Franz Gertsch (1930–2022)

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In this room, you will see two family portraits. One shows Maria with her eight-month-old son, Benz, wearing an embroidered blue smock. The other depicts the three children, Brecht, Hanne-Lore and Silvia, in the bath. Here is curator Dr Kathleen Bühler:

'I don’t think Franz Gertsch’s family portraits can ever be fully appreciated. Something quite extraordinary happened here. At first glance, it all seems very simple. He just uses his own snapshots of everyday family life – his wife, the children having a picnic, or the children in the bath. But what happened here was that something which had never really been considered a subject for painting or art before suddenly became one. … a very particular moment in our cultural history is being preserved here. I feel that especially strongly because I’m the same age as Franz Gertsch’s children. I also grew up in the 1970s, so I too belong to the first generation in our culture whose entire childhood was documented.

Today, that’s completely taken for granted – every moment ends up on social media. But we were the first generation to experience it. Historians have since studied this phenomenon and found that, although these were individual records, these pictures of families all look remarkably alike.

They all look the same because they were taken on the same kinds of occasions. And that’s what I find so beautiful about them. They document individual family histories, yet they also take on a universal quality. By translating a small photograph into a monumental painting, Gertsch reinforces that realisation: something deeply personal and seemingly insignificant becomes something larger – something that speaks beyond the moment in which it was created.'

Gertsch wanted to capture what he called 'the crackling vitality' and 'the pulse of life' – life at close quarters and unfiltered. These were the first paintings he created from his own photographs. The photograph on which Maria and Benz is based, was taken in the summer of 1969, during the same trip to the Jura Mountains that is also immortalised in the large painting in the mentrance hall. Maria Gertsch recalls:

'It was a wonderful, exciting time – a fresh departure, the beginning of a new chapter. (…) I was amazed at how Franz could knit. You could read every single stitch of the red jumper. The boldness of the colours took me by surprise: the golden-blond hair, the heightened complexion (…). It was on that Sunday, too, that he took the photograph that became the basis for the four-by-six-metre painting Maria with Children.'

Shown here exclusively for the first time is a slideshow of photographs from the family archive that Gertsch used as the basis for these paintings, offering a fascinating insight into his working process. Our tour continues upstairs.