KLAUS FRIEDEBERGER - Delahunty Fine Art

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Y 5

Introducing Klaus Friedeberger

The British are good at overlooking the artists in

their midst, which is one reason why those adept

at self-promotion occupy so much of our attention

these days. Excellence of product, it seems, is

of less relevance than efficiency at mass media

manipulation. One consequence of this is that

the quieter and more modest talents are ignored.

Klaus Friedeberger is just such an artist - a painter

of immense distinction and painterly verve, whose

work deserves far wider recognition than it has

hitherto received.

Friedeberger has made his home in this country

since 1950, when he painted in an Expressionist

and figurative idiom. From the mid-1960s his work

became increasingly abstract and monochromatic,

but still richly expressive in terms of form and

texture, light and space. Deliberate restriction of

means led to new and resourceful discoveries.

(Braque: ‘In art, progress does not consist in

extension but in the knowledge of limits.’) Half-a-

century later, his understanding of strategies and

materials is magisterial in its formal and emotional

implications. Friedeberger has created a body of

work quite remarkable in its abstract scope and

nuance. By limiting himself initially to black and white

(only recently allowing some colour to re-invigorate

his tonal dramas) he has plumbed new depths

of subtlety in his dedicated investigation of that

strange mixture of intoxication and sense which

constitutes art.

Klaus Friedeberger was born in Berlin in August

1922, the only child of middle-class secular Jewish

parents who separated in 1930. As the political

situation in Germany deteriorated, young Klaus

was sent to a Quaker school in Holland in 1938.

There he began to draw from nature, encouraged

by his art teacher Max Warburg, son of the founder

of the Warburg Institute in London. In April 1939

Friedeberger came to England as a refugee, and

found work with an electrical sign firm. Soon after

war was declared, he was classified as an enemy

alien and interned, then transported to Australia

on the troopship Dunera, along with nearly 3,000

others, mostly German and Austrian Jewish

refugees. Arriving in Australia, he spent two years in

an internment camp in New South Wales.

In the camp, he continued to draw and paint,

making portraits and figure studies, surrealistic

compositions as well as posters and scenery for

theatrical productions. The camp functioned as

a kind of unofficial university, and anyone who

had something to teach came forward and took

classes. There was the sculptor Heinz Henghes,

the surrealist painter and stage designer Hein

Heckroth, and the photographer Helmut

Gernsheim, who could only teach the theory of

photography because there was no equipment;

Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack from the Bauhaus taught

colour theory, and Ernst Kitzinger and Franz Philipp

art history. (Philipp later wrote the first monograph

on Arthur Boyd.) Heckroth was probably the

most important early influence on Friedeberger’s

developing vision of the world.

Lo o k i n g a t p a i n t i n g i s a b o u t t h e d i s cov e r y

o f t h e co m p l e t e n a tu r e o f a n i m a g e w h i c h

o n l y co m e s i n to ex i s t e n c e t h ro u g h t h e

i n t e ra c t i o n o f a l l i t s co n s t i tu e n t p a r t s

w h e n t h e v i ew e r i s s t a n d i n g i n f ro n t o f i t .

Th i s co m m u n i c a t i o n f ro m a r t i s t to v i ew e r

t h ro u g h t h e a c t i v i ty o f d i r e c t l o o k i n g i s

u l t i m a t e l y mys t e r i o u s a n d i n ex p l i c a b l e .

W e m i g h t d e s c r i b e i t a s t h e a u ra , p r e s e n c e ,

c h a ra c t e r, ev e n t h e m a g i c o f a p a i n t i n g ,

a n d Fr i e d e b e r g e r ’s wo r k h a s i t i n s p a d e s.

A n d r ew L a m b i r t h

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Y 7

Released from the camp, Friedeberger joined a

non-combatant labour corps in the Australian Army,

and worked for four years on the railway. When he

was finally demobilised in 1946, he applied to study

at the East Sydney Technical College and was

assigned to the painting department (rather than

to graphic design, as he’d expected, considering

he’d been making posters since he was 13). There

he came to know the young artists Guy Warren,

Tony Tuckson, and Oliffe Richmond and met other

painters intent on establishing themselves, such as

Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan.

Inevitably, Friedeberger was associated with the

great upsurge of Australian creativity at this time.

After his move to London in 1950, he exhibited

into the early 1960s as an Australian artist, but

subsequently was thought of as an independent

painter, neither particularly German, Australian

or British, just a painter living in cosmopolitan

London. In some ways he was better known as

a graphic designer - a subject he taught at art

school and practised in agencies to earn his living.

