Avantgarde Pioneer Artist Mary Bauermeister Has Died
Germany did not like her work for a long time, despite the fact that Mary Bauermeister was a pioneer of avant-garde art. His studio in Cologne was the birthplace of the Fluxus movement.
© Horst Galuschka/dpa/Picture AllianceMary BauermeisterMary Bauermeister died on March 2 at the age of 88, her son Simon Stockhausen confirmed to German news agency dpa.
She was considered the "mother of the Fluxus movement", an art movement that broke with tradition by using Dadaist tools to integrate everyday life into art. However, this classification did not suit the artist very well, born in Frankfurt on September 7, 1934.
"Fluxus didn't even exist in the late 1950s," he said in a 2018 interview. The term didn't exist until 1963, when Fluxus festivals were held in Düsseldorf and other cities. other German cities. At that time, Mary Bauermeister had already become a star in the United States.
But before that, the art scene in the Rhineland-Westphalia region of West Germany was in crisis. When he moved to Cologne at the age of 22, after studying art in Ulm and Saarbrücken, the famous cathedral city was still in the midst of Germany's famous "economic miracle". The last fields of debris left by the war had just been cleared and women had equal rights before the law.
Bauermeister's studio becomes a meeting place for artists
The tall blonde entertainer caught the eye. He ignored the rules. A pioneer of her time, the young woman declares that nature is the material of her art, breaking all the boundaries of the genre.
In his famous "lens boxes", curved pieces of glass, magnifying glasses and prisms were fused together to create optically distorted images and words resembling magical structures.
After her arrival in Cologne, Mary Bauermeister was quickly fascinated by the evolution of the New Music scene in the Rhineland.
His penthouse in the heart of the historic city center was also his studio, which at the same time became a meeting place for the international artistic and musical avant-garde. Composers such as John Cage, David Tudor and LaMonte Young gave their first concerts there, invited by Mary Bauermeister.
Cologne is a magnet for the international avant-garde
The West German public broadcaster (WDR), with its radio station and popular electronic music studio, attracts musicians from all over the world.
In addition, the International Union of New Music (IGNM) organized a festival in the city. In the evening, after several WDR events, an international audience and artists from all over Europe and the United States gathered at Mary Bauermeister's studio for a "counter-festival" with many artists rejected by the official IGNM. JURY
Between March 1960 and October 1961, in addition to concerts, legendary exhibitions took place in Bauermeister's apartment. Fluxus stars such as Wolf Vostel, Nam Joon Paik and Christo have performed or exhibited their work at the Bauermeister Studio. With the support of Mary Bauermeister, the premiere of the "Ballet of Light" by artist Zero Otto Pien took place. His workshop was a center of creativity and freedom of thought.
A radical new departure in art after Nazism
"All the greats have slept on my mattresses: John Cage, Christo, the writer Hans G. Helms, the pianist David Tudor and the Korean composer Nam Joon Paik, considered the inventor of video art", Bauermeister, active until old age. , recalls in one of the interviews. What he shares with his colleagues is a taste for improvisation.
He said his outlook on life was a reaction to Germany's National Socialist past. “People who were killing Jews during the day while listening to Beethoven at night were suspicious of us, so we liked anything that was radical and a break from the past,” Bauermeister said.
She not only welcomed the male-dominated avant-garde movement, but also constantly developed her mirror installations, fluorescent tube sculptures or "photowriting". He created spirals from flat pebbles, which made him famous in the United States in the 1960s. He experimented with patched newspapers, which he placed in light boxes. Numbers, symbols and text fragments from science, philosophy and mathematics, music and art form the basis of his paintings, collages and objects.
Marriage to Karlheinz Stockhausen
During a composition course in Darmstadt, Bauermeister met the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1962, in Amsterdam, they presented together the first exhibition of the Bauermeister museum. A year later, he moved to New York, where his prisms and lens cases fetched high prices in galleries. A closer examination of his glass spheres reveals the notes of John Cage or the autobiographical texts of Mary Bauermeister.
In 1967 Mary Bauermeister married Karlheinz Stockhausen. Before that, they lived under the same roof as Stockhausen's first wife, Doris, in a threesome relationship for several years. Bauermeister had two of his four children with Stockhausen.
He wrote a book about this period, published in 2011, Ich hänge im Triolengitter. "Mein Leben mit Karlheinz Stockhausen" (Hung on the trio's web: My life with Karlheinz Stockhausen).
While the Museum of Modern Art had already exhibited her work in the 1990s, Germany had long been more opposed to artist Mary Bauermeister. He was discovered only a few years ago in his native country, exhibiting his works in German museums.
He continued to work at his home near Cologne, creating geometric shapes in the form of spirals and pyramids from stones polished by the sea. He also continues to create his own paintings, made of straw delicately arranged and painted with phosphorus ink, a technique he began to use in 1958. At home in Forsbach, he regularly organizes Sunday mornings, where he chats with passers-by. a hectic life.
This article was originally written in German.
Author: Sabina Oelze
