Franz Gertsch (1930–2022)

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After encountering Pop Art in the 1960s, Gertsch began searching for a new direction in his painting. He found it in photography.

Listen to the exhibition curator, Dr Kathleen Bühler:

'In this gallery, we encounter Franz Gertsch’s first three Photorealist paintings. In 1969, he decided to work exclusively from photographs as source material, so no longer from sketches, but from photographic images. The first image he used was a film still from a historical film about the Crimean War, depicting the doomed Charge of the Light Brigade.

At the time, this was understood as a commentary on the Vietnam War. The second source image was a photograph taken by a journalist during the Vietnam War in 1970, showing wounded American soldiers huddled together. The third painting, Junkere 37 – the name refers to an address in the centre of Bern – depicts young people, the so-called nonconformists, discussing a new vision of society.

It captures a moment when social change was being tested and explored in Bern. These three paintings also stand out because they are political works. Each comments either on global political events in Vietnam or on local political developments in Bern.

This is something people don’t generally associate with Franz Gertsch. He is better known as an artist concerned with timeless truths, beauty, nature, but also art history. At that time, however, he deliberately made the political his subject. He later abandoned this approach after realising that even the painting of the wounded soldiers attracted audiences more because of the way it was painted than because of what it depicted.'

The painting Huaa…! depicts the actor David Hemmings in the 1968 British war film The Charge of the Light Brigade. Two years earlier, Hemmings had starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s legendary classic Blow-Up. Gertsch saw the film twice at the cinema and was deeply impressed by it. The film explores the role of photography and asks whether enlarging an image – a blow-up – can help reveal the truth. That idea stayed with Gertsch and became the catalyst for his Photorealist paintings. Personally, he saw it as the true beginning of his artistic oeuvre, which is why he gave Huaa…! the number 1 in his catalogue raisonné.