Karl Weschke; painter (GREAT Independent obit)
Hyfler/Rosner
whether it was the beautiful Cornish light that had inspired
him to live where he did, he snorted dismissively, "Cornish
light? I've got a 60-watt light-bulb and I keep the curtains
closed." He admitted to not having perhaps the sunniest of
dispositions..."
His work:
http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/exhibitions/weschke/
http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/search/Object.asp?object_key=11258
The Independent ~ 23 February 2005
The artist Karl Weschke lived for more than 40 years in an
isolated house on the tip of Cape Cornwall, near Land's End.
An entrenched individualist, Weschke was never part of the
St Ives school of colourful abstraction, though some of its
practitioners were his friends and neighbours. His art owed
more to German Expressionism and to the continuing relevance
of ancient myths, reinterpreted through the rugged Cornish
landscape.
Weschke took pride in pitting himself against nature: not
taming it, but cohabiting with it, if not always amicably.
The view from his studio was over the desolate moors with
their crops of bracken or gorse, to the long rollers of the
Atlantic. He loved and respected the sea, both as diver and
artist, and painted it in many moods.
He was a great debunker. When asked once by a student
whether it was the beautiful Cornish light that had inspired
him to live where he did, he snorted dismissively, "Cornish
light? I've got a 60-watt light-bulb and I keep the curtains
closed." He admitted to not having perhaps the sunniest of
dispositions, though counted himself moody but optimistic.
His was a strong personality - by turns enthusiastic,
impatient, irate, mischievous, or utterly charming.
The blond boyishness of his youth transmuted in later life
to a startling resemblance to Picasso. He was powerfully
attracted to women, and was married three times. He was the
father of four children - Benjamin, Lucas, Laura and
Rachel - and, when relationships didn't work, had no
hesitation in bringing the children up on his own, while
still continuing to paint. (Their needs came first: painting
was done at night. Hence the crack about Cornish light.) He
had little patience for people who claimed it wasn't
possible to have children and be an artist.
Karl Martin Weschke was born in 1925 in Taubenpreskeln, near
Gera, in Germany. One of three illegitimate children by
different fathers, he grew up in considerable poverty and
was deposited by his mother, Elsa Emma Weschke, in a
state-run children's home at the age of two. She reclaimed
him when he was seven, but life was no easier sharing a
bedroom with a mother who worked in a bar and brought men
back for the night. Weschke later referred to his mother as
a prostitute, while his father, Hermann Hanke, was a
peripatetic freedom fighter and anarchist. The boy saw him
only once when he was 11; Hanke perished in a concentration
camp during the Second World War.
A tough street child in Weimar Germany, Weschke soon became
something of a thug, though there were occasional more
calming interludes pulling an ice-cream cart or working as a
ball-boy at the local tennis club. Drawing was an early
preoccupation, and carving. He was encouraged in this by
Fritz Dix, artist brother of the more famous Otto, who lived
in Gera. Weschke dreamed of becoming an ornamental
blacksmith, so that he could "make roses out of metal". He
left school at 14 and instead was put to work in the state
insurance office, before being inducted into the Hitler
Youth.
In 1942 he joined the Luftwaffe, and two years later he
volunteered for the paratroops. He was taken prisoner in
Holland and brought to Britain. As a prisoner of war, he
suffered a nervous breakdown and partly as therapy he began
to paint and sculpt again.
He was sent to Radwinter Student Camp, near Saffron Walden.
There he had the good fortune to be befriended by the Quaker
Bessie Midgley, who lent him studio space. He was also an
extramural student of art history at St John's College,
Cambridge. Gradually he became, as he put it, more
civilised. He was also befriended by the writer and MP Tom
Driberg, through whom he met his future first wife, Alison
de Vere.
As an artist, Weschke was largely self-taught. He lasted for
only one term as an art student at St Martin's in 1949, and
then resolved to make his own way. Weschke lived on the
fringes of London's Bohemia, taking a succession of odd
jobs. After a spell planting trees for the Forestry
Commission in Argyll, he worked in the factories of Wall's,
Peak Frean and Tiptree, and for a time was assistant lion
feeder in a circus.
In 1953 he spent six months in Spain, and he lived in Sweden
from 1954 until 1955. On his return to England, he moved
down to Cornwall on the advice of the artist Bryan Wynter,
living first in Zennor, and then in 1960 settling on Cape
Cornwall.
In 1958 Weschke held his first one-man exhibition at the New
Vision Centre in London, and his work received favourable
attention from the influential critic John Berger. The next
year, the Art Gallery of New South Wales bought a large
painting, Deposition Triptych, on the recommendation of
Bryan Robertson, then Director of the Whitechapel Gallery.
