg im Breisgau. His ties to the area were deep: his mother’s family had farmed in the Black Forest area for generations and his father’s people were craftsmen in the town. Bissier’s interest in drawing began during childhood. After completing his schooling in Freiburg, he went to Karlsruhe Academy where he began his formal art studies at age 20. Within months, however, he was conscripted into the military when World War I began. At war’s end he chose to study on his own and, in 1920, had his first solo exhibit in Freiburg. The decade would be important to the development of his ideas. Early on, he met the art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, who directed his attention to the writings of the mid-19th-century Swiss historian and mythologist Johann Bachofen. Later, he met the eminent sinologist Ernst Grosse, who was also the author of a monograph on East Asian India ink drawing. Grosse would interest Bissier in ancient Chinese thought and in drawings based on contemplation. Finally, in 1930, in Paris, Bissier met the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who reinforced the meditative aspects of the practice of painting. Painting, he taught Bissier, is first a state of being, and then—and only to a much lesser degree—a state of doing. The subsequent years were not easy for Bissier or his family. In 1934, while teaching and working at the University of Freiburg, he lost almost all of his paintings in a fire at the university. He also lost his teaching position. Later that same year he lost his only son, six-year-old Uli, to complications of a childhood illness. In 1939, with a second world war imminent, Bissier and his family moved out of the public eye, to Hagnau, a town on Lake Constance. There he worked in virtual isolation, with only his painting, his family, and his cello (in which he was reportedly quite proficient) for solace. Not until the mid-1950s did he begin the work that has become his signature, a series of small, colored, egg-and-oil tempera images painted on torn or cut pieces of linen. The paintings are small and delicate, fleeting as thought, fragile as an eggshell. The images are diaphanous, like silk in sunlight, and evanescent, like foam on the crest of a breaking wave; the colors are muted, yet brilliant, residue of a butterfly’s wings. He called these pictures “Miniaturen”—they were hardly eight inches square; he also called them metaphors, tiny pictures that carry the burden of that single moment wherein object, light, arrangement, and the soul of the painter met and embraced. They might also be called meditations on reality: real objects such as jugs, bottles, and beakers are set among geometric abstractions such as squares, rectangles, circles, cylinders, and pyramids. The small work Rondine 5. März 62 g (cover ) is part of this series. As the just barely visible text in the upper left corner implies, it belongs to the late winter of 1962, just before the advent of spring. Bissier and his wife had left Hagnau and were living at Casa Rondine, a former vintner’s cottage in the Swiss town of Ascona on the eastern edge of Lake Maggiore, near the Italian border. Shadowless, the forms of Rondine float in the imagination, like objects half glimpsed, music half heard, thoughts half formed in the state between sleeping and waking. A movement, a sound, a passage of time—of even a moment—and the mood is changed, the thought has evaporated, and the images are beyond recovery. They exist only at the semipermeable juncture between two realities: concrete and abstract, visible and invisible, light and dark, matter and spirit. One does not go there at will; one can only wait for the images to form themselves. In the same manner, Bissier’s paintings are not objects, but states of being that are recalled by certain objects or their configuration, much like a mood that is re-created when a certain melody is heard. As such they have been called lyrical and Bissier a lyrical painter. They are also intensely personal. Julius Bissier (1893-1965), Rondine 5. März 62 g, 1962, German. Egg tempera on linen. 19.1 × 21.3 cm. Courtesy of the Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University (http://www.marquette.edu/haggerty/), Milwaukee, Wis; the Mary B. Finnigan Art Endowment Fund. Typically, Bissier concentrates on reconciling opposites, not so much in the sense of resolving conflict, but as showing that each, being contained in the other, is necessary for a whole. Thus in Rondine—though much of its symbolism remains with the author—some of the images recall both universal and particular. For example, a circle-square reconciliation may be seen in the upper right portion of the work. But it is the bottles that draw one’s immediate attention. Paired, they complement each other: one dark, one light, the “C” on one suggesting they belong to Casa Rondine. And the fact that Casa Rondine is a former vintner’s cottage suggests wine bottles, receptacles for the fruit of the vine. They also suggest one of Bissier’s favorite themes, the universal male-female principle of life. But this is only scratching the surface of the painting. Bissier’s tiny paintings, as one critic observed, are packed with symbolism. More importantly they do not speak in words: they speak more like a cello speaks, drawing out a long lyrical line of melody until even the music disappears and only the mood remains. In such a state, one no longer hears the music: one becomes the music (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets). Bissier’s works are indeed meditations, states of being as Brancusi suggested, small, silent, and charged with energy. Bissier died of heart failure in 1965 in Ascona. He was 71.
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The German painter Julius Bissier (1893-1965) was born and raised in Freiburg im Breisgau. His ties to the area were deep: his mother’s family had farmed in the Black Forest area for generations and his father’s people were craftsmen in the town. Bissier’s interest in drawing began during childhood. After completing his schooling in Freiburg, he went to Karlsruhe Academy where he began his formal art studies at age 20. Within months, however, he was conscripted into the...
