QR-Code

#265

The Coltish Sisyphus and His People

Mattheuer, Wolfgang ((1927-2004)) | Painter

02:09

In Greek mythology, the gods thought up a particularly horrific way of punishing Sisyphus. They condemned him to roll a massive boulder up a hill – and every time it neared the summit, it rolled down and he had to start again. Was this the epitome of a hopeless task? Wolfgang Mattheuer’s Sisyphus cycle from the 1970s plays with three possible alternatives to that narrative. In the first, Sisyphus escapes his senseless fate by running away. He simply stops pushing the boulder and, with huge strides, races for the valley. In the second scene, an exuberant Sisyphus celebrates with helpers as they watch a massive stone head roll down a steep slope. The group is euphoric – have their combined efforts toppled a memorial? The landscape, though, is desolate and bleak. Barely visible in the background on the right, a tiny figure still recalls Sisyphus’s seemingly endless task.

In the third painting, Sisyphus is no longer dressed as a worker, but in a shirt and tie. Watched by three men, he is busily working a huge grey boulder with a hammer and chisel, shaping it into a clenched fist – a symbol of resistance. The scene is set in a junk yard. In the background, tall chimneys send up plumes of grey smoke into the yellow sky.

The message: rather than people simply being helpless in the face of their fate, they have to act. The paintings are packed with allusions and metaphors which can easily be read as criticising the state of affairs in the GDR – yet also offer other interpretations. As a result, Wolfgang Mattheuer was officially praised, yet secretly kept under observation by the Stasi. In West Germany, his work proved similarly difficult to categorise. There, he was initially acclaimed for his critique of the East German system, but shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall was accused of being one of the GDR’s ‘state artists’.

Together with Bernhard Heisig and Werner Tübke, Wolfgang Mattheuer belonged to the first generation of what became known as the Leipzig School.

 

Material & Technique
Oil on canvas
Museum
Galerie Neue Meister
Dating
1976
Inventory number
Inv.-Nr. 81/02
0:00