This was Weschke's first public purchase, and his career was
launched.
He continued to exhibit regularly in group shows up and down
the country, and in solo shows at the Arnolfini, Bristol
(1964), Whitechapel (1974), Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (1980),
and later at the Tate. In 1996-97 there were special
displays of his work in the London Tate and then at Tate St
Ives.
From such unpromising beginnings, it is remarkable that such
a well-rounded human being could develop. Weschke was highly
articulate and original; he was sure of his goals and made
steady progress towards them. But he was a slow painter,
prepared to give time to the long process of distilling an
image. Honesty was more important to him than instant
acclaim.
Animals in his pictures often stand in for humans. He was
particularly good at dogs - often portraying his own Borzoi,
Dankoff. Besides the elemental landscapes and the solitary,
frequently embattled figures, Weschke returned again and
again to an intense and tender celebration of female flesh.
His colourful life sometimes distracted from his very real
achievement as an artist.
Weschke eschewed the picturesque and for much of his life
his palette was dominated by dark earth colours. However,
his visits to Egypt in the 1990s liberated his sense of
colour. As he put it: "The light did affect me. The blue was
lapis-lazuli, the yellow was ochre, the colours were
substances." Egypt made him feel he "had come home to my
real beginning as an artist".
In 1997, Weschke survived a triple heart bypass, and
continued to paint with even greater assurance and
determination. The next year the first monograph on his
work, Karl Weschke: portrait of a painter, written by Jeremy
Lewison, was published. He was given a substantial
retrospective in Gera in 2001 and he was presented with the
freedom of the city.
In his adopted country he was given a select but well-chosen
retrospective at the Tate St Ives (2004), and critics and
public woke up to his work. His later years were further
cheered by the rediscovery of a daughter by an early
liaison, and marriage to his long-term companion, Petronilla
Silver.
Karl Martin Weschke, painter: born Taubenpreskeln, Germany 7
June 1925; three times married (two sons, three daughters);
died Hayle, Cornwall 20 February 2005.
Andrew Lambirth
Hyfler/Rosner
Karl Weschke
(Filed: 23/02/2005)
Karl Weschke, who has died aged 79, was the last survivor of
the most romantic episode in modern British art, the years
after the Second World War when the pretty port of St Ives
became Britain's artistic Mecca.
The exoticism of the setting was matched by the artistic
cast, who sought this long-established bohemian sanctuary in
the wild west as a release from war and London. Of this
motley company none had a more extraordinary tale to tell
than the German Karl Weschke - a street urchin who had once
had the temerity to ride alongside Hitler on the
running-board of the Fuhrer's limousine; a German commando
who was taken prisoner and interned in Britain's toughest
PoW camp; and, having decided to become an artist and stay
in Britain, had paid his way by being, among other things, a
bouncer, gravestone carver, auxiliary coastguard, scuba
diver (on one occasion he was given up for dead from the
bends) and even a lion feeder's assistant in a circus.
Weschke remained aloof from the St Ives School, which was
characterised by abstract painting, but his landscapes
combine emotion and observation in a way truer to the light
and mythic grandeur of Cape Cornwall than his peers. His
climactic retrospective at Tate St Ives last year was well
named Karl Weschke: Beneath a Black Sky. Three months before
he received the German Order of Merit and said: "The best
thing that happened to me was being taken prisoner of war."
Karl Weschke was born near Gera in the province of Thuringen
on June 7 1925, the illegitimate child of a barmaid and a
gun-toting anarchist. After several years in an orphanage he
was reclaimed by his mother, with whom he lived a "fairly
brutish existence", sometimes "pretending to be asleep" as
she entertained a lover in the same narrow bed; sometimes
sleeping rough on piles of dirty laundry. He learned to use
his fists and once ate roast cat - it was delicious.
He only met his father once, at the age of 11. He deplored
his mother but treasured the memory of the dashing,
long-haired, man who bought him a new pair of trousers and
introduced him as "the child of my insignificance". The
meeting was brief because his father was against all
government and therefore constantly on the run. Such a
wayward existence ensured the tough and bright young Karl
shone in the Hitler Youth, although he always stressed that
membership was compulsory.
For him, it conferred pride, ambition, comradeship,
amusement and altogether a happier and healthier life. War
even offered the chance to be an officer and a gentleman.
Weschke applied for the prestige of the air force but had to
settle for the commandos. He was taken prisoner after seeing
brief action in the Low Countries and invalided out. His
life might have ended when he was being loaded on to a
hospital ship for England. "For God's sake put him in
pyjamas," said a British medical orderly, since the Belgian
stretcher bearers were tipping uniformed Germans into the
sea.