But he always continued painting, and for 20 years

(1946-66) his main subject was children, painted

allegorically and expressively in rich, discordant

colours. His first solo exhibition in July 1963 was

the inaugural show in Annely Juda’s new Hamilton

Galleries, in St George Street, Hanover Square. The

slim, elegant, square-format catalogue contained

an introduction by the critic Charles Spencer.

(The catalogue’s designer, Tony Guy, commented

that designing for Friedeberger was somewhat

fraught - ‘like pulling a tooth for a dentist’.) Charles

Spencer wrote perceptively: ‘The world of children

- serious, cruel, aggressive, self-centred - is to

him not only a reflection of life itself, but because

of its uninhibitedness a truer insight into human

behaviour. Yet even this is not really what he is after.

To him the painting is the end, not a bald statement

on the human situation.’

This last observation is worth emphasising: that

painting is the end, not the ostensible subject.

Spencer realised precisely where Friedeberger’s

true interest lay. And he also noticed that (even

by 1963) ‘a more abstract complexity has now

taken over’. This was prescient, for in 1966

Friedeberger renounced colour, exhibiting his first

monochromatic paintings (still of children) the

following year, and then beginning in 1969 his long

sequence of abstract black and white paintings.

After the high-flying start with Hamilton Galleries,

Friedeberger’s career slowed, and for fifteen years

he exhibited only infrequently in group shows. This

was essentially a period of transition, in which he

didn’t relish the spotlight. One exception was a show

at the Ben Uri Gallery in 1978 selected by Abram

Games, the great graphic designer, who included

three of Friedeberger’s abstracts. This was an

accolade. Games had responded favourably to the

Hamilton Galleries exhibition, commenting of the

paintings: ‘They aren’t even bad.’ It was the kind of

laconic understatement Friedeberger appreciated.

By the mid-1980s he was ready to exhibit once

again, with solo shows at the Warwick Arts Trust

(1986) and a retrospective at the Woodlands Art

Gallery in Blackheath (1992). In 2007, England & Co

mounted a show of his early figurative work (1940-

70) accompanied by a well-documented catalogue,

and then in 2009 Simon Pierse organised a splendid

show of recent abstract paintings at Aberystwyth

University. But Friedeberger’s exhibiting history has

somehow never regained its early momentum, and

as a consequence, his work is not nearly as familiar

to the gallery-going public or the critics as it might

be. This is a tragedy, as the paintings he has been

making over the last 25 years are the most original

and rewarding of his entire career.

Friedeberger’s current pictures have all been given

the title Black Space and then a number. He says

he finds it difficult to think of titles that won’t direct

the viewer. He doesn’t want to programme the way

someone looks at his paintings - he wants them to

respond from within themselves, not be saddled

with preconceptions. His paintings don’t start like

that, but mostly evolve from paint. ‘I sometimes

see things that suggest a painting, but the rest

comes out of the paint. I listen to the paint.’ Very

occasionally he will make a drawing in a sketchbook,

but generally he doesn’t make preliminary studies.

His works on paper (both drawings and collages) are

a parallel but self-contained activity. If he is tempted

to stay too close to an observed motif, the painting

will suffer. For instance, he remembers making ‘a

scribble’ of a wire-sided truck full of branches he saw

once in Paris. Later he felt the urge to turn this into

a painting. But the motif was too strongly figurative

and specific, and the painting was never resolved

to his satisfaction, even though re-painted several

times.

Nowadays he might begin with ‘a bit of an idea about

tones, but I have no great method.’ Sometimes

black and white photos might suggest something.

A photograph by Helmut Newton (or Helmut

Neustadter as he was when Friedeberger first met

him in the camp in Australia), might look good turned

upside down, when the abstract shapes make new

configurations. One painting was sparked off by

a portrait of Goethe looked at similarly - upside

down. Friedeberger has a number of reproductions

of paintings by Old Masters pinned up in his studio

(Caravaggio, Titian, Rembrandt), and these too can

serve as the starting point for a painting. ‘It always

has to start somewhere - that is really the problem.

You’ve get to get something down. If you don’t have

anything down you have nowhere to go.’ The blank

canvas remains a challenge.

