Frédérique Goerig-Hergott
In 1948, after studying art in Amsterdam and Maastricht, Martin Engelman settled in Paris, becoming A.M. Cassandre’s assistant that same year. In 1957, he began a seven-year collaboration with Darthea Speyer, director of exhibitions at the American Cultural Center, before deciding to devote himself to painting. He had his first solo exhibition in 1960 at the Galerie Jean Giraudoux in Paris. Four years later, he was invited to take part at documenta III in Kassel (the museum Unterlinden has one of the three works Engelman exhibited, À trois, 1963) as well as his compatriot Willem de Kooning. In 1965, the Stedeljik Museum Amsterdam presented Engelman’s first solo exhibition (a retrospective of his work followed in 1997).
Like many of the artists who settled in Paris after the war, Engelman was drawn to Surrealism, and in particular the dreamlike images of Max Ernst, which veer between nightmare and reality. He was close to the CoBrA movement in Europe and to Willem de Kooning in the United States, both the source of the spontaneity and boldness in his paintings (Lady Chatterly, 1961), but he was also inspired of van Gogh, Bacon, Picasso, the van Velde brothers, and works by French painters such as Bazaine and Manessier. His use of childlike simplification, the grotesque and the fantastic was not unrelated to Dubuffet’s Art Brut (Tête, 1963). During his Parisian years, Martin Engelman created an ambiguous world inhabited by imaginary, supernatural creatures that came out of ever more frightening dreams. The picture space increasingly became the theatre of a reflection on events in society (Vietnam War, student revolts in the late 1960s), with his paintings taking on a menacing, serious, dark tone. The arena, Le manége, a reference to Max Beckmann’s Die Barke (1926, Feigen Collection, New York), belongs to a pictorial world in which strange, dislocated, sexual, hybrid creatures act in a space that holds them prisoner.
In 1969, Martin Engelman was awarded a one-year scholarchip as part of the artist’s programme of the ‘Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst’ (DAAD) in Berlin. The following year, he was invited to teach at the ‘Hochschule der Künste’. During this period of his career, his forms became firmer and the colours, which echoed a world bruised by history, also reveal a dark, serious mood that dominated his work until 1971-72. The heads, which recurred throughout his oeuvre, became increasingly menacing. Hostile physiognomies are depicted, isolated in undefined spaces, bearing witness to his confinement and thinking in the context of a Germany that had been cut in two parts. …
Frédérique Goerig-Hergott
(quote from: Collection of Modern Art, Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, 2015, page 114)
Peter-Klaus Schuster
MARTIN ENGELMAN or the other side of Berlin
…Everything that distinguished the art of the 1960s in artistic diversity, and that documenta III in 1964, composed under the direction of Werner Haftmann, united in its great variety of forms, from the classical modern to post-war abstraction to the new representational style, this entire international diversity of languages Martin Engelman, himself also a participant in documenta III, perceived and processed in his art.
The utterly surprising element in this so very international art life was Berlin. West-Berlin walled in within the Eastern bloc, became for more than twenty years the centre of life of Martin Engelman, this cosmopolitan painter and graphic artist. A DAAD-grant led him to West-Berlin in 1969. One year later he received a professorship for free painting at the Hochschule der Künste at Steinplatz.
If there was an anti-authoritarian professor at the Berlin Hochschule der Künste, then it was Martin Engelman, as well recognized by the students. He was not an agitator and not a dogmatist for a realistic depiction of social injustices, as it was fashion in the admittedly social-artistic Berlin. He was and remained a sovereign defender of artistic freedom and its polyglottism, and his respect for and tolerance towards the diversity of opinions as well as artistic styles, his indulgence, were valued and venerated at the Hochschule der Künste….
The global language of the modern trend and its anti-authoritarian habitus, its freedom and the diversity of its forms and levels of language, from the erotic to the ironic up to the dramatic fragmentation of bodies and heads, all of this Berlin gained with images of exceptional beauty of colour and ambiguity through Martin Engelman, the “man of colour”, as he called himself….
Peter-Klaus Schuster
(quote from: Martin Engelman. Das Malerische Werk, edited by Andreas Haus und Heike C. Mertens, Cologne 2007, page 7)
Christian Lenz
… The work of significant artists originates outside of general tendencies. Many outside influences are indeed accepted at the beginning of a creative life, in a period of orientation, but these are immediately amalgamated with the personal manner, so that from the outset those unmistakable characteristics are perceptible which lead to an independent and constant development.
For Martin Engelman the beginnings lay with CoBrA, the movement in European painting which emerged in 1948/49 from a liason between artists in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam and which was characterized by a grotesquely figurative world of spontaneous, even wild brushwork. Through these beginnings Engelman came in contact with the works of various other artists (like Nolde, Beckmann, Picasso and Max Ernst) without, however, simply attaching himself to any one of them.
Engelman’s early work, starting at the end of the 1950s, may be termed wild in every respect: the thick application of paint is wild, as are the configurations, in which one recognizes a company of monsters. At the beginning of the 1960s the forms become clearer. Plastic values are more strongly emphasized – though usually in transparent formations, so that the figures often acquire a hovering character. Works like these, by which Engelman was represented in the 1964 documenta III, are already distinguished by that element which constitutes the artist’s special achievement – colour. Around this time there originated a series of lucid works of a fairytale-like lustre and gleam which, in spite of their figurative grotesqueness, permit one to speak of a captivating dream-world. This dream-world did, however, become increasingly threatening from 1965 onwards: the figures became firmer and, finally, stiff like puppets, as though they were taking part in a masquerade of sexuality and aggression. When Engelman moved to Berlin in 1969 and was confronted there, as nowhere else, with those traces of evil that were scattered across the world since the 1930s, his art experienced a turn toward seriousness and gloom, from which he did not begin to free himself until 1971/72. A series of light, crystalline pictures with motifs drawn from Dutch towns bears witness to this gradual process. This serenity was preserved when, in 1974, the artis reverted to a looser manner of painting. …
… The serenity is not, however, totally harmless. When one discovers in the pictures figures that are more like imps and spirits than human beings and that move in a juggling world of swapping and changing, then one is reminded that a surrealistic element permeates Engelman’s entire work. It has an erotic and an ironic component. In comparison with earlier works, in which they appear with great violence as sexual torture on the one hand and as sarcasm on the other, these two components are liberated as playful eroticism and humour in the phase of the serene pictures. …
… Martin Engelman is a moulder of figures, a story-teller who devises ever new fables and situations. He possesses a continually regenerated and regenerating imagination which is also extensive in the techniques used (painting, gouache, drawing, lithography, etching and, most recently, even woodcut) and which is constantly opening up new possibilities. The mark of this artistic imagination is a highly developed sense of colour and of optical and tactile form. The pictures may appear sketch-like and spontaneous, but their spontaneity is strictly controlled, the result of creative power. ...
Christian Lenz
(Quote from: catalogue ‘Paintings from 1975 – 1981’, Edition Buus, Sweden, 1982)