The man’s legs are crossed. That must be the reason for the loss of his lower left leg. His right leg has grown immeasurably. With his arms folded, he is sitting on a sofa that is but a skeleton. The room is as open as the Renaissance bowers in which an angel of the Lord startled the Virgin Mary. Yet, the angel is not an angel. It is an eagle that comes breezing in, without an announcement, but with an African sculpture clutched in its talons. Green, yellow, red, and blue Matisse forms are raining into the picture from above. Still the man, his legs crossed, sees nothing. Not even the piece of lawn outside, that triangle of jungle that might have been laid out by Henri Rousseau. But then, Le Douanier would not have hidden pieces of carcasses there.

Thus, one wanders around in the picture, one combs it unsystematically, finds this, finds that, and then discovers that the man has a face. There is nobody to guide or tell one how to move. And not all roads lead to the face. But sooner or later, one stands in front of the face—the eagle, the Matisse rain, the immeasurable leg, and the discovered bones in the grass step back a little, like shadows that line a field of vision that is completely filled by the face. Faces belong to human beings. Human beings have names. Whoever knows the white-haired man with crossed legs and folded arms will recognize him immediately. The painting is a portrait, a portrait of the art dealer and museum founder Ernst Beyeler from Basel. But the title of the painting is not “Portrait of Ernst Beyeler”. It is Das 20. Jahrhundert [The 20th Century][1].

The title ought not to be taken as an instruction. Das 20. Jahrhundert resembles a hall or a large museum gallery that alludes to the profession of the portrayed man and his remarkable commitment to 20th century art. At the same time, Das 20. Jahrhundert slightly obscures the person and the individual. Like a detour sign, it leads all visitors who do not know or recognize the protagonist with the immeasurably long leg past the doorplate. One does not have to identify the portrayed man. Even if he remains anonymous, the effect of the painting is not lost. The painting tells of the portrayed man, of the encounter with him and the closeness to him, but even more does it speak of the intimate reference of its individual parts and elements, of the inexplicable process that was triggered by the act of portraying, and of the conception and genesis of a painting that are never quite transparent.

The portrayed man is not predominant, as little as is the eagle flying toward him. He seems to be entangled in a network of glittering references, associations, insinuations, and allusions. And at no stage can one pull a string to make the details fall into place and add up to a coherent story. Who knows why the man lost his lower left leg when he crossed his legs, while his right leg grew immeasurably? Why does the Annunciation scene stick in one’s head when the eagle spreads its wings and green, yellow, red, and blue flakes trickle from the off-screen space? A strong maelstrom whirls in these paintings, and a strong maelstrom draws the viewer into them as though they wanted him to be part of their creation, as though they would only come into being through the fantasy cooperation between the painter and the viewer. The maelstrom is so strong that one quickly loses oneself in its secret blueprints and forgets that the painting could also bear the title “Portrait of Ernst Beyeler”.

Elisabeth Masé has been painting portraits since 2001. Portraits of family, children, friends, acquaintances, fellow artists. They form a gallery that is not in the least systematic or representative, a gallery that neither sifts out human types with a particular socialization, nor a certain social group. A gallery that is formed by chance meetings rather than strategic selection. Most of the characters belong to rather intimate spheres of the painter’s life; deep-rooted and intensive relationships link them to her. The classical conditions of single-figure painting never seem to apply to these portraits. Hidden or overtly, the artist always appears in them herself, and she will not make do with the role of a committed observer. She takes part in the portraits, leaving behind traces here and there that lead all the way around the portrayed person and back to her. ‘Portraits with inscribed self-portraits’, perhaps that characterizes the set of works best. Yet, they will have nothing to do with biographical consistency, or even with the poetry of a friendship book. And one should beware not to swiftly go stalking for psychological prey with the lost lower left leg and the right leg that has grown immeasurably. Of course, there is symbolism involved when legs are lost or grow immeasurably. But primarily, this is a precarious point in the painting, and the real reason of all portraits lies in the act of painting itself, in the artistic metabolism of ideas, impulses, and impressions, described by the artist as an ever-fascinating process of making uncontrolled and controllable painting decisions[2].

The series started with children and was marked by representations of children for a long while, and looking back, that seems important in several respects. The motif of children, their play and their costumes, their guileless and dangerous dreams, their awakening bodies and faces allowed the painter to subtly test the interplay of observation and memory that is crucial for the structure of a painting. And indeed, the hazy silhouettes of the figures emerge from the gleaming background like an epiphany[3]. The style of these portraits is quite unusual, as they are neither illustrations for the purpose of documentation nor photographic accounts, but astonished observations of figures that gently appear or emerge, and of the child the painter once was persistently creeping into the likeness of the children.

