A show of Dylan works in Chemnitz art gallery -
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2210625,00.html
Another side of Dylan
He has been painting for years - but it has fallen to a tiny gallery in eastern Germany to stage Bob Dylan's first exhibition. Kate Connolly reports
Wednesday November 14, 2007
The Guardia
Those who don't ask, don't get, Ingrid Mössinger was brought up to believe. So when she came across Drawn Blank, a book of Bob Dylan sketches in an antiquarian bookshop in Manhattan two years ago, her first thought was to ask him if she could mount an exhibition.
"I know it sounds quite fanciful, but I set about getting in touch with him," says the director of the Chemnitz Art Gallery. She had only got to know Dylan's music shortly before the attempt to contact him, and had been moved by hearing his 1965 song Subterranean Homesick Blues. "I thought to myself, someone who works with language in such a pictorial and abstract way must be able to draw," she said.
He replied within days. "I couldn't believe it when I got a positive answer - I think he was just waiting to be asked, and quite simply until then, no one had," she said. Mössinger's ambitions remained modest - to display his snapshot-style drawings and sketches compiled while on tour in Europe, America and Asia between 1989 and 1992 in a small exhibition in the gallery that she has managed for 11 years. "But like a true artist, he wanted to make new works," she says.
In a burst of creativity over eight months he created 320 works in watercolour and gouache, digitally enlarging them on deckle-edged paper. In a similar approach to his songs, Dylan produced three or four versions of a single motif by altering both the medium and the colours. "I was fascinated to learn of Ingrid's interest in my work, and it gave me the impetus to realise the vision I had for these drawings many years ago," the 66-year-old writes in the exhibition notes. "If not for this interest, I don't know if I even would have revisited them."
Mössinger chose 140 of the paintings plus a further 30 for the accompanying catalogue, for what is the first exhibition of the singer-songwriter's works.
The Drawn Blank series is attracting inquisitive art lovers and Dylan fans from far and wide and is quite a coup for Chemnitz, a small city 164 miles south of Berlin, which was known as Karl-Marx-Stadt in the dreary days of communism. Not since Mössinger brought the international show Picasso and Women here five years ago has there been such excitement in a place with a reputation as a rundown, rustbelt town - not, in fact, unlike the place of Dylan's childhood, the mining town of Hibbing in Minnesota.
The show does not disappoint and the critical response has, so far, been positive. Some critics have even gone as far as to compare Dylan to Munch and Matisse, as well as to the German expressionists Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, for his dark lines and bold colours. Edward Hopper has also been cited in the way in which it is the objects for the paintings that speak - the ships, bicycles, train tracks and bulbous TV screens - rather than the people, who are often portrayed as silent and anonymous, like the formless Guitar Player.
"The pictures that are on show would also be worth viewing even if Bob Dylan had never sung a note or written a line of poetry," declared Burkhard Müller, art critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, in a swift riposte to those who might say that it is only because the artist is Bob Dylan that people are paying any attention.
Dylan once said that music is the only thing that is in tune with the present. Tobias Rüther, of the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, even credits him with transferring his songs on to canvas. "That which he's done for years on the stage - performing new versions of his old songs in order to give a fresh interpretation - he's now continuing on deckle-edged paper in Chemnitz," he says.
Mössinger has received thousands of requests from people wanting to buy the works. "I am delighted we've attracted a completely different audience than normal," she says.
What the audience will see is life through the eyes of a laconic American who has himself been part of his country's narrative for decades, always peering in from the edge. His works are of chance encounters and spaces - like the Man On a Bridge, tangled up in a big blue coat the size of an alpine scene who is lost in his thoughts, or Statue of Liberty, a mock version of the iconic American image in an amusement park on Coney Island, cradling a newspaper with the headline: "Rape is not sex." There are copious hotel rooms and views from hotel rooms of carparks, or street scenes.
Nearly all of the paintings seem to express what the Germans succinctly refer to as schwellenangst - the fear of entering a place. "Again and again Dylan paints from passageways," says Rüther. "In doorframes, window sills, on balconies and verandas, in portholes, half in, half out - maybe it's symbolic of the fact that Dylan is wary of stepping into the realm of the fine arts, a shy respect that is quite sympathetic."
Dylan began drawing after taking lessons from New York teacher Norman Raeben in the 60s following a serious motorcycle accident. In his Chronicles, published in 2004, he wrote: "What would I draw? Well, I guess I would start with whatever was at hand. I sat at the table, took out a pencil and paper and drew the typewriter, a crucifix, a rose, pencils, knives and pins, empty cigarette boxes. I'd lose track of time completely ... Not that I thought I was any great drawer, but I did feel like I was putting an orderliness to the chaos around." He later went on to draw some of his own record covers.
The Drawn Blank series, Dylan has said, was done in order to relax and refocus a mind which was packed with the impressions of touring - a journey towards the idea that "someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody". Dylan seems to be following the idea of the German expressionists who believed that a creator should vent his emotions without being restricted by societal norms and dogmas.
Woman In Red Lion Pub, sketched while on tour in Blackpool in 1992, embodies that expressionism. Viewed from behind, in a luxuriant dress, the curvaceous woman appears to swing her hips erotically as she waits for a drink at the bar. Just Like a Woman (from Blonde On Blonde) comes to mind in another reminder that it's hard to separate his paintings from his music.
Corner Flat shows three men at different stages of life in the same flat at different times - or different flats in the same block, it is not clear. They are surely Dylan's lonesome hobo or his Mr Jones, asking: "Is this where it is?"
But the most striking images are those that show empty rooms, such as Lakeside Cabin. It reminds us of Dylan's mantra: stick to the reality that is in front of your eyes. A seemingly mundane scene, the outside world has been shut out by drawn blinds, the television is turned off and the image is one of tranquillity. But again, the objects are the subject, while the lonely human is not in the picture at all but is viewing the scene from the corner of the room.
"Great paintings should be [found] where people hang out," Dylan once said. "Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner."
There is something ironic about the fact that the icon of the protest movement who would once have done away with galleries should now be relishing the experience of showing in one himself.
But whether the shy artist will visit his own exhibition or not is anyone's guess. "I sent him an invitation last week and I'm waiting for a reply," Mössinger says. He may have the chance to see the exhibition in South Korea, Stockholm or New York, where, with Dylan's approval, it is likely to go next.
Yet Mössinger says she is fully prepared for the fact that he might well come in disguise and that even she, the woman who made it happen, might not get wind of his visit.
"Wouldn't that be funny?" she says. "But it would also sort of fit in with this whole strange fairytale."
· The Drawn Blank series runs at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz until February 3, 2008
