Martin Engelman about 1980

An Interview of Martin Engelman by the BBC in Berlin, November 16th, 1981

In 1969 a Dutch artist, then living in Paris, was invited to continue his work in West Berlin, under the city’s cultural programme.

The painter was Martin Engelman, whose fresh and vived style of abstract art arrived considerable attention, particularly after he gave a large exhibition in the city.

Subsequently, the talented Dutchman was asked to remain in Berlin on a permanent bases, as a guest professor at the city’s academy of art. He agreed and since then his work has been exhibited in a host of European countries including Britain, France, Belgium and Holland, as well as in Scandinavia and the United States.

Clive Freeman who met Martin when he first arrived in Berlin over ten years ago, recently visited the artist at his studio in the city’s Schöneberg district and began by asking him, how his life as an artist had first started.

Martin Engelman:

“I have been trained in graphical studios in Holland during the war; and at a certain moment when the war was getting on, there were a certain amount of young Dutch people asked if they would join the Dutch navy to come to England and to contribute to the end of this dreadful Second World War.  I have served in the Dutch marine during two years and when the war was over I came back to my earlier activities as a designer in The Hague and of course as an adventurous person I had to go further on and my aim was going to France. I met the quite notable French stage designer and painter called Cassandre. This was in 1947 so in ’48 I found myself in Paris working in his studio and working out sets together for Mozart, for Shakespeare, Othello, Don Giovanni, on stage design. That’s what took me to France.

Clive Freeman:

Paris in fact was in a rather desperate situation in a certain sense, there wasn’t much money, certainly, there

ME: 

There was not much money, but you said desperate; it was not desperate, because the Second World War was over and everything had to build up again with very limited possibilities financially but the spirit was enormous. There was this feeling of freedom. There were the Allies; France, Holland, Belgium, all were the Allies, it was over, a sort of “they had won the war” as of course between quotation marks, a war is never won. One could start again, build up something. So it was a spirit of building up new again, of course, in the political scene there were different governments, it wasn’t clear in which direction France would go. But, there was an enormous freedom, intellectually and in the commercially world of getting into something new and I have been profiting of that in the very moment after the war.

CF:

How did your painting develop, you express yourself very much as an individual, how would you define your later work ?

ME:

I’ve been working much more tight, in a certain time I worked with forms and shapes much more defined and precise, the whole mood in my work from the earlier days is still there but…it is…, it is more open, I don’t close myself so much in anymore. When I start a canvas    I have a quite definite – and undefinite idea where to go on my surface and I start working quite liquid on the floor, flat. As soon as that first coat is dry I am beginning to realize where my painting should go and get more powerful, where it should stay as it is and where I should put on more paint and then any medium is good, but if I see that I can’t go nowhere with my first set-up, then I wash it all over and start again.

CF:

But colour is very important to you 

ME:

Colour is most important. When I start working I have an approximate conception of what I should put on the painting and then it is a matter of just drawing one or two lines, then it comes out of my whole system and the brush and the material.

CF:

Would you say that you have been influenced quite a bit by France?

ME:

I could not deny this; but I also have this straight forwardness of contrasts that comes from my own country. Our country has had a long tradition of painters and the Dutch sky is very wide and the sea is long and the country is flat and it has these enormous contrasts which you can find in any direction of painting from Holland. I don’t have to mention names - such as Mondrian and Van Gogh and this is the sort of element that I feel in my painting still today, in ‘81, it will never get away, it is in me. Now I could be….(because, by the way, you know, I am very often in the South of France where I have a studio as well) whenever I go to France, to Holland or to Germany, I keep those contrasts and colour in my work – in me.

CF:

would you say there is any particular artist who influenced your painting?

ME:

Important have been in my life, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Cezanne, also Mondrian, then Picasso of course. I have looked at Bacon’s paintings, I have been very impressed by the German painter who has not been accepted during the Nazi time, Beckmann. Then, after the war - influenced by what I have seen happening in Holland and in America; I am talking about CoBrA, action painting from the United States: Kline, de Kooning, Rothko, Guston. I’m talking about the French impressionists and – no, late impressionists, I’m talking about the Paris school with all their weaknesses, Manessier, Tal-Coat, Bazaine, and so on.

CF:

You also do lithograph and wood cuts, this is a very important aspect of your work.

ME: 

Yes, and this has become an aspect of my work - because during the time I lived in Paris, I started doing lithography. I’m talking about the beginning 60’s and I have done a great number of them. And then, by the time I arrived in Berlin in the end 60’s I have had this connection with printers who always asked me to come back to do lithograph. This is also a personal situation between very deep convictions I have since ever and it gives me this enormous pleasure of working on stone or cutting in wood. Then the press is ready and then the ability to work any time, not depending on – now it is four o’clock, we’re finished - any time even at night time. This contact stayed with me, between Paris and me here in Berlin.

CF:

You’ve been here now over ten years I think.

ME:

Yes.

CF:

It has proved for you to be a magnificent base. You go out of Berlin a lot, you give quite a lot of exhibitions, I know, in Sweden, in West Germany and in Paris and in Holland.

ME:

Although it sounds so far away, it is the next step to the East and it is a station where I’ve got the possibility of giving a realistic drive to my situation in life and the possibility to work in a certain calm way, you know, of course Berlin is a very sophisticated place but it is an end station in a certain sense, while of course Paris, Amsterdam, London, New York, people go through all the time. Very few people come here, but maybe, this restriction of the far-end station before you come to the East, is - may be a necessity of working so much – and the tranquility you find here, one is not that much disturbed.