Paris on the Rhine

A visitor to West Germany might logically assume that cheery, beery Munich, with its renowned art galleries and swinging student quarter, or perhaps the hothouse glitter of West Berlin, might offer the most congenial milieu for artists. Hardly anyone would think of busy Duesseldorf, a conglomeration of shimmering steel-and-glass office buildings on the Rhine that epitomizes the commercial hubbub of the Wirtschaftswunder. Nonetheless, the lion's share of West Germany's most adventurous artists today find in Duesseldorf just the setting they need. Says Munich's grand old man of art, onetime Neue Pinakotek Director Dr. Eberhard Hanfstaengl, 81: "Duesseldorf is now on the map as one of the world centers where art is being created."

Chocolates & Chaos. High on the list of Duesseldorfs innovators to gain international recognition over the past decade are Heinz Mack, 36, Otto Piene, 39, and Guenther Uecker, 37 (see color pages). The three young "idealists" joined together as the Group Zero in 1958; their aim, according to Uecker, was to create "a white world" out of light, motion and other optical effects, and Zero presaged the founding of half a dozen other experimental groups in as many different countries. Another leader is Painter Gerhard Richter, enigmatic 1960 fugitive from East Germany's socialist realism, whose eerie and deliberately vague and cryptic oil renderings of commonplace snapshot subjects, magazine and catalogue illustrations have elicited viewers' shudders and critical raves throughout West Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

Newest discovery is "Brutalist" Norbert Tadeusz, son of a Polish-descended Dortmund coal miner; only one year out of the Duesseldorfs liberal Academy of Fine Arts, he has already been represented in nine shows, become a collector's favorite. Tadeusz' teacher, Joseph Beuys, is also out of the ordinary. A onetime Hitler Youth and World War II Stuka pilot, Beuys has undergone a characteristic postwar metamorphosis to become Duesseldorfs reigning neo-Dada hero. He is celebrated for his Chaplinesque smile, battered Homburg, octopuslike drawings, sculptures made of chocolate and lard, for the splendiferous happenings that he used to stage and, above all, for the fertile chaos of his classrooms. Students in a Beuys class are permitted to build, sculpt or paint literally anything, from kinetic doodads to studies of Beuys himself.

Elliptical Shadows. To Dealer Alfred Schmela, Beuys's appointment to the academy in 1961 was the starting signal for avant-garde forces to coalesce in Dusseldorf. Other observers give much credit to Schmela, who opened his gallery in 1957 in the picturesque Altstadt quarter and introduced the city to most of its comers, from Group Zero to Surrealist Konrad Klapheck, a bespectacled young man who paints typewriters, telephones, boots, bicycle bells and shower heads as though they had eyes, ears and affections of their own.

Keeping the new art movements rolling is the Rhineland's newly prosperous postwar buying public, which is willing to splurge on experimental works. When Dusseldorf opened its stark $2,300,000 modern-art museum last month, the new Kunsthalle boasted not only an impressive display of 16 privately owned Picassos and Braques, but also works by Lichtenstein and Warhol--plus 17 works by contemporary Dusseldorf artists. The area's leading modern-art collector, aristocratic Frau Fann Schniewind, has amassed a $1,000,000 collection that runs the gamut from a white-plaster woman painting her fingernails by U.S. Pop Sculptor George Segal to a white disk studded with a forest of white nails casting elliptical shadows by Gunther Uecker.

Forward to Zero. To most artists, however, the real lure is Duesseldorfs tantalizing whiff of Zeitgeist. The city's brusque hurly-burly provides both their modern subject matter and technological means for expressing their art. Gotthard Graubner, an abstractionist, for example, paints on huge, cloudlike formations of polyester produced at nearby factories. Peter Bruening, who like Winfred Gaul, is fascinated with traffic and touring maps, points out that he lives in Duesseldorf because it is the geographical center of a "seemingly endless area where roads become the interconnecting arteries between every possible manifestation of urban and rural conditions. My studio thus becomes a microcosm of what surrounds me."

The city's very impersonality acts as a magnet for today's less flamboyant, more businesslike variety of artist. Gerhard Richter observes that "in Munich, the artist is too easily corrupted by the pleasant life. In Duesseldorf, the intellectual air is clean." For artists like Joseph Beuys, this is just the atmosphere for fresh beginnings. "What all of us have been doing," he says, "is trying to return to the zero points, to seek new essentials, to engage in meditations to lead us to the rediscovery of what lies behind our thwarted existence."

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