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 500!) are on view in the exhibition Revolustionssplitter (“Splinters of Revolution”) 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 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.
Why, then, did this artist bring his collection together with his own works in a contemporary art gallery? A lot of the exhibited works were made around the French revolution, in times of upheaval. Ingres, Delacroix, David, Valloton, Fantin-Latour, Manet, 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 small 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.
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 J. D. Ingres (his work also appears) is quoted: when confronted with the maxim that artists should bring the new, and follow their time, Ingres strongly disagreed: “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.
This is an abbreviated version of a text that was published in the section Artseen of The Brooklyn Rail, February 2025. The exhibition took place from November 5, 2024 till January 26, 2025 at Galerie Pankow, Berlin.