Franz Gertsch (1930–2022)

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In a sense, this seascape brings us back to the very beginning of Franz Gertsch’s artistic journey. His fascination with observing nature had already found expression some sixty years earlier in his painting Bach im Mondschein (Creek in the Moonlight).

The photograph on which this seascape is based was taken in 1971 at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in southern France. Franz and Maria Gertsch had travelled there to photograph the annual pilgrimage of the Roma and Sinti in honour of their patron saint, Saint Sarah. Gertsch later recalled:

'At the time, I also took another photograph: just the turbulent sea, without the girls, shortly after the storm. I intended to turn it into a painting at the end of 1972, but interrupted the work (…). I kept thinking about that unfinished painting. Then, last year, I came across an old, discoloured paper print. I asked a photographer to make a slide from it, which served as the source image for this seascape.'

In this atmospheric seascape, Gertsch has captured the dazzling light above the wildly foaming sea in shades of white and grey. It is the same spiritual contemplation of nature that we encountered in his butterbur paintings which, after forty-five years, drew Gertsch back to this seascape. For him, painting was a form of meditation:

'My paintings are, in a way, daydreams. I look for images through which I can express that. (…) It is a philosophical undertaking and, in that sense, a spiritual one.'

To conclude, here is Dr Kathleen Bühler once again:

'For me, Sea I, painted in 2016 and 2017, represents a kind of horizon – a glimpse of where Franz Gertsch’s work was ultimately heading. While in the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, he really painted people, gradually, nature began to occupy an ever more central place in his work.

Nature becomes an entity equal to humanity. And this seascape, with its mysterious sunlight…

To me, it symbolises Franz Gertsch’s attempt, towards the end of his life, to move away from always placing human beings at the centre. Instead, he increasingly expressed his conviction that we are all connected to what is happening around us in the natural world, and that human beings are no more important than nature itself.

That’s why he also referred to nature – his portraits of plants – as Wesenheiten, meaning "beings" or "essences". And that’s precisely what I find so radical about his work: it points us towards the questions of our own time. Today, we are trying to move beyond this anthropocentric view of the world, to look beyond the idea that nature is merely a resource, and instead to see it as something that possesses the same dignity, the same fragility, as we do – and that we therefore have a responsibility to protect. For me, that is the legacy of Franz Gertsch’s art. It is what inspires and moves me today.'