The Brooklyn Rail

The current Hans Josephsohn exhibition at Skarstedt uptown through October 28 is a grab bag. One is glad to see it but reminded that a gallery is an art store, with a stock. It happens not to include any of the artist’s reliefs, which are the inmost core of his art and very likely great.

Josephsohn is an artists’ artist in Europe, where he is a favorite of Thomas Schütte and Rebecca Warren, among others, but he is less known here. He came to wider notice late in his long and industrious working life, because he was at ninety-two and now, eleven years gone, is still sculpture’s oddest man out. While our contemporary visual arts could not agree better with the world as it is, Josephsohn’s unflinching apartness is a brusque charm in itself.

He was an exemplary dissociate, being a German Jew who had, for starters, survived the twentieth-century European experience (born Königsberg 1920, died Zürich 2012) by only the slimmest chances. As a teenager, he followed his artistic interests from Prussia to Italy and dropped into Switzerland just as borders shut down all over Europe. He was unwelcome but safe, and never at home. Josephsohn being Josephsohn, he did not take that personally. All his family was lost. He seems to have had little to say about that. His losses did not come out in words. His reported observations on his German experience, though bracingly matter of fact and quite specific to his inadvertent survival, leave everything out. Some kind of hero or monster of self-possession, he didn’t care to let mere current events bend his own course.

In his work as well as his person, Josephsohn was independent-minded, inconveniently frank, sardonic, and accusatory without making a sound. He had learned something about people no one wants to know. Along the way, he came to value the unmediated facts of body and person and trust them as he saw and felt them, finding all else unreliable, even false. Without the world cataclysm, he might well have felt and done the same. Just before the war, at 19, he was not overawed on his first visit to the studio of Otto Müller, his only “master.” The older artist never forgot it. Hans’s May-September equanimity was breathtaking, probably smiled at, but to Josephsohn’s mind the world had only just begun, and no one knew any more about it than he did.

What the artist called half-figures, giant heads not particularly distinguished from a columnar neck/trunk, are most of the exhibition checklist. They date from the late eighties and early nineties when the times were catching up to him. It was as if Baselitz, Penck (and Schütte) could see what he was doing.

Even while he was a kid, older artists had noted Josephsohn’s sub-careless technique. He quite preferred to be rudimentary—like Diogenes tossing away his gourd when he realized he could drink from his hands. And he didn’t mind doing things the hard way. To make these big half-figures he poured foot-square, inch-thick plaster plates and stuck them together edge to edge, like a patchwork quilt hung over a giant thumb. He stuccoed over it lump by plaster lump. The half-heads are muddily accretive rather than composed or hewn. Articulation held little advantage to Josephsohn. His work weakens in detail, features sap his strength, and he gathers power in turgid mass.

The half-figures are from sitters. One would hardly guess. Likeness quite evaporated early on, we are told. They do not engage. Their indistinct gaze was of no particular interest to Josephsohn. It sails away somewhere overhead. At four feet high and up, on waist-high pedestals, they tower but do not loom. Massive, they don’t impress by their weight, they linger rather than impose. Back and front a lot alike, they really are by no measure portraits (his champions concur on this) but seem to caricature something. One becomes gradually aware that there is take-down satire in these hunks, with classical art (emperor portraits?) being one among other fat targets.

Their indeterminate modeling feels more like style than necessity. Perhaps Josephsohn felt he owned it outright via his reliefs, but the reliefs were enacted on a whole other level. Faced with the picture plane, in effect a wall, he set out in what seems an inchoate Genesis state, lightless, sightless, and alone with his hands. In that mode, matter itself was ever a fresh invention, thrown back at a void. Josephsohn would not finesse those terms. His work is a rebuff to polite creation and a Creator. A lump, even when it stood for a figure, was an unregenerate lump.

His subjects are primal scenes of just a character or two, each of them a coarse bar of wet plaster literally stuck against the picture plane. In his unmapped psychic no-space, the action is so urgently elemental, so true to pure emotion alone, that any further tuning of form or place would be a lie. The images, however rudely conceived, are as richly narrative and far more imperative than any panel in Ghiberti’s gilded Baptistery doors, to which they may fairly be compared. Josephsohn’s stories are pitilessly abrupt and obscure. He holds a lantern that illuminates only by flashes, each picture only momentarily more interpretable than the darkness.

Although his work has taken a rightly prominent place in postwar sculpture, it is not guaranteed a link in a chain of influence to other artists’ work, no matter how much admired it is today. Its virtues are innate features of his person, never to be repeated. There is no emulating Josephsohn. And perhaps even his admirers must admit that a basic unpleasantness colors all his work. It comes from a hard place. Who would go there? The reliefs tell stories no one wishes had ever happened, without apology, almost without art. One is sorry for the moral lesson, no matter how eloquent.