Astonished observation does not mean inertia. Astonished observation is wide-awake participation. These early portraits are not the results of hallucinatory acquiescence, either. They are influenced by constructive elements as well as the by the “sudden emergence of scenes from my childhood”[4]. Nothing is ever painted spontaneously. The images that come to the painter’s mind yet have to prove that they are suitable for the developing painting. The gentle appearance or emergence of the figures is always preceded by photographic studies or drawings. During a conversation, the artist mentioned that she creates complete “dossiers” for her portraits[5], not just because her models find it difficult to sit still for long. The true reason is that painting is a secluded act for Elisabeth Masé. Her style of painting portraits does not unfold in front of the model, but in careful deliberation about him. Perhaps that was not quite clear in the beginning, but ever since the portraits of children from the years 2003 and 2004[6], the productive distance has become characteristic for this style of painting portraits.

The stage setting that strikes one as surreal has not turned the acting figures into actors, of course. At best, they are actors of themselves. There are no behavioral patterns or repetitive types of roles in this work. Even the ‘children’ have strikingly little in common with child types or child standards; they seem to lack the aptitude to pose for child portraits altogether. The gentle appearance and emergence was always reserved for unmistakable characters, child individuals, child personalities. Unlike contemporary figure painting with its across-the-board sensations, this work is not aimed at the sentiments of an epoch; nor does it target moods and mood spaces. For that matter, “dossier” is just another word for accuracy in the act of portraying, for a level of identification and elucidation that is not reached by faithfully copying the outlines of nature. For the purpose of identification and elucidation, the strange, unseen scenes have become instrumental, where coherence meets alogicality, the faithful likeness gets caught in the artistic miracle report, the accessible location of the painted event immediately borders on blocked terrain, and plenty of memorized images get into the “dossier”, the archive of “photographic snapshots and graphic notes”.

But the work differs not only from paintings of the times that are founded on surrealism. These portraits are also a kind of reinvention of the genre because they are not actually focused on the face. Classical portraits always concentrate on the face. The face has always been considered the mirror of the soul, an effective gateway to a person’s inner being. It virtually represents the person. A person’s face makes him recognizable, unmistakable. The face appears like a screen onto which the individual film of the person is projected[7]. If the face is missing, the main thing is missing. In the history of portraits, deleting the face always amounted to a damnatio memoriae, the banishment of the person, the destruction of his social relations and of the memory of him. The greatest horror is the horror of a destroyed face. That is the horror that pervades the paintings of Francis Bacon. By faces, we have learned to see. When our eyes opened, they saw a face. Even before the world was filled with things, faces were there. The horror of a destroyed face is the horror of losing the basis of one’s eyesight, the horror of an injury to the act of seeing itself, which was a mode of life before it became knowledge. There is a beautiful word for that: visage. A visage is a face that is able to see, a face that looks back when one looks at it. To look a person in the eye or to look at his mouth is always intimidating if intimacy has not been granted. Bacon forces us to look at squashed eyes and open mouths.

Elisabeth Masé never exerts force. As little as she cuts the faces out of the context of figures and substitutes their meaning must she wipe them out[8]. From the very beginning, her cycle of portraits has never relied on faces alone. To the faces belong the bodies; to the bodies belong the other bodies; to those bodies belong the rooms; to the rooms belong the things in the rooms. There is no representative face that, devoid of the person and his relations, should witness to that person and his personal relations. The approaching eagle witnesses to the art dealer and museum founder Ernst Beyeler no less than the hawk-like profile of the portrayed man. And in Richard, Rita & Marcel, one of the most recent paintings in the series[9], there are three faces that occupy the points of a triangle. Rita Donagh, the painter sitting next to Richard Hamilton, reaches out to the photograph on the wall with her braid that has grown immeasurably. The photograph shows Marcel Duchamp enjoying a cigar while the picture frame in front of him is crooked, turning down to old Richard Hamilton, on whose upper arm rests a rootless, bony hand. Whoever knows them will recognize them immediately. As far as that is concerned, there is no difference between Richard, Rita & Marcel and the single seated man in Das 20. Jahrhundert. And yet, the painting is not a portrait of Richard Hamilton, Rita Donagh, and Marcel Duchamp. It is a portrait of a terzetto, an undisclosed triangle constellation that perhaps reveals something about the soloists involved, but is primarily an independent pictorial conception. Elisabeth Masé’s portraits cannot be interpreted in the same way as a Beckmann portrait can be searched for traces of increasing or decreasing vanity. The scenes cannot really be deciphered. They remain as closed, as open, and thus as mysterious as a person one looks in the eye.

