The One Work
ANYONE who has stood before the Isenheim altar- piece in the museum. of. Colmar will know how little of the terror and beauty of this extraordinary work reproductions and words alone can com- municate. The plates and text of this new book are excellent, but to appreciate GrUnewald's masterpiece completely one needs to experience it at first hand. This is expressionist art at its most naked; every pictorial means is used to intensify the work's emotional impact. The images of anguish—appealing gestures, contorted forms, strange colour harmonies that are totally unlike those of any other artist—seem almost to scream out until one can bear to contemplate them no longer.
No other work .of art, except perhaps Picasso's Guernica, makes the same searing impact. And there are good reasons for this. It was painted in 1510 or thereabouts7–on. the eve of the Reforma- tion—for the Antogite House at Isenheim in