In Revenge

by Eckhart Gillen (translation: Tas Skorupa)

Via Lewandowsky developed the principle of reproductive painting as an antidote against the aesthetic idea of the artist as a genius who creates from the innermost depths of his being. It is a form of art recycling for found images which have already been reproduced. In this way, he follows quite well-known examples, such as the Leipzig history painter Werner Tübke who utilizes images of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in a virtuoso manner. Lewandowsky however carries the principle to ironic extremes in his use of mostly trivial models and the consistent mechanization of the artistic creative act by means of photocopiers, scanners, plastic film, montages and multiple projections as well as precise, manual copying on canvas as a pseudo-authentic personal style.

Two paintings which are linked by the title "Hopeisthestaffoflifefromthecradletothegrave" were produced in 1989 and 1997. In these works, Lewandowsky reproduced two illustrations by Alfred Rethel from the 1840 edition of the 'Nibelungenlied', the famous German epic. This volume, published by the Leipzig publishing house Wigand, contained eight other prints by Rethel, along with illustrations by Eduard Bendemann, Julius Hübner and Hermann Anton Stilke.

Following the Napoleonic occupation of German lands, there was an increased demand for patriotic, anti-French subjects in Germany. The bourgeois audience derived pleasure from fictive tales of Romantic chivalry from Germany's feudal past. While other countries chose successful battles as the subject of their national epics, the Germans, as a "belated nation," identified themselves with this family saga which ends in the total destruction of the roster of heroes. From then on, the Nibelungen were considered a "living document of the indelible German character" of wild passions "of revenge, anger, wrath, fury and terrible love of death" (preface to edition of 1807). Referring to the looming defeat in Stalingrad, the heroic, final battle of the Nibelungen in Etzel's castle was evoked by Hermann Göring in a speech to members of the German army on 30 January 1943, the tenth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power: "They too stood in a hall of fire and quenched their thirst with their own blood – but they fought and fought until the end. Today such a battle is raging in Stalingrad and even one thousand years from now every German will have to pronounce that name with a reverent shudder …"

In 1989, in the midst of the unheroic fall of the GDR and of the entire Eastern Block, the grotesque disparity between a subject which is so fatalistically loaded and Alfred Rethel's trivial woodcut must have provoked Via Lewandowsky to a sarcastic examination of the ideology of state-supported history paintings.

The first painting reproduces the illustration of the thirty-fourth adventure, "How They Threw Out the Dead at the Last Battle in Etzel's Castle." The detail, greatly enlarged to 140 x 280 cm, is stretched to a wide format and trivialized by the omission of all architectonic elements, thereby turning it into an oversized cartoon in which blood – represented by rust-tinted watercolor – is pumped from a metal tank into the metal frame and flows over the canvas as rusty slop. The "crocodile tears," which were shed so eagerly by the sentimental nineteenth-century audience, irrigate the canvas with the help of a water pump, like a special effect in a Hollywood film.

Lewandowsky made his first appearance in the West with this painting, which was shown in 1989 in "Zwischenspiele" ("Interludes"), a group exhibition of young artists from the GDR. When, during the show, the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November, Lewandowsky's painting hit the nerve of the contemporary situation in East-West relations, proclaiming a cease fire for the hostile brothers. He presented himself to the West with an image of the fighting working class's party sitting on the skeletons of Germany's past, still trying to get rid of them quickly. While the West Germans had seemingly come to terms with history by clearing the skeletons from the German hall of fame, the skeletons still remained in the closets of the GDR. East Germans had to live with them and were forced to examine them without excuses.

Invited in 1997 by the Museum Junge Kunst in Frankfurt an der Oder, Lewandowsky participated in his first exhibition in the East in eight years. He once again used Alfred Rethel's Nibelungen cycle for the show, which was significantly entitled "Zur Rache" ("In Revenge"). The subject is the thirty-ninth and last adventure, "How Günther and Hagen and Kriemhilde Were Killed." Imprisoned by the noble Dietrich, King Günther and the wicked Hagen fall victim to Kriemhilde's lust for revenge. The scene shows how Kriemhilde, who as a woman dared to kill the "very best hero," is killed herself. As in the final battles against the Red Army in defense of the Seelow Heights, the last bastion before Berlin, heroism is once again turned by means of an example into a mere attitude, a rhetoric of gestures and of changing expressions. In the reversed reproduction of Rethel's woodcut, the heroes who swing their swords with their left hands appear simply ridiculous. The German aesthetic sense of depth becomes shallow, approaching the level of cartoons, whose aesthetic value is still deemed dubious by the cultural critique of middle-class intellectuals.