The German painter Julius Bissier (1893-1965) was born and raised in Freiburg im Breisgau. His ties to the area were deep: his mother’s family had farmed in the Black Forest area for generations and his father’s people were craftsmen in the town. Bissier’s interest in drawing began during childhood. After completing his schooling in Freiburg, he went to Karlsruhe Academy where he began his formal art studies at age 20. Within months, however, he was conscripted into the military when World War I began. At war’s end he chose to study on his own and, in 1920, had his first solo exhibit in Freiburg. The decade would be important to the development of his ideas. Early on, he met the art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, who directed his attention to the writings of the mid-19th-century Swiss historian and mythologist Johann Bachofen. Later, he met the eminent sinologist Ernst Grosse, who was also the author of a monograph on East Asian India ink drawing. Grosse would interest Bissier in ancient Chinese thought and in drawings based on contemplation. Finally, in 1930, in Paris, Bissier met the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who reinforced the meditative aspects of the practice of painting. Painting, he taught Bissier, is first a state of being, and then—and only to a much lesser degree—a state of doing. The subsequent years were not easy for Bissier or his family. In 1934, while teaching and working at the University of Freiburg, he lost almost all of his paintings in a fire at the university. He also lost his teaching position. Later that same year he lost his only son, six-year-old Uli, to complications of a childhood illness. In 1939, with a second world war imminent, Bissier and his family moved out of the public eye, to Hagnau, a town on Lake Constance. There he worked in virtual isolation, with only his painting, his family, and his cello (in which he was reportedly quite proficient) for solace. Not until the mid-1950s did he begin the work that has become his signature, a series of small, colored, egg-and-oil tempera images painted on torn or cut pieces of linen. The paintings are small and delicate, fleeting as thought, fragile as an eggshell. The images are diaphanous, like silk in sunlight, and evanescent, like foam on the crest of a breaking wave; the colors are muted, yet brilliant, residue of a butterfly’s wings. He called these pictures “Miniaturen”—they were hardly eight inches square; he also called them metaphors, tiny pictures that carry the burden of that single moment wherein object, light, arrangement, and the soul of the painter met and embraced. They might also be called meditations on reality: real objects such as jugs, bottles, and beakers are set among geometric abstractions such as squares, rectangles, circles, cylinders, and pyramids. The small work Rondine 5. März 62 g (cover ) is part of this series. As the just barely visible text in the upper left corner implies, it belongs to the late winter of 1962, just before the advent of spring. Bissier and his wife had left Hagnau and were living at Casa Rondine, a former vintner’s cottage in the Swiss town of Ascona on the eastern edge of Lake Maggiore, near the Italian border. Shadowless, the forms of Rondine float in the imagination, like objects half glimpsed, music half heard, thoughts half formed in the state between sleeping and waking. A movement, a sound, a passage of time—of even a moment—and the mood is changed, the thought has evaporated, and the images are beyond recovery. They exist only at the semipermeable juncture between two realities: concrete and abstract, visible and invisible, light and dark, matter and spirit. One does not go there at will; one can only wait for the images to form themselves. In the same manner, Bissier’s paintings are not objects, but states of being that are recalled by certain objects or their configuration, much like a mood that is re-created when a certain melody is heard. As such they have been called lyrical and Bissier a lyrical painter. They are also intensely personal. Julius Bissier (1893-1965), Rondine 5. März 62 g, 1962, German. Egg tempera on linen. 19.1 × 21.3 cm. Courtesy of the Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University (http://www.marquette.edu/haggerty/), Milwaukee, Wis; the Mary B. Finnigan Art Endowment Fund. Typically, Bissier concentrates on reconciling opposites, not so much in the sense of resolving conflict, but as showing that each, being contained in the other, is necessary for a whole. Thus in Rondine—though much of its symbolism remains with the author—some of the images recall both universal and particular. For example, a circle-square reconciliation may be seen in the upper right portion of the work. But it is the bottles that draw one’s immediate attention. Paired, they complement each other: one dark, one light, the “C” on one suggesting they belong to Casa Rondine. And the fact that Casa Rondine is a former vintner’s cottage suggests wine bottles, receptacles for the fruit of the vine. They also suggest one of Bissier’s favorite themes, the universal male-female principle of life. But this is only scratching the surface of the painting. Bissier’s tiny paintings, as one critic observed, are packed with symbolism. More importantly they do not speak in words: they speak more like a cello speaks, drawing out a long lyrical line of melody until even the music disappears and only the mood remains. In such a state, one no longer hears the music: one becomes the music (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets). Bissier’s works are indeed meditations, states of being as Brancusi suggested, small, silent, and charged with energy. Bissier died of heart failure in 1965 in Ascona. He was 71.
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