He mostly paints in oil on canvas. ‘I don’t do much

in acrylic - it dries too fast.’ And this can be the

case with the metallic paints he began using in

1994, introducing accents of copper, silver or

gold. The metallic paints dry quicker than black oil,

for instance, and for a painter who is constantly

scraping or sanding back a surface to re-paint, this

can pose further difficulties. As Friedeberger says:

‘I’ve sanded through many a canvas - some are all

patched up on the back.’ He doesn’t use line much

but builds up a depth of paint in sensitive layers and

abutments, trying to create a sense of something

else behind the paint, which gives it an extra

(metaphysical) dimension. He doesn’t see himself

as a medium for some message from elsewhere (‘I

think of myself as a painter who paints’), and insists

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Y 9

that all his discoveries come through his relationship

with the paint. And like any relationship, this has to

be worked at, not taken for granted.

A painting may take months to finish and the main

task is to maintain a sense (and appearance) of

freshness while he agonises over its final form

and definition. His primary ambition is to stop

the image collapsing in on itself and becoming a

meaningless tangle of paint. On the other hand

he doesn’t want it to be too much about gesture.

The process of painting and scraping back can

become almost a despairing kind of drudgery, and

then suddenly there will come a point when it is right

and Friedeberger can recognise it as such. Then he

stops. It’s always a surprise. This is very difficult to pin

down and describe - it’s perhaps an almost mystical

moment of revelation. Certainly, the struggle is

resolved on some subconscious level. He doesn’t

want to know consciously what is happening, he

doesn’t want to direct it, he wants to discover it. The

challenge is to keep an open mind and not impose

an easy solution - for this will have no meaning in the

end. He needs to uncover something deeper.

He is an enthusiastic reader of Samuel Beckett, and

one of Friedeberger’s most eloquent supporters,

Stephen Coppel from the Department of Prints &

Drawings at the British Museum, has identified an

affinity between writer and painter. To illustrate this,

Coppel quotes that moving passage from Beckett’s

novel The Unnamable which concludes: ‘…you

must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’. As a description

of the seeming impossibility of the activity of writing

or painting, it cannot be bettered. But actually how

Beckettian is Friedeberger’s approach? Certainly,

there are things that writer and artist have in

common - principally an urge towards restriction

and compression of means - but in comparison to

Beckett’s spirit of negation, I find in Friedeberger

something altogether more affirmative and

optimistic. In fact, a spirit of celebration - of the

glories of looking and the splendours of paint.

Friedeberger’s late work is profound, reflective and

serene, not gloomy and desolate like Beckett’s.

Beckett is the artist of deprivation and terminal

depression. This is not Friedeberger’s intellectual or

emotional complexion at all.

Beckett’s work is forbiddingly difficult and makes no

concessions to his public. Looking at Friedeberger’s

abstract paintings may be initially challenging, but

concentrated scrutiny (and an open mind) will

unlock his intentions. Although he is diffident about

his work and avoids talking about it, Friedeberger

is not socially reticent or miserabilist as Beckett

tended to be. (In fact, he’s a man of much humour

and enjoyment of life.) If Beckett is going into the

darkness and sending back bulletins of despair,

Friedeberger is coming out of the darkness with

glimmers of hope and recovered truth.

The decided chastening of his painterly style has

been relaxed over the last 20 years, and a certain

amount of colour has been allowed back to irradiate

his black and white constructions. If Beckett’s

increasingly minimal prose signalled a withdrawal

from the richness and warmth of the world,

Friedeberger’s much more opulent paint does not.

Although he doesn’t slather the paint around with

undisciplined abandon, he does offer a panoply of

textural and formal painterly considerations that are

a visual delight. But don’t look for narrative meaning

here. In 1992 he wrote: ‘since the 1970s my

paintings have not been “about” something outside

themselves. I want them to have a presence with a

convincing reality of their own. I like what someone

said about Turner’s landscapes, quoted by Hazlitt:

“Pictures of nothing, and very like.”’

Friedeberger is a tonal painter of decision and

subtlety, acutely aware of the materiality of paint,

and always trying to rid himself of distractions to get

to the heart of his investigation. His paintings are not

spontaneous but much worked over - fought over,

indeed - and filled with passages of dragged paint

of wondrous subtlety and overlays of forms moving

in upon one another (predatory or amatory?),

emerging and dissolving, summoning things from

shallow or deep space. The human mind cannot

help making connections and finding associations,

that’s its default mode, and although abstract

painters are no doubt fed up with people saying

‘that reminds me of…’, the individual associative

response is central to the experience of looking at

art. Thus, in Friedeberger’s abstractions, which are

purely formal explorations of light and space, the

mind sees other things. Among them: abysses and

summits and a rock-face in potent close-up; tunnel

and crypt; vegetation against a void; a window

filled in with any material to hand (this element of

bricolage lingers suggestively through the work); a

fishing boat drawn up on a beach; a parcel of string,

to some degree unravelled; portals; a window high

in a wall.

