OUTER TURMOIL: HORST JANSSEN'S ART THERAPY

One of the quickest ways to understand an artist is to look at his self portraits. Van Gogh’s reveal his intensity and passion while Rembrandt’s show us the calm dignity to which he aspired both in his art and his life and with which he faced aging. But what are we to make of the self portraits of Horst Janssen, the German artist who died in 1995, whose work has found its way to the Museum of Modern Art Saitama (MOMAS) as part of the seemingly endless Deutschland in Japan Year 2005/2006?

In a series of pencil and pastel works from the 1980s – all showing a great instinct for the expressiveness of line – the artist seems to be caught up in a bout of self laceration. One shows him puffed up like a ball of fat, while another shows the opposite, the lines of the skull protruding through his fleshy features. In another he presents himself as the Cyclops, peering over his glasses with one eye, while the most memorable image, Selbst – Zu Paranoia (1982), shows the artist with a look of idiotic surprise on his face and a gaping toothless mouth.

Although they impress by their artistic virtuosity and sheer gut–wrenching honesty, these are not self-portraits, like Rembrandt’s, designed to present an impressive exterior to the public, but something a lot more private and stormy.

“His art was his diary,” Itaru Hirano, curator at MOMAS, comments. “This is why his portraits, as well as his other works, always have the exact date.”

Adding to this quality of the personal in his art are portraits of family, friends and lovers, like Lamme Ich Bin (1993), showing his daughter, Lamme – in an Amazonian pose – as well as numerous erotic works. In fact the exhibition gives the impression of the artist’s private studio and secret cabinets having been ransacked. This is because most of these works were in his private possession when he died and have in fact been lent by Lamme.

As his self portraits suggest, Janssen, who was born in 1929 in Hamburg, led a tempestuous life that included several divorces, problems with drink, and even a trial for murder following a drunken brawl. Starting as an illustrator for children’s books in his teens, Janssen then experimented with the woodblock prints that won him moderate fame as an artist, before moving on to other media, including etching, pen, pencil, pastel, and watercolor.

Unlike Japanese woodblock prints, with their sinuous flowing lines and blocks of space, Janssen’s prints are dark, clustered and dense, reflecting the fact that the wood was the primary surface, unlike ukiyo-e, which are essentially print reproductions of works done on paper. Owls (1957) shows how heavily Janssen chiseled directly onto the wood, giving his prints an almost sculptural feel.

Initially influenced by European Expressionists like Munch, Janssen also came under the influence of the automatist side of Surrealism, encouraging him to experiment with chance elements, as in his early erotic etchings, in which the blotches and stains of the ink are incorporated into the design – usually as pubic hair!

Another important influence was Art Brut, a movement that rejected the art world and its fashions, and instead found its inspiration in art created by primitives, prisoners, and psychiatric patients, often as a form of therapy. It was this therapeutic aspect that Hirano suggests was one of the attractions for Janssen.

“In his own work, he seems to be looking for some kind of mental cure,” Hirano says. “Janssen was a compulsive drawer and wouldn’t stop even when people visited his studio.”

It was this characteristic that also led Janssen to identify himself with Japan’s own ‘drawing maniac,’ the 18th and 19th century ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai, making him eminently suitable as a representative of cultural exchange between Germany and Japan. As Hirano explains, Janssen’s native Hamburg has close ties to the Dutch ports, which have traditionally had close ties to Japan. Because of this, there were several good collections of Japanese art in the German port city to exert an influence on Janssen.

Although Janssen’s woodblocks radically differed from those of Hokusai and other Japanese artists, he was intrigued by the compositional and evocative qualities of Japanese art in other media, like the pen and watercolor Griechischer Jüngling (1978), which, it is thought, was inspired by Hokusai’s notorious Kinoenokomatsu (1814), a shunga (Japanese erotic print) depicting an octopus performing cunnilingus on a naked woman.

Nowhere is the true originality of an artist clearer than in how he deals with his influences and inspirations. While a lesser artist would have taken a more literal approach, Janssen quotes the composition and mood of sexual perversion in Hokusai’s work, but radically substitutes the elements.

Instead of a naked lady and an octopus, a limp, long haired youth passively accepts the sexual attentions of a flaccid old man – a perfect stand-in for the boneless octopus! The tension created by the octopus’s tentacles is expressed through the crutch the old man holds onto as well as the rope lines connecting his and the young man’s nipples. As for the large round shape of the octopus’s head, Janssen preserves this element in his composition by including a classical Greek figure holding a hoop.

In this way, Janssen expertly matches the impact and feel of Hokusai’s classic piece of bestiality and pays tribute to the Japanse master, while staying true to his own artistic style.

It may sound strange to say this, but if Germany in Japan Year 2005/2006 has achieved anything, it is this identification of a woman being pleasured by an octopus with an old man and a youth involved in a weird act of bondage.

C.B.Liddell
Japan Times
20th April 2006