After benefiting from the neutrality of hospital he was
interned on Chepstow race course, where the inmates were
subjected to repeated film shows of the recently revealed
horrors of the death camps. One day the interrogation
officer called him the "son of a Nazi whore". "You're making
a mistake. I am not your brother," Weschke replied. It
earned him an immediate transfer to the highest-security PoW
camp in Britain, at Watten in Caithness, the inner compound
of which was defiantly nicknamed "Little Belsen".
There was no peace treaty between Germany and the Allies
because Germany had forfeited its sovereignty.
Fraternisation with the 400,000 German prisoners was
strictly forbidden. At Watten Weschke learned that his
father had died in a concentration camp. His mother wangled
him an exchange but he refused repatriation, as he would
later decline to become a British subject. He vowed never to
return to Germany or to identify with a nation.
Clearly no longer a hard-liner, he was transferred to
Radwinter, an open prison near Cambridge. Radwinter was
where Weschke's rehabilitation began, through the kindness
of its founder Charles Stambrook (formerly Karl Sternberg, a
Jewish refugee) and Bessie Midgley, a member of the Fry
family, who welcomed prisoners at her country house. He also
met the local MP, Tom Driberg, who introduced Weschke to his
future father-in-law.
His talent for carving, first encouraged at Watten by the
chaplain, began to direct his life. In 1948 he was released,
determined to be an artist. It took a long time to establish
himself but a significant step was taken in 1955 when the
painter Bryan Wynter arranged for him to settle in Cornwall.
He rented the cottage at Zennor where DH Lawrence had lodged
in the First War. When Francis Bacon visited St Ives in 1959
he and Weschke particularly hit it off. The following year
Weschke moved to a more remote cottage with a magnificent
view above Cape Cornwall.
Further isolation suited his free spirit and it was after
this move that he first made his mark with such brooding,
earth-coloured landscapes as Meeting Point of Land and Sea
1961, Pillar of Smoke 1964 and Sturmfloten 1965/66. These
paintings are expressionist in that they convey the emotion
of the painter and the sensation, rather than the exact
topography, of his surroundings. Later Weschke added a
romantic note, fleeting life set against the eternal, by
sometimes including his favourite borzoi, Dankoff, or naked
swimmers, their vulnerability in erotic contrast with sea
and rock.
Scuba diving, through which he usefully collected his own
shellfish, gave him a special empathy with the sea.
Essentially self-taught, Weschke remained aloof from St
Ives, which he regarded as "Bloomsbury on Sea". He had no
more time for "art about art" abstraction than for soulless
holiday scenes. His friends tended to be outsiders like
himself - the painter Roger Hilton (born Hildesheim), the
Scottish poet WS Graham and Bryan Wynter, whom he admired
not least for his impeccable manners. "Welcome to Cornwall,"
he remembered Wynter saying with a doff of his hat, as that
most metropolitan of ladies, Muriel Belcher of Soho's Colony
Room Club, and her Jamaican girlfriend Carmel, stepped off
the train at Penzance. He also became friends with his
neighbour on the Cape, John Le Carré, an enthusiastic
collector of his work. "Call me a Cornish Kraut with a sense
of humour," he told Le Carré.
Although Weschke's outsider status worked against him for
many years it proved ultimately to his advantage. Unlike
once fashionable artists, his later work was not dismissed:
on the contrary, from the late 1980s he found a further
subject in Egypt, which he painted in terms of its
architecture as a place of monumental stillness. He also had
the good fortune to find two younger champions in Jeremy
Lewison, first of Kettle's Yard then the Tate, and
Petronilla Silver-Weschke, his third wife and former
Director of the Contemporary Art Society. They produced Karl
Weschke, Portrait of a Painter in 1998. At the time he hoped
for six more years, having undergone a triple heart by-pass
in 1997.
His wish was granted and they proved the most successful and
fulfilling of his life, with his art finally acclaimed in
Germany. As he was told on the presentation of his Order of
Merit: "Your own life, Herr Weschke, should be compulsory
reading in the history books of both our countries."
Karl Weschke died on Sunday. In his youth he had a daughter
with Lore Grage. His first wife was Alison de Vere, with
whom he had a son. The marriage was dissolved. His second
wife was Liese Denise. That marriage was also dissolved.
With Jan Green he had a son and daughter, and he had a
daughter with Madeleine Fry. He married, thirdly, Petronilla
Silver, who survives him.