Eduard Bargheer “Fishing nets” Pen and ink drawing on paper, 1930s

“Fishing nets”

Pen and ink drawing on paper,

1930s

signed by hand lower right

Dimensions: 22 x 27 cm

Eduard Bargheer (1901 – 1979) was an artist who was represented in many exhibitions in the 1950s, including internationally. He took part in the Venice Biennale in 1948 and the documenta in Kassel in 1955 and 1959. After the Second World War, his work led from an expressionist early work influenced by Edvard Munch to an abstract formal language. For him, abstraction meant translating a visual experience into a two-dimensional, symbolic representation, abandoning the illusion of spatial perspective, concentrating on the essential and elementary and making the hidden architectural structures of the motif visible. The resulting formal network of relationships was described by the artist himself as “fabric”. If the expressionist approach of the early work meant a transformation of the object, in the creative phase of the post-war period one could rather speak of transfiguration, of a symbolic representation of reality. Another characteristic of this phase is the harmony of color and light that he strived for in his paintings, which he found exemplary in Paul Klee’s watercolours from his trip to Tunis in 1914.
Non-representational directions (“abstract art”) prevailed after the war as a sign of liberation, western orientation and supposed progressiveness. Bargheer’s works were also occasionally classified as “abstract” at the time. This is incorrect and probably due to the fact that the fundamental difference between the approaches “representational” and “non-representational” and between “abstracting” and “abstract” was blurred. It would perhaps be better if non-representational art were also called this and the term “abstraction” were avoided as a generic term for both approaches or at least only used with regard to the abstracting method. Abstraction is from something and to something. In any case, Bargheer’s works remained related to the visual experience of reality. He attempted to find an adequate pictorial response to this, which for him was only possible in symbolic form. This also distinguishes him from the playful, creative directions of free figuration, which, after the dance of death of styles and the abandonment of the fetish of innovation and progress, were revalued in our time, but led to an unmanageable fair of arbitrariness.
Bargheer was an exceptional artist whose work does not really fit into any of the usual categories. With artists like him, the landscape and human depiction of classical modernism found a continuation. Although he took careful note of the tendencies towards deconstruction that became dominant in the second half of the twentieth century, he was not interested in them in relation to his artistic work. In contrast, he certainly anticipated some of the ideas of postmodernism.