Lesson from the Masters: Ursula

No, not that Ursula.

This Ursula:

Ursula, Das bin ich, na und? (Ursula, That’s me. So what?) 1995.

From the retrospective exhibit at Museum Ludwig in Cologne:

Ur­su­la Schultze-Bluhm, who is known sim­p­ly as Ur­su­la, was one of the most im­por­tant Ger­man artists of the se­cond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. She was born in Mit­ten­walde, Ger­many, in 1921 and died in Cologne in 1999. Mu­se­um Lud­wig’s ex­hi­bi­tion Ur­su­la—That’s Me. So What?, which is the first com­pre­hen­sive mu­se­um show on the artist in over thir­ty years, of­fers a fresh look at her oeu­vre. The show con­tains 236 works, of which 44 are from the col­lec­tion of the Mu­se­um Lud­wig.

This exhibit filled the entire ground floor of Museum Ludwig, and it was a challenge. My fellow travelers either fled the scene or didn’t brave the experience, but I found her work exhilarating. My description of it is that she was “obsessively exuberant”: all those dots and strokes and indeterminate shapes — it’s as if Seurat decided to become a Fauve and then parody Marc Chagall or Maxim Gorky.

I can see why others might find her work unsettling.

legend of Ursula I / boat trip to the lotophagi (1963)

It’s relentless, isn’t it?

Demon minuet (1996)

She gives the appearance of being an outsider artist in the vein of Howard Finster or St. Eom, but although she was not formally trained like her husband (alongside whom she worked in the same studio), she was nonetheless a professional artist. And although her work gives off serious “automatic drawing” vibes, she famously stated that her work was completely thought out and designed before she began, which her husband verified.

Wilder mann (1992)

So Ursula is not (was not) to everyone’s taste. I imagine the primitivism is off-putting to many, the messiness of the technique, the busy-ness of the surface, the psychological (and often political) aggression. And yet she has this enormous exhibit in Cologne’s premiere museum: Her stuff is ART.

So I have questions.

If Ursula’s sloppy, impassioned stuff is ART, then what about…

…which is a perfectly cromulent postmodern piece that you might find in the National Gallery of Contemporary Art in Athens.

Except it’s not:

graffiti under the bridge in vondelpark, Amsterdam

Another:

graffiti, somewhere along the rhine river near strasbourg

Do I think the graffiti that peppers the modern landscape is the same as similar barbaric yawps in trendy galleries/museums?

I do, in fact. They differ not in kind but in AUDIENCE. The stuff in galleries and museums has been curated, gate-kept, filtered, presumably for an audience with “sophisticated” tastes, but the graffiti has the same energies, the same bravura, as the “real” artists exhibiting in Soho.

(Apologies to those who thought I was going to trash Ursula’s art for being no more than a vandal’s waste of paint. That’s not what I got from either art form.)

lascaux cave paintings

I mean, we’ve been desecrating walls ever since we’ve been human, right?

So the lesson today is not to let any possible rejection by some imaginary future AUDIENCE deter you from smearing paint on a surface (or writing a poem about your cat, or a song about your one true love who done left you). Not everyone is or will be (or even can be) your AUDIENCE. You are not creating for them.

STOP WORRYING ABOUT WHETHER PEOPLE ARE GOING TO HATE YOUR ART. You make your art and then make some more art. That’s all that matters.