Bernard Schultze

Hommage a Picasso, Etching by Bernard Schultze

1973

Bernard Schultze (1915-2005) was a painter, a leading figure in German Informal Art. He was born in Schneidemühl (East Prussia) and was 6 years old when he moved to Berlin, where his father held judicial office. When he was 19, he enrolled at Berlin’s Academy of Art Education and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. After graduating in 1939, he was sent to the front, in Russia and Africa, where he was to say until the end of the war. After spending two years in Flensburg as a refugee, he joined his father, who had been appointed senior judge at the Frankfurt court. In autumn 1949, he made the acquaintance of the artist Ursula Bluhm at the Franck Gallery, whom he married 6 years later. In 1951, Bernard Schultze, whose early works had been destroyed when Berlin was bombed in 1944, produced his first informal paintings and paid his first visit to Paris, where he later stayed at regular intervals. He was one of Europe’s leading practitioners of gestural abstraction. In1952, he founded the Quadriga group of artists along with Karl Otto Götz (1914-2017), Otto Greis (1913-2001) and Heinz Kreutz (1923-2016), inaugurating “Informal Art” in Germany. In the early years of his career, he adopted André Breton’s point of view, according to which creative processes must be guided by the unconscious, which led him to develop a unique pictorial vocabulary in resonance with other artistic practices prevalent in the first half of the 20th century and an existential aesthetic of destruction reflected in tattered, distorted structures and colours evocative of wounds and decomposition, certainly connected with his own experience of war. In 1972, he was elected to Berlin’s Academy of Fine Arts. For two years (1980-1981), a major retrospective of his work made the rounds in Germany (Düsseldorf, Berlin, Frankfurt and Saarbrucken). In the 1980s and beyond, the painter was awarded numerous prizes and held numerous exhibitions, including one devoted to his works on paper at the Albertina in Vienna (1984). The end of the decade also saw his first large-format oil paintings, which could reach sizes of up to 15 m2, in which he soon introduced (1991) “tabuskri”, intersections of painting and graphic structures. During the years that followed, the artist worked on developing large-format bronzes and etchings. In 1995, he moved to Rue du Cygne in Paris, which became his second home. Thenceforth, he divided his life between Paris and Cologne, where he died on 14 April 2005, a few weeks before his 90th birthday. Bernard Schultze’s works feature in a great many collections across the world, including at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Museum of Modern Art in Céret, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Collection in London, the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam and the MoMA in New York.