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Interview
with Gunther Gerzso |
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I had first met Mexican artist Gunther Gerzso literally "under the volcano," on Popocatépetl where director John Huston was filming his version of Malcolm Lowry's novel. Gerzso, as art director, created the sets. Albert Finney had the lead along with Jacqueline Bisset. Emilio Fernández, "El lndio," acted the part of a brothel owner and palenque proprietor. Gabriel Figueroa was the cinematographer. It was 1983, and Gerzso had returned to film. Now, at his studio, our photographer asks if Gerzso minds if he smokes. "No, but who knows if the paintings do?" Gunther says in a mock-serious tone. With those words, we are welcomed to his San Angel Inn house. Forty-six years earlier he had remodeled it and moved in with his wife Gene and their two sons, Andrew and Michael. 17. Mythologie, 1964
The garden is Gene's domain. The house has the order and the exactness of Gerzso's paintings. Tall shelves of books cover the walls and make it cozy. There are no rooms or corridors without books. He is an avid reader, devouring three or four books a week. Between the shelves are preColumbian sculptures. "A miserable sample of the pieces I formerly had," states Gerzso. Gerzso is a large man of impeccable demeanor; his long face is without wrinkles, and has the dissecting glance of a surgeon, maybe as cool as the impression of his paintings can be. His posture is upright, austere, parsimonious, and when he sits down he rests his enormous hands on his knees. His thin lips release a sigh. His demeanor when speaking is determined, intelligent, and provocative. He always quotes from this or that book, a habit of his disciplined, formal, European education. As we wait for the sunlight to photograph a detail next to Gene's piano, Gerzso remarks, "It's like in the movies; everyone waits for the sunlight." Gerzso spent more then twenty years in film, from 1940 to 1964. He was living in a house which had belonged to Julio Castellanos, when one day Francisco Cabrera, the movie producer, knocked on his door. He asked Gunther to do his next film, Santa, with director Norman Foster. This initiated a career of more than 180 films during the famous golden years of Mexican cinematography. During that long period he would go to Churubusco Studios to earn his daily bread. In the afternoons he painted, but without any pretension of making art; it was a form of escape, a violon d'Ingres. For Gunther, painting is the antithesis of filmmaking. One is still, motionless, the other full of action and movement. Painting has a simple technology, film is complicated. Painting is an individual achievement, film a collective one. The crisis in Europe in 1930, and the economic situation there, interrupted his education in Switzerland. Gunther was living in Lugano with his uncle, Dr. Hans Wendland, an art dealer who instilled in Gunther a love of art and a refined eye. Upon returning to Mexico in 1931, Gunther's first work was in a production of one of Molière's plays. His attitude toward Mexico then was an ambivalent one; he had no access to Mexico's cultural elite, and there were few theaters in existence, so he found his way to the theater world of Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked as a set designer. The American stage technique impressed him, and he learned much about Broadway's theater arts of the thirties. He met Leslie Howard. During the summers he returned to his country and started collecting paintings by Julio Castellanos, Orozco, and Siqueiros. In Cleveland, Bernard Pfriem, an art student, presented him his first oil colors and advised him to leave the theater and dedicate himself to painting. Gerzso answered, "You're mad! I'm not a painter!" But nonetheless, it was then that he started painting. He found these first efforts clearly unsuccessful. His friend Juan O'Gorman, painter and architect, introduced him to the group of Paris surrealist painters. Gerzso knocked at a door at number 4 Calle Gabino Barreda. Remedios Varo, the wife of Benjamin Pèret, opened the door. She was living in quite a primitive state, Gerzso recalls, but hanging on the walls were sketches by Picasso and Ernst. In the neighborhood also lived Leonora Carrington. Edward James and Matta would visit them when they were passing through, and they all exchanged visits Sundays in one another's houses. Gerzso was asked to make a scene for a window-front exhibition to aid the British war effort. Times were hard, and there was little work. Gunther worked alone, painting canvases influenced by Picasso and European surrealism, particularly that of Tanguy. One day, he recounts, he had the desire to create something that had to do with the Americas alone. He found his style in a small painting, Tihuanacu, that was the father of all of his later work. In 1951 lnés Amor offered to show his work in her Galería de Arte Mexicano. "It was the biggest failure of the century," he recalls. "No one went, no one bought." His work since that time shows the immense impact of the Mexican landscape upon him. Gunther speaks openly of the importance the forms of the pre-Columbian world hold for him. Ramon Xirau comments that in Gerzso's work, the great spaces remind him of architecture from the pre-Columbian world, the deep dreams and the precise profiles recorded by those walls. Gerzso has always worked in his studio at home. "Remember that when I started out I was only a part-time painter." In his studio there is the order and rigor of a laboratory. The walls are covered by books and shelves for the paintings. His drawing table was made by a carpenter of movie sets. But on some shelves he has his "horror collection": a dwarf from Carcassonne, a Virgin from Rocamadour, a Buddha from San Francisco's Chinatown, a bronze reproduction of an Etruscan piece bought in Munich, a thermometer from the Bon Marché, the anti-works of art that amuse him. On one of his easels, a wedding present in 1940, rests one of his latest paintings on Masonite, in greenish yellows. Gunther achieves his heightened colors by superimposing subtle layers of oil on a polished surface of paint. The Mexican colors, deep and intense, the jungle and jade greens, pervade his work. But Gerzso emphasizes that technique is fundamental. "In painting there is only one basic rule: painting fat over lean." He shows me the catalogues of pigments and materials, from which he has ordered the colors he uses. "I like to see Daniel Smith's catalogues. They bring me back to life when I am tired of reading anthropology, politics, and philosophy." 37. Manantial, 1993 As a work method, Gerzso elaborates fine sketches on bond paper. He has a thorough archive of all the drawing studies he has done for each painting. From a loose sketch, he sets about establishing a geometrical scheme. He determines points of intersection of lines by use of the golden mean. "I used to ruin canvases; I read that Mr. da Vinci also did several preparatory drawings, to the point that when the drawings were finished he was no longer interested in the painting. Those are the true battlefields. I envy Mr. Picasso, who would begin a painting just to see what came from it, and if it turned out, then fine. But my style is like flying an airplane; you cannot improvise." Gunther registers every work session in a folder; which pigments he has used, how many layers he has put down, what oil, which varnish, and the date. For Gerzso, painting is learned by looking. He has spent days in the Louvre differentiating Titian from Tintoretto. "A painting is not only the theme but the substance, the way it has been painted. Venus and Adonis six feet away, but also at twelve inches. My uncle told me I had to observe until the artist's very soul had entered me. "I admire Morandi, who takes a bottle and paints it. When I see Bonnard's wife, having a cup of tea with her dog and cherries, I find it marvelous. A painting must be brought to a point where it communicates the emotion that informed it. Then it detaches itself from that emotion and acquires its own life. That is when spirit inhabits matter. A painting isn't always achieved because it does not always reach that point. I see paintings as patients. We are the doctors who try to save them" In Gerzso's life, everyday routine has the same precision as his painting. When he was in film he would wake up at five in the morning and would not go to bed until ten at night. These days he wakes up at six-thirty, starts reading at seven. At nine he has breakfast and sometimes goes back to bed to finish a book. He showers, and goes up to his studio, working until two. He has lunch and half an hour later goes to his room to read Newsweek or The New York Times Book Review, The London Book Review, or a catalogue if it has arrived in the mail. He devours essays, histories of art, biographies, novels, poetry. What happens after painting, family, and books? "Nothing happens because there is nothing more. I watch television, starting with the news, but I am not really interested in what I am seeing. It helps me concentrate, and ideas develop for the next day. Television is just an instrument. I can't concentrate in silence. I am fascinated by this procedure, this new use for television. Where, from the screen filled with realistic, boring, and tacky images, ideas for a sketch are born. In the same way, when I'm listening to music I concentrate on the CD's cover or on the booklet. I read and listen, listen and read." We return to his painting. At first look it could appear repetitive. Gunther comments that yes, this is so, but true of Renoir as well. Because even if one day he paints his children's nanny, the next he will paint the back of another woman; he always returns to the same thing. "Titian is also repetitive, El Greco is repetitive. They are variations on the same subject; that is what we now call style. The truth is that a painter feels trapped. What gives personality to my paintings? It's a mystery. I found a world and that world I cannot explain. When you have found it, things turn out a certain way for the rest of your life. "One paints for oneself. The great Renaissance masters, when painting a commission, were filled with restrictions and conditions of how they were to paint. They would say, 'Look, I want an Adoration of the Magi, but I want the Virgin to have my wife's face and Saint Joseph to have my uncle's, my nephew as this other person, and I want the background to be my ranch!' In spite of all of that, they achieved splendid works of art. I once was asked to make a painting that matched a red carpet, chosen by the collector. The amazing thing is, it turned out well! "But I am not a great admirer of my own work. There are too many doubts in the creative process, too much suffering. I have spent my whole life doing this and I don't know if it was worth it, but then I remember that when Mr. Cocteau visited Mr. Picasso in the south of France he told him, 'I can't work, I am a disaster, these doubts kill me.' So damn it, why do I complain? "To paint, you have to paint. You perspire, move the paintbrush, a ridiculous pastime, because painting by itself does not mean anything. The paintbrush is nothing but a poor animal's hair; but you wiggle it, and suddenly something appears. Something that has a life of its own. It could be the Guernica, the Sistine Chapel, or maybe one of those remarkable paintings by Mr. Van Eyck." |
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