Looking at painting is about the discovery of the

complete nature of an image which only comes

into existence through the interaction of all its

constituent parts when the viewer is standing in

front of it. This communication from artist to viewer

through the activity of direct looking is ultimately

mysterious and inexplicable. We might describe it

as the aura, presence, character, even the magic of

a painting, and Friedeberger’s work has it in spades.

Perhaps creative art is a way of matching up the

changes that take place in nature with the changes

that take place within ourselves, and searching for

understanding as much as reconciliation. If all art

worthy of the name offers access to the centre

of things, it may be said that Klaus Friedeberger’s

paintings, drawings and collages throw a lasso

around the centre; and in this case, the centre not

only holds but reflects back an illumination that is

rare in contemporary art.

Andrew Lambirth

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Y 11

CLUMP, 1997

Oil on canvas, 127 x 127 cm, 50 x 50 in (KF002)

LIGHT SPATIAL, 1992

Oil on canvas, 101 .6 x 91 .4 cm, 40 x 36 in (KF001)

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Y 13

WHITE WITH GOLD AND SILVER, 2003

Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 73.7 cm, 29 x 29 in (KF004)

DIAGONAL SILVER/BLACK AND A WHITE, 2000


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Y 15

DARK STILL LIFE WITH COPPER, 2007-8


HALTED GREY, 2008


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Y 17

BLACK SPACE 10, 2011

Oil on canvas, 127 x 127 x 2 .5 cm, 50 x 50 x 1 in (KF007)

BLACK SPACE 13, 2011/14


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UNTITLED, 1992


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UNTITLED ( I I ) , 1997


UNTITLED ( I I I ) , 1997


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UNTITLED (A) , 2007

Charcoal on paper , 50 x 50 cm, 19 ¾ x 19 ¾ in (KF019)

UNTITLED (B) , 1984

Penci l on paper , 50 x 50 cm, 19 ¾ x 19 ¾ in (KF020)

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UNTITLED (C) , 2000

Str ipped paper col lage, 45 x 45 cm, 17 ¾ x 17 ¾ in (KF021)

UNTITLED (D) , 2000

Penci l and col lage, 52 x 54 cm, 20 ½ x 21 ¼ in (KF022)

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UNTITLED (E) , 1987

Penci l on paper , 27.3 x 26.7 cm, 10 ¾ x 10 ½ in (KF023)

UNTITLED (F) , 1987

Penci l on paper , 36 x 36 cm, 14 ⅛ x 14 ⅛ in (KF024)

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UNTITLED (G) , 1987

Penci l on paper , 35 x 35 cm, 13 ¾ x 13 ¾ in (KF025)

UNTITLED (H), 1987

Penci l on paper , 39.4 x 39.4 cm, 15 ½ x 15 ½ in (KF026)

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UNTITLED ( I ) , 2012

Str ipped paper col lage, 56 x 54.6 cm, 22 ⅛ x 21 ½ in (KF027)

UNTITLED (J) , 1996

Penci l and acryl ic , 40 x 38 cm, 15 ¾ x 15 in (KF028)

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UNTITLED (K ) , 1998

Water-soluble wax crayon on paper , 35 x 35 cm, 13 ¾ x 13 ¾ in (KF029)

UNTITLED (L) , 1997

Water-soluble wax crayon, 35 x 35 cm, 13 ¾ x 13 ¾ in (KF030)

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UNTITLED (M), 2006

Str ipped paper col lage, 19 x 19 cm, 7 ½ x 7 ½ in (KF031)

UNTITLED (N), 1984

Paper drawing col lage, 21 x 21 cm, 8 ¼ x 8 ¼ in (KF032)

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UNTITLED (O), 2006

Acryl ic on paper , 23 x 23.5 cm, 9 ⅛ x 9 ¼ in (KF033)

UNTITLED (P) , 2006

Acryl ic and Penci l , 23.5 x 24 cm, 9 ¼ x 9 ½ in (KF034)

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UNTITLED (Q), 2012

Collage, 42 x 42.5 cm, 16 ½ x 16 ¾ in (KF035)

UNTITLED (R) , 1997

Str ipped paper col lage, 35.6 x 38 cm, 14 ⅛ x 15 in (KF036)

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KLAUS FRIEDEBERGER - Delahunty Fine Art