The Brooklyn Rail

Over the past decade, Mark Lammert has been regularly meeting with Rudolf Zwirner in his house in Berlin to draw the portrait of the man who created one of Germany’s most influential galleries. The sessions were, apart from an exchange of looks, also a stage for conversations around how art and the market have developed, for better or worse, from father to son. Do we get to see this in the drawings?

The portraits are, at first sight, modest, silent almost, as Lammert uses his charcoal with a gentle touch when it comes to directly portraying people. As a viewer you have to adjust to the low contrast first, to see the face appear and read its expression. But then you see something other than “art talk”: the portraits are glimpses of life in its awareness of mortality. We see a disappearing presence, some fear in the eyes, but also intimacy and proximity. The model trusted the one who took his image.

Two of the Zwirner portraits (out of more than five hundred) are on view in the exhibition REVOLUTIONSSPLITTER (“Revolution Splinter”) at the municipal Galerie Pankow in Berlin. The exhibition shows a number of Lammert’s own works on paper, but they are embedded within selections from his private collection of drawings by other artists, mainly French, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Why this remarkable set up?

Let’s first look at Lammert’s own work. The artist is known as a painter, and I consider him a great colorist, but for him, every painting begins with drawing. The human figure has been his leading motif over forty-five years. Having lived in Berlin, both as a citizen of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and of the reunified German Republic, he has witnessed human habits under diverse systems, along with the physical and psychological behavior that accompanied them. These collected insights come out in the fact that Lammert presents us figures existing in time, in space, and in motion. The dynamic nature of life is an essential underpinning of the work. And thus, it makes sense that the visits to Rudolf Zwirner still continue; there is no such thing as one portrait that immortalizes a person. It is ongoing work, drawing from life, and drawing through life.

While some of Lammert’s drawings are model-based, the majority come from working alone in the studio. These images are sometimes sharper and more articulate in expression, or evolve with the addition of color into free painterly fragments. But in all cases, restraint and reduction keep the works in focus and balance. Lammert draws our attention to a defining fragment—of a face, a body—as noted in a glimpse or gesture. In the process of picking that moment, he is precise and particular, omitting what is irrelevant even though the final result tends to look abstract and is open to different readings.

Why, then, did this artist bring his collection together with his own works in a contemporary art gallery? The choice certainly sprang from enthusiasm for the medium and its history, Lammert’s esteem for the works he purchased. But there is more to it. It is also a way of defining a conversation around the work. Lammert could as well have invited a group of contemporary artists working in diverse media, or painters who also draw, to surround his own work and articulate his position. But instead he turned to another time to present works that have spent a life in the shadow.

A lot of the exhibited works were made around the French revolution, in times of upheaval. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Jacques-Louis David, Félix Vallotton, Henri Fantin-Latour, Édouard Manet, Pierre Bonnard, as well as various lesser-known artists, are all present with one or several drawings. It is a noteworthy fact that the works were acquired through the auction platform eBay, often for little money. Lammert’s meticulous research allowed him to discover works that dealers and collectors apparently overlooked or didn’t find interesting. (In a separate text, published in the German Lettre International summer issue of 2022, he made his case for the attributions.) Buying drawings without having prior confirmation of their provenance requires a certain courage. It puts weight on the eye, on stylistic understanding, on recognizing a hand and technique, and on the ability to sense the special quality of a work. Or, as Lammert puts it, one has to trust what makes the heart beat faster. To put forward this collation is a way of saying, “This is what matters in drawing.” It might have been overlooked or ignored by the market, and it is certainly not fashionable, but it is highly contemporary in relevance, a source to stay close to. Look at it!

A recurring type of drawing in the exhibition is the portrait, such as the one attributed to Manet, in which a woman of later age stares at the beholder, and it is hard to decide if she offers comfort or wants to share her sorrows. The face comes out in clear lines, strong contrasts. Lammert’s own portraits are, in comparison, piano in execution, and far less detailed. But they share the ambiguity regarding what time does to a human face and human existence, giving it an intensity that sometimes includes traits we might find unpleasant to look at. In six portraits Lammert made of Edith Clever, the German actress appears without a mouth, her eyes barely open. The faces appear like faint messengers from another world, yet one we all are heading towards. In a series of eight drawings by Pierre Joseph Dedreux-Dorcy (1789–1874) the focus shifts, instead highlighting youthful traits. A free and funky way of drawing is combined with control over the appearance of the face as a whole, which leads to vivid, sparkling portraits.

Next to portraiture, other types of drawing are present in the show, more than can be mentioned here. There are hidden political layers as it comes to the role the artists (or their models) played in a revolutionary landscape, being embraced one day and reviled a few years later. This invites us to draw parallels to the revolution that Lammert experienced himself in Berlin in 1989, which he has noted did not, after all, bring that big of a change. What you can glean from such events is, like the exhibition title indicates, some splinters.

We ought not to forget the erotic potential of drawing, as shown in a combination of two works from around 1800. An anonymous French work depicts a young woman with a bare upper body, her glove symbolically indicating that she remains available for marriage. And next to it, a young nude by Baron Jean-Baptiste Regnault seems as genderfluid as many contemporary residents of Berlin appear, strangely appropriate to an era far in the future.

Presenting drawings from the past is not an act of nostalgia here, but more a kind of archeology, finding the foundations that underlie the current day and presenting them as stones you can keep on building with. In an introduction to the exhibition, Ingres is quoted when confronted with the maxim that artists should bring the new, and follow their time: “Why, if my time is wrong.”

Why embrace narratives or aesthetic conventions if you feel they are flawed? Here the exhibition becomes political again. Being relevant as an artist might as well mean that you need not react to the topics that are discussed in dominant discourse, but instead focus on phrasing a different story. This seems especially thought-provoking and helpful in the context of our current political climate, where false narratives are aggressively propagated by authoritarian actors. When such narratives lead into the darkness, or distract (as they do) from what really matters, the artist’s role may be to recognize that, and choose a different path instead. Mounting your work alongside overlooked drawings you know to be genuine and significant might be just a small act of resistance to contemporary norms. Yet, as an act of holding on to what you know really matters, it sets an example of independent thinking—something we will dearly need in the days to come.