Contemporary draftsmanship is not in so exalted a state that one can afford to miss the exhibition of Horst Janssen drawings, watercolors, prints and posters at the Worthington Gallery, 620 N. Michigan Ave.
The generous show contains no new pieces, though the artist is, at 64, still working in Hamburg, the city of his birth.
However, those who did not see Janssen’s previous exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and Worthington still will find this one full almost to bursting, as it surveys his career since his American debut here in 1980, including several of his finest pieces, some of which Worthington brought back specifically for the occasion.
For those who do not know Janssen, he isn’t an easy artist to describe, as there’s no one working today quite like him. You have to imagine an outsize character from, say, a Werner Herzog film, a figure at once riotous and decorous who can achieve anything he wants to.
Janssen was a legend in Germany as long as 30 years ago. Rarely did he travel far from Hamburg. But always there were buyers for his works as he produced them, and seldom have any pieces come up for sale at European or American auctions.
He excelled at all the time-honored subjects: still life, landscape and the human figure. So he raised the stakes not only by challenging earlier masters on their own ground but also by adopting their styles in works that cut across centuries by uncannily blending his and his forebears’ sensibilities.
Then Janssen turned his attention strictly to himself, producing long series of self portraits in drawings and prints that rank with those by Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann and Lovis Corinth. These are some of Janssen’s most powerful pieces, though again they were not enough for him, so he began crossing portraits with landscapes.
In no case did he allow pieces to become needlessly complicated; in fact, he often disarmed the viewer by creating works filled with excitement that are also touchingly simple, as when he painted watercolors of fish on colored papers or memorialized objects from one of his rare trips, to a tiny village in the south of Sweden called Svanshall.
Janssen also was a great reader, and as a lover of books he increased their number by making more than 100 of them himself. Worthington always has had a few of these on hand, just like the signed posters the artist intends to remain within the economic reach of everyone, as high-level affordable art.
The exhibition includes examples of every medium practiced by Janssen, with the exception of woodcuts and photographs. Few artists today could match him either in number or, more important, quality.
It’s a show with achievements so high they restore our faith in what still is possible in contemporary art. (Through January.)
Notes
– Officials of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, report that the restoration necessitated by the explosion of a car bomb last May has gone according to plan and all rooms will be reopened by next Christmas.
The first of the paintings to be restored, “The Adoration of the Child,” by 17th Century Flemish artist Gerrit van Honthorst, will go on view this month. The bomb killed five people, damaging 32 paintings, destroying three others and severely altering the structure of the 400-year old building.
– The Getty Grant Program in Santa Monica, CA., has contributed $250,000 to the conservation of the Camposanto Monumentale in Pisa, Italy, part of the cathedral complex including the structure known as the Leaning Tower. The two-to-one matching grant will help finance the conservation of the marble arches that form an arcade around the courtyard of the cemetery/shrine.
– The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., will celebrate the 90th birthday of American painter Willem de Kooning with an exhibition of about 75 of his finest paintings from collections in the United States and Europe.
De Kooning’s birthday is on April 24. The exhibition will open on May 8 and will continue through Sept. 5; it then will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Oct. 6-Jan. 8, 1995) and the Tate Gallery in London (Feb. 15-May 7, 1995).
– Columbia College Chicago has received a $70,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for “The Arts in American Society,” a year-long project to investigate arts policy issues and educate the community about them.
– The Randolph Street Gallery has received a $2,000 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in Manhattan. The grant is to help in the production of P-Form magazine, a journal of performance art now in its ninth year.
– Film director Michelle Citron will present a performance/lecture, “Speaking the Unspeakable: How We Talk When Words Fail,” 7:30 p.m. Friday at the C.G. Jung Institute, 1467 Maple Ave., Evanston. The event promises to explore the complex conscious and unconscious “language of incest.” Admission is $15 in advance; $20 at the door.
