Gunther Gerzso
Mexican, 1915-2000
Le Temps Mange la Vie (El tiempo se come a la vida), 1961
oil on Masonite
17 ¾ x 25 ½ in.
SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by Jon B. and Lillian Lovelace, Eli and Leatrice Luria, The Grace Jones Richardson Trust, an Anonymous Donor, Lord and Lady Ridley-Tree, SBMA Modern and Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund, the Ala Story Fund, and the SBMA Visionaries
2002.50
Undated self-portrait of Gerzso
"I want to paint constructions of the mind whose light calls out equally to one’s feeling and one’s intelligence." - Gunther Gerzso
POSTSCRIPT
The Enemy by Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867) French poet
My youth was one long, dismal storm, shot through
Now and again with flashing suns; the rain
And thunder stripped my orchard bare: too few,
Today, the ruddy fruits that still remain.
And so I reach the autumn of my mind:
With rake and shovel must I now set out
To right the sodden landscape, where I find
Deep, gaping holes, like graves, dug roundabout.
But who knows if this soil, like sea-washed shore,
Will feed the new-dreamt flowers of my art
The mystic food their vigor hungers for?
-Ah woe! Ah woe! Time eats life to the core,
And the dark Enemy who gnaws our heart
Gluts on our blood and prospers all the more.
L’Ennemi
Ma jeunesse ne fur qu’un ténébreux orage,
Traversé çà et là par de brillants soleils;
Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage,
Qu’il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.
Voilà que j’ai touché l’automne des idées,
Et qu’il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux
Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées,
Où l’eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.
Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve
Trouveront dans ce sol lave comme une grève
Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur?
---O douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,
Et l’obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le cœur
Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!
From: Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du mal: A Bilingual Edition
By Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Norman R. Shapiro
COMMENTS
GERZSO'S PROCESS: RECONCILIATION BETWEEN REASON AND IMAGINATION
Technique and process are two other areas where analysis proves a connection between Gerzso’s work and Abstract Expressionism. For the Abstract Expressionists. spontaneity was of the highest aesthetic value. Having embraced Surrealisms concept of psychic automatism, they believed in a creative process that was direct and immediate. Pollock's drip paintings epitomize their idea of "alla prima", in which the artist works freely on an unprepared canvas, responding to impulse as opposed to Following a structured plan. By placing his canvas on the floor instead of the easel and using unconventional tools instead of traditional artist's brushes, Pollock represented Abstract Expressionism's "culture of spontaneity”. Yet, Pollock's method was also purposeful and deliberate, the perfect example of control as much as abandon. Writes Michael Leja, “Pollock was committed both to painting from the unconscious and to outdoing Picasso and others in the making of sophisticated, structured, modernist paintings.“
Gerzso, too, believed in spontaneity, but balanced with deliberation. His creative processes as well as his architectonic structure at once reveal his rational and imaginative approach to art making. Having been educated in Europe, at the side of his uncle who demanded of him a connoisseur’s eye, Gerzso was well versed in European Old Master technique. As he developed his own form of expressive abstraction, this foundational knowledge became central. An entire shelf in Gerzso's still intact studio is filled with texts on painting technique, many devoted to the Old Masters, including Max Doerner’s "The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting with Notes on the Techniques of the Old Masters" (1934), Jacques Maroger's "The Secret Formulas and Techniques of the Masters" (1948), Frederic Taubes's "The Mastery of Oil Painting" (1955), and Daniel Thomson’s "The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting" (1956). In addition, Gerzso had monographs on many of the major European Old Master painters, among them Bosch, Brueghel, Canaletto, Piero della Francesca, Tintoretto, and Titian, as well as specialized publications on fifteenth-century Flemish painting.
Gerzso's astonishing craftsmanship was an innate gift and the result of his self-education. Gerzso never attended art school; his surprising technique was realized in ten years of solitary labor. While he was not a formal student of art, Gerzso consistently shared technical notes with other painters, among them Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Otto Butterlin. Like Gerzso at the beginning, Butterlin was a painter after hours and on the weekends, having a full-time job as a chemist with the Bayer Company in Mexico. As a chemist, Butterlin offered Gerzso insights into the physical properties of paint and paint processes. “I learned the ‘abc’s’ of painting here in Mexico," said Gerzso, “with several friends who were painter-enthusiasts.” Through the years, one continues educating oneself and discovering new secrets.
Of the European Old Masters, it was the Northern Renaissance painters, especially members of the Flemish School, who most interested Gerzso. His immersion in this aspect of art history came through his Wolfflin-trained uncle, who researched and published on the Swiss fifteenth-century painter Konrad Witz (ca. 1400). Born in Germany but active in Switzerland, Witz became that country's most important Renaissance painter, and his meticulous naturalism suggested that he was aware of his Flemish contemporaries Jan Van Eyck and Master Flemalle. His most famous surviving work, the St. Peter Altarpiece, in the Cathedral in Geneva, now in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva, helps explain the highly refined application of paint and the extremely smooth, porcelain-like surfaces of Gerzso‘s fully mature works. One of Gerzso’s earliest observers made this association: “He paints in a technique which rivals the Van Eycks.” Gerzso’s passion for oil painting is another point that confirms this link to Witz, Van Eyck, and the Northern Renaissance tradition, because it was Van Eyck's innovations in oil painting that helped transform this medium into a dominant mode for serious artists beginning in the sixteenth century. To satisfy his taste for precisely rendered subjects and obsessively worked surfaces, Gerzso hung in his living room a view of Rome by the Venetian oil painter Ippolito Caffi (l809-1866) and in his studio a reproduction of a Flemish oil painting.
During the 1930s and 1940s, artists in both the United States and Europe developed a renewed fascination with oil painting and the “secrets” of the Old Masters. Out of this fresh look at tradition came two of the most influential publications on the subject, both of which Gerzso owned, Doerner's The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting with Notes on the Techniques of the Old Masters (1934) and Maroger's The Secret Formulas and Techniques of the Masters (1948). A pioneering arttist-chemist from Frankfurt, Doerner was especially influential in the German-speaking countries of Europe, which explains one way that Gerzso would have been introduced to his book, in addition to the fact that it was the “Bible” for artists of the period. Gerzso also spent many an hour conversing about Old Master techniques with his Surrealist cohorts Varo and Carrington.
Together Doerner’s and Maroger’s publications led to a revival of tempera painting and experiments with "mixed" techniques, notably egg-oil emulsions as underpainting followed by oil resin glazes. Having the ambition to look like but not necessarily be like the Old Masters, modern painters, like Salvador Dali and Otto Dix, experimented with secrets of the past but with new materials that were more scientifically sound. Alluding to historical painting while using innovations in materials science, Gerzso, too, synthesized new expressive means with Old Master techniques.
Serving as a case study, Gerzso’s "Le temps mange la vie" ("Time Eats Away Life"), 1961, exemplifies the artist's technique for creating his expressive abstractions of the 1960s. Using the reverse or the smooth side of masonite for this work’s support, Gerzso carefully treated its surface in order to emulate the historical process of painting on wood panel, which can yield porcelain-like surfaces. Combined with a highly refined surface texture, this quality of smoothness, “so smooth that it appears to have been painted on fine silk," became a hallmark of Gerzso’s fully mature work. Conservation analysis of this work revealed that Gerzso used the traditional painting process of priming the support, but he did so with Duco, a modern substitute for the classic gesso. It also showed that he applied a conventional under layer but that he experimented by using a brilliant red. While Italian Old Masters would have also used a colored ground, they would not have selected the vibrant red employed by Gerzso. State-of-the art conservation analysis also determined Gerzso’s extensive use of glazing. One of the defining characteristics of Gerzso's fully mature painting is its mesmerizing luminosity, which he achieved through the application of traditional glazing techniques. Like Renaissance painters, Gerzso built up layers of thin transparent colors with little or no admixture of white, which allowed light to be reflected back from the prepared ground and from the successive layers of colors. Yielding a different type of color and light than does the mixing of pigments, glazing imparts a special depth and radiance. Since recession was a tactical aspect of Gerzso’s expressive abstraction, he frequently used this Old Master process, which was slow and painstaking compared to the swift and spontaneous methods of the Abstract Expressionists.
Showing an affinity for the “mixed” techniques used by the Old Masters and promoted by Doerner, Gerzso combined pastel with oil paint in Le temps manage la vie, but unlike the Old Masters, he experimented with a fixative in order to adhere it to the surface. Old Masters would not have risked this process for fear of losing the pastels brilliant color, but by using modern materials, Gerzso found a way to bind the medium without compromising its rich hue. In this blending, he capitalized on creating contrasts between matte and shiny surfaces in the way he characteristically contrasted smooth and textured surfaces. These contrasts aid in creating the illusion of mysterious, shifting depths, as did Gerzso’s use of scumbling, an Old Master technique in which a thin, opaque layer of paint is applied over dark underpainting.
- Diana C. Du Pont, "Gunther Gerzso, 1915-2000", Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2003, pp. 147-149
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Gerzso was born in Mexico to a Hungarian-Jewish father and a mother from Berlin, Germany. As a teenager, he studied in Switzerland and lived with his maternal uncle, an art dealer in Lugano. Between 1935 and 1941, he designed sets for the Cleveland Play House in Ohio. He went on to art direct more than 150 films in the Mexican film industry between 1943 and 1962.
In this painting, planes of color float and overlap in a shallow space. Could the large white rectangle be a stage or a huge curtain waiting to be lifted to reveal a drama? Will the colored planes on the right suddenly move to reveal an actor? The poet Octavio Paz described Gerzso’s work as “painting at the halfway point of time, suspended over the abyss . . . painting-before-the-event. Before-what-is-going-to-happen.”
- Going Global, 2022
The work of Gunther Gerzso explores the facets of human existence, often engaging abstractly with concepts of eternity and the unknown. No work better epitomizes this philosophical preoccupation better than Le Temps mange la vie/El tiempo se come a la vida. The title of this work comes from a poem by Charles Baudelaire entitled “L’Enemmi” (The Enemy) from his most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), in which time is the enemy that slowly eats away at life.
- SBMA title card, 2013