The Newest Gothic

West Germany's Horst Janssen is an unkempt, 200-lb. colossus who, when not actually at his drawing board, sprawls on his unmade bed, clad in boots and blue jeans, redolent of cheap schnapps, cursing the world and especially its art critics. Yet for all his fulminations, both fame and money seem to be irresistibly coming Janssen's way.

At Munich's Wolfgang Ketterer Gallerie, two spacious floors have been jammed for the past six weeks with crowds of visitors who nearly block the view of Janssen's 234 watercolors, woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and drawings. Gallery habitues come to admire the skill of Janssen's work, staid burghers come to tut at his subjects, teen-agers to titter over them, students to analyze their social significance, and connoisseurs to buy.

Janssen's savage and savagely portrayed world is in many ways familiar. The lineal ancestry of brutish whores and demonic cripples, bloated dwarfs and twisted drunkards, perverted bourgeois and browbeaten soldiers can clearly be traced back to Durer and then down through George Grosz. In his wispy cloudlike sketches and pastels lurks the orchidaceous venom of Odilon Redon. In his zinc-plated etchings there are shades of Max Beckmann. One, entitled Klee and Ensor Fighting over a Smoked Herring, acknowledges the artist's debt to both.

Yet for all the echoes, West German critics are unanimously agreed that Janssen, 37, has a substance of his own. "He distills from tradition," said Sueddeutsche Zeitung. He also distills from experience. The illegitimate son of a seamstress, Janssen spent his adolescence in an SS training academy, became an alcoholic by the age of 22, ran a liquor parlor hard by Hamburg's reeking Reeperbahn, served seven months in jail in 1951-52 for stabbing his fiancee in the abdomen in a fit of jealous rage.

Since those days, Janssen has reformed somewhat; he now concentrates on portraying Gothic horror instead of experiencing it. He lives in a crumbling Hamburg apartment house with his handsome blonde third wife, Verena, the wealthy granddaughter of one of Kaiser Wilhelm's last Chancellors, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, and their five-year-old son. Others may find his pictures macabre, but he maintains: "For me, whatever I do is not ugly, not horrible, not repulsive. I couldn't draw what I don't love."

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