Throughout their long history, the chief interest of portraits has always been to create personal integrity[10]. No matter whether a portrait is monumentally solemn or divulging, a picture of dignity or a caricature, whether it is the result of a passport photo camera or of sitting as a model at a studio, in the traditional understanding, it creates a totality that reaches beyond the individuality; it describes the person in a way that amalgamates his brittle nature and idealizes his complexity—even and especially where it wishes to expose it. Even a critical portrait painter will normally give in to the self-representation demands of his model and tacitly consent to the elevation process that belongs to the history of this genre. Ever since classical antiquity, portraits were recommended as a special case of mimesis, as they promised more than duplication. Their tempting offer was to outshine the person they depict. It is one thing for a painter to capture and render his model faithfully. But the portrait also makes the person appear as somewhat defragmented; it adds an integral visual part to him that could never have been added through a multi-perspective face-to-face meeting with the person beyond the portrait.

Looked at in that light, the skepticism about the sublime proxy function of the face might also be understood as an artistic critique of knowledge. Elisabeth Masé’s portraits never aim at an illusory totality. In this work, portraits are a means of getting the portrayed persons embroiled in laboratory stories, a means of interpreting personal details, neatening them up a little, messing them up a little, encrypting them, networking them, and watching the network start to quiver. “Heat and cold reigned side by side in his work”, so Serenus Zeitblom describes the opus of his uncanny friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, in Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus[11], “and at times, at the moments of greatest genius, they interlocked, the espressivo grabbed hold of strict counterpoint, the objective blushed with emotion, so that one had the impression of an incandescent construct.” An incandescent construct, that fits quite well. It is an incandescent construct when the man with crossed legs has lost his lower left leg, while his right leg has grown immeasurably. It is an incandescent construct when the eagle soars above the triangle of jungle like the heralding angel and no one notices what fatal bones that are hidden there.

The art of portraits is the art of pertinent description. Thus it made its triumphal procession into the museums. And rarely was the described person not a co-author of the description. The art of portraits as an incandescent construct; that is new. And totally different. An incandescent construct is the poetry of description. The poetry of description is the art of description that, above all, describes one thing: that nothing is ever described completely, and never is a description truly finished.

Hans-Joachim Müller

[1] Das 20. Jahrhundert, 2007, 150 x 160 cm, oil on canvas, sponge rubber.

[2] „Als ich in ein altes, verwunschenes Haus im Bielefelder Johannistal zog, fing ich an, aus meinen Bildern Schatten zu entwickeln. Plötzlich tauchten Szenen aus meiner Kindheit auf. Dabei entstand, wie zufällig, ein Selbstporträt. Auf einem anderen Bild erschien ganz nebulös mein Mann. Das faszinierte mich.“ Stefanie Heraeus im Gespräch mit Elisabeth Masé in: „Elisabeth Masé. Die Unsterblichen“, Bielefeld 2007, S. 13

[3] z.B. Ertrinkendes Kind, 2001 oder Die blaue Mütze, 2002

[4] Cf. footnote 2.

[5] „Deshalb habe ich eine Arbeitstechnik entwickelt, bei der ich aus vielen fotografischen Schnappschüssen und zeichnerischen Notizen ein Dossier anlege. Wenn ich dieses Dossier lange genug studiert habe, entstehen die ersten Kompositionsskizzen. Manchmal nehme ich ein Kleid oder ein Tuch und male so die Accessoires meiner Figuren nach der Natur. Das meiste entsteht aber aus meiner Vorstellung.“ Wie Anm. 2

[6] etwa Fliegenpilz, 2003, Armer Ritter, 2003, Mein letzter Schultag, 2004

[7] „Zum einen zeigt sich die Wichtigkeit des Gesichts als ‚pars pro toto‘ der menschlichen Erscheinung. Die herausragende Bedeutung, die ihm in Kunst und Leben zukommt, ist hier gespiegelt. Aus Gründen, die man in der menschlichen Phylogenese, der frühkindlichen visuellen Mutter-Kind-Beziehung, gesehen hat, ist das Gesicht der wichtigste Schlüssel der Identifikation.“ Rudolf Preimesberger, Hannah Baader und Nicola Suthor (Hrsg.): Porträt: Einleitung. Geschichte der klassischen Bildgattungen, Berlin, 1999, S. 959

[8] dazu ist auch kein Widerspruch, dass auf dem Porträtbild Schlaflos (2009, 40 x 50 cm, Öl auf Leinwand) die Augenpartie des Porträtierten (des Basler Schriftstellers Tadeus Pfeifer) verwischt ist

[9] Rita, Richard & Marcel, 2009, 150 x 160 cm, Öl auf Leinwand, Holzleisten

[10] siehe dazu Georg Simmel „Ästhetik des Porträts“ in: ders. „Vom Wesen der Moderne. Essays zur Philosophie und Ästhetik“, Hamburg 1990, S. 277 ff.

[11] Thomas Mann „Dr. Faustus“, Frankfurt 1980, S. 240