In 1961, two scrappy young artists decided to stage their first show together. One of them was Georg Baselitz, who would later become a mainstay of Neo-Expressionism’s German flank; the other was Eugen Schönebeck, who would stop painting by the time he was thirty.
The show was held in a condemned building in Berlin, and in keeping with the well-established enfant terrible tradition, the two artists produced a manifesto — the enviably titled First Pandemonium (Manifesto) — as a 52 x 39-inch lithograph.
From a translation provided by the David Nolan Gallery, where the manifesto is part of a superb exhibition of Schönebeck’s work, it’s immediately evident that the writing is your standard apocalyptic fare, especially Baselitz’s section (“spots of shadow, drops of wax, parades of epileptics, orchestrations of the flatulent, warty, mushy, and jellyfish beings, bodily members, braided erectile tissue, moldy dough”).
The hyperbolic tone of the artists’ screed is not unexpected, written as it was in a destroyed and divided city sixteen years after the fall of Hitler. But even in its condemnation of “the amiable” who proceed “by art-historical accretion” and its rejection of “those who can’t wrap art up in a smell” (Baselitz again), the differences between the two artists are already apparent.
While Schönebeck shares Baselitz’s disdain for the status quo and taste for fatal syntactical collisions (“Painting was — is a formic raster putrid subjective general. Tendentious.”), in general he takes a more reserved and philosophical tone, one that sees a glimmer of light limning the black horizon:
[…] the gift of unlimited exuberance can make possible the leap out of the routine track of the well-known and, with the instantaneousness of light, point the way unerringly to the true meaning of freedom. / Flowers in the undergrowth / The creatorium
Which makes it all the more ironic that Baselitz, who became famous twenty years later for exhibiting his splashily expressionistic figurative paintings upside-down, would continue along a career path to international stardom while Schönebeck would cease to make art after 1966.
The duo produced a second Pandemonium Manifesto the following year. It is even longer than the first, and more fevered; Baselitz’s part (which ends with the pithy “All writing is crap”) is less readable than the first effort, while Schönebeck’s (which ends similarly but enigmatically, “Words are prick piglets”) is far more coherent.
Titled “Fragments for a Pandemonium,” Schönebeck’s text exhorts the reader to “Pandemonize!” while heaping scorn on the artist’s peers, carrying forward the flatulence motif introduced by Baselitz in Pandemonium I:
My colleagues are introverted and extroverted Rubensians. I have to counter my colleagues with wealth; I have to do the imaginative. My colleagues consist of natural flatulence. They love the wild and they love it unconsciously — the way flayers have to gnaw their victims with their lips until they rub off.
Such youthful, self-consciously flamboyant pronouncements would be ultimately tangential if not for the gnarly graphic invention coursing through the two lithographs. Hung one above the other in the dead center of the gallery’s longest wall, their head-banging, high-contrast image-and-text mash-ups, even without benefit of a translation, immediately grab you by the eyelids.
