born: 22.8.1912 Stettin, Germany
died: 11. 6.1995 Wasserburg, Germany
Mac Zimmermann's personality when revealed by his pictures, seems at first
glance to be characterised by a contradiction. In him we have an artist
with a sense of tradition, seemingly fighting against the wish to break
away from this tradition, and yet in the end the two seem to blend together
happily. His drawing is clear, the composition severe, and nothing in
the scenes he presents disturbs our sense of the possible. Should he turn
away from nature, or at least from that which represents reality to us,
then the world he reconstitutes does not seem any the less probable and
coherent - within the scope of its own system of hidden laws. Basically
the tradition to which Mac Zimmermann's works are attached is essentially
poetic rather than aesthetic. He learned from the glaomy world of his
youth that the more one limited the term reality only to visible things,
the less meaning it had. He felt and also expressed that each attempt
to grasp the external world will fail unless accompanied by a deeply personal
and inspired vision. If there is, in his ovvn country, a conception of
art to which he can rightly refer, it is to be found in the timeless sentence
which the friend of Novalis and Kleist, the Romantic painter Caspar David
Friedrich, so excellently formulated: Close your eyes in order to see
your picture first through the eye of the spirit and then bring to light
what you have seen in this darkness". Friedrich left us still landscapes,
full of secrets, with distant mountains and copses through which the moanlight
filters, and men deep in thought, whose faces are almost never to be seen
since he paints them from behind. He gave us the most perfect example
of a realism which is constantly transcended by a feeling for the unfathomable.
Something of this feeling for the infinite can be found again in Mac Zimmermann's
work. But after studying his pictures, it also becomes clear which other
painters he has been influenced by, naturally without imitating them.
One is reminded of Giorgio de Chirico's Metaphysical Interiors, with their
blind speechless puppets, and also of the Gangs and of the Birds by Max
Ernst, ivho is another of the great forerunners of modern poetic painting.
But in Mac Zimmermann's painting one also seems to rediscover the somewhat
faded traces of the great painters of the fantastic, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch,
Hans Baldung Grien and Urs Graf. Perhaps one could even say that his individual
imaginative power is more suited to the tormented heroes of the Reformation,
than to his Freud-influenced contemporaries. The elegance and originality
of Mac Zimmermann's art seem to me to be characterised by the consciously
archaic expression of his creative ecstasy. There is a spiritual dandyism
about him which frees him from the stresses of the present day even when
he happens to be depicting aeroplanes and machines, apparently referring
to our new myths. What is certain is that with his work he questions our
world more severely than others with their slogans and banners. He pillories
its unacceptable elements, the gross simplification, conditioned reflexes
and absurd mechanisation. In moments of self-forgetfulness he also shows
the ways which must be taken to escape from these stresses: they all lead
past self-examination and man's own conversion of himself. However Mac
Zimmermann detests verbosity. His art remains mobtrusive and his modesty
allowes him to take refuge in irony. If it is true that he traces his
spiritual descent from the world of the Romantics, then he will always
be closer to Lichtenberg rather than to the brothers Schlegel. Mac Zimmermann
has always had a predeliction for the ancient Greek myth of Deucalion.
Deucalion had fallen into despair when he found himself alone after the
Deluge. He begged Hermes, who had granted him one wish, for companions.
Thereupon Zeus ordered him to cast the bones of his mother behind him.
Deucalion realised that this meant stones, which are the descendants of
the earth. Therefore he followed the command, and the stones were changed
into human beings. I do not think I am falsifying Mac Zimmermann's thoughts
when I assume that he paints and creates works mainly - as this book shows
- to discover, as Deucalion did, human beings.
Patrick Waldberg
Taken from German section of 'Artistgroup'
www.kuenstlergruppe.de
Zimmermann artwork at NewArt24
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