Rainer Fetting ”Van Gogh u. Hochbahn”. 1979

Emulsion paint on canvas. 210 × 270 cm (82 ⅝ × 106 ¼ in.). Titled, signed and dated in black chalk and red on the reverse: Van Gogh u. Hochbahn Fetting 79. [3216] Framed, Emulsion paint on canvas. 210 × 270 cm (82 ⅝ × 106 ¼ in.). Titled, signed and dated in black chalk and red on the reverse: Van Gogh u. Hochbahn Fetting 79. [3216] Framed, Private Collection, Berlin (acquired in the late 1980s at Galerie Raab, Berlin), Private Collection, Berlin (acquired in the late 1980s at Galerie Raab, Berlin), Rainer Fetting. Berlin/New York. Gemälde und Skulpturen. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/DDR Nationalgalerie; Weimar, Stadtmuseum (Bertuchhaus), Kabinett am Goetheplatz, 1990, cat. no. 5 („Van Gogh und Hochbahn I“), Vincent van Gogh as Alter Ego – Rainer Fetting and the Melancholy of West Berlin The elevated railway line opened in 1902, now part of the U1, forms part of Berlin’s oldest railway connection. Its striking viaduct winds along Skalitzer Straße and across the Oberbaum Bridge to Warschauer Straße station in Friedrichshain. The elevated railway is thus closely bound up with Berlin’s history and with a sense of movement and connectedness. With the construction of the Berlin Wall, this connection came to an abrupt end at Schlesisches Tor station, as the heavily guarded sector border with East Berlin ran just beyond the Oberbaum Bridge. During the years of division, Kreuzberg was a peripheral district of West Berlin, characterised by low rents, squatted buildings, a vibrant alternative scene and a diverse population that included many Turkish migrant workers as well as artists. The city’s unique political circumstances and the relative freedom it offered made West Berlin a magnet for creative minds. Rainer Fetting, too, arrived here from Wilhelmshaven in 1972. Paradoxically, it was in the enclosed world of West Berlin that he found freedom: he avoided military service and discovered an alternative cultural scene and an environment in which he was accepted as a gay man. As his father came from Berlin, the move was almost a homecoming. In Berlin, Fetting found like-minded artists in the circle around the Hochschule der Künste, including Salomé, Bernd Zimmer and Helmut Middendorf. The “Moritzboys”, named after the self-help gallery they founded at Moritzplatz, deliberately set themselves against the doctrine of the Düsseldorf artists, who had once again declared painting dead. They developed a form of painting that rebelled against established notions of art through its expressive gestures. The artists known as the Junge Wilde championed immediate expression, physical presence and a new intensity of colour. Berlin itself became the protagonist of numerous paintings by Fetting. He once described his artistic engagement with the city as follows: “I painted Berlin in its existential situation, or took the pulse of the time as source for pictures.” Vincent van Gogh is another recurring point of reference in Fetting’s work. He regarded the Dutch painter not only as an artistic role model but also adopted him as a kind of alter ego. In a number of self-portraits, Fetting cast himself in the role of Van Gogh, who remains the quintessential uncompromising outsider, consumed by his art. For the Junge Wilde, Van Gogh was also an important precursor: they followed his example in their expressive brushwork and their intense, emotionally charged use of colour. Fetting shares Van Gogh’s existential understanding of painting. Whereas Van Gogh primarily explored his own perceptions and inner states in his work, Fetting also employs expressive gesture to convey the spirit of an entire city. Few artists have captured the distinctive zeitgeist of West Berlin with comparable immediacy. His paintings of the Berlin Wall are particularly renowned, and he would sometimes transpose the Wall from its actual location into the very heart of Kreuzberg. In our painting of 1979, which Fetting titled “Van Gogh u. Hochbahn” (Van Gogh and Elevated Railway), he brings the historical figure of Vincent van Gogh into his contemporary West Berlin. Without the explicit reference in the title, the figure would scarcely be recognisable. Beneath the elevated railway stands a solitary man whose face disappears into shadow. His hat pulled low over his brow, his shoulders hunched and his figure only faintly illuminated by the lights of the railway station, he is little more than a silhouette at the left edge of the painting. The ground glistens with rain, while the illuminated station in the background forms a stark contrast with the darkness of the foreground. The figure appears to shrink from the cold, yet his posture also suggests someone who has lost his bearings in the metropolis. Where has he come from, and where is he going? It is precisely because the figure remains so elusive that he becomes an embodiment of anonymous urban life. The scene evokes those dark, wet days of autumn and winter when Berlin seems closed off and inhospitable. In West Berlin in the late 1970s, this atmosphere was intensified by the city’s particular historical circumstances. On cold, overcast days, the Wall may at times have seemed all the more present and threatening to the inhabitants of a city that was otherwise so free. This was the enduring paradox of West Berlin: movement and restriction, emergence and isolation were inseparable parts of everyday life. Fetting has always painted Berlin with striking immediacy. The city was never merely a backdrop in his work, and almost fifty years later, “Van Gogh u. Hochbahn” feels anything but a nostalgic image of the past. His most existentially charged paintings emerged from a city in a state of exception. In “Van Gogh u. Hochbahn”, the particular tension between freedom and confinement is distilled with remarkable intensity in the lonely figure beneath the elevated railway. FvW

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