Gustav Metzger
Holocaust child survivor who developed the AutoDestructive Art form
IT COULD be described as weaponised art, but the dystopian vision of the artist Gustav Metzger, who has died aged 90, ironically developed from a love of nature. Metzger’s anger was forged at the age of 12 while growing up in Nuremberg and hiding in the city’s forests, before Kindertransport brought him and his brother safely to England in 1939. Their Polish-Jewish parents died in Buchenwald.
Watching the shiny militarism of the Nazi Nuremberg rallies, Metzger felt sustained by the forests, literally and metaphorically. They fed a burgeoning artistic talent that represented both anger and a desire to heal. Metzger joined Bertrand Russell’s nonviolent civil disobedience movement in the late 1950s, for which he was imprisoned. But then, perhaps inspired by an earlier art form, Constructivism, he came to understand that things that could be destroyed could also rise again and be used as a social force.
Metzger’s creative response developed during The Cold War between America and Russia. The US nuclear attack against Japan in 1945 had a profound effect on artists and young people who expressed their fears that the discovery and use of nuclear power endangered the planet.
In 1960 Metzger used acid as a form of creative protest. He coined the phrase Auto-Destructive Art in his article Machine, Auto-creative and Autodestructive Art in a 1962 issue of the journal Ark. But he had been working on it for years and created his first acid paintings in 1959 as protest against nuclear warfare. He sprayed acid onto sheets of nylon, which produced rapidly changing shapes in the dissolving nylon, rendering the work both auto-creative and auto-destructive: Quoting him in The Guardian in 2012, Stuart Jeffries wrote: “The important thing about burning a hole in that sheet, was that it opened up a new view across the Thames of St Paul’s Cathedral. Auto-destructive art was never merely destructive. Destroy a canvas and you create shapes.”
Metzger’s manifesto Auto-Destructive Art was presented at a 1964 lecture to the Architecture Association, which was turned into a creative happening by students. Two years earlier he had taken part in the Festival of Misfits organised by the Fluxus group at London’s Gallery One. In the 1960s he became a protégé of The Who, having studied with its guitarist Pete Townshend, and they projected his work onto screens at their concerts. With his cloth cap and fiery eyes and beard he sometimes resembled an angry Van Gogh. But his anger was actually turned inward, towards his own painful memories and his fears for the future. He caught the imagination of generations of younger artists who felt the same angst he distilled into art. It often invited spontaneous outbreaks of performance art, of the punk message which smashed guitars onstage. Because he hated man’s inhumanity to man and the planet, his art was often made of found objects, cardboard, bits of rubbish, things of the earth.
Whatever he had to say about the planet’s future – or lack of one – Metzger’s anger always reflected what the Nazis in their steely uniforms and their goose-stepping parades had done to his life and his family. The Holocaust and Nazism are reflected in such works as Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19-28, 1943, in which broken bricks surround the notorious photograph, or a blown-up photograph of Austrian Jewish children scrubbing a sidewalk, covered by a yellow blanket. You had to crawl under the blanket to experience the horror in virtual reality. His enlarged image of Jews at Auschwitz invited viewers simply to feel without artistic intervention.
Metzger studied art in Britain and Europe, working during the war in a furniture factory in Leeds, and inspired by the writings of Eric Gill. In 1945 he enrolled at London’s Borough School of Art under the unconventional guidance of the Jewish artistDavid Bomberg.
Metzger received a grant from the British Jewish community to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp between 1948 and 1949. By the late 1950s he flocked to anti-capitalist movements. The emergent auto-destructive art became his subversive weapon – attacking both capitalism and the art establishment for manipulating modern art. And the art world responded by ignoring him -- until the mid 1990s – when it suddenly recognised his force and influence. In 2004 Tate Britain exhibited his controversial installation, which included a rubbish bag that a cleaner unwittingly threw out.
But Mertzger continued to insist that his message was intended as a rejection of power, the power he had seen wielded by the Nazis. He remained at heart a nature-artist, someone whose work exploded with a sense of man’s transience and violence. His immersive work, Liquid Crystal Environment, originally made in 1965 and remade in 2005, was most recently on display at Tate Modern. He never married. GLORIA TESSLER
Gustav Metzger: born April 10, 1926. Died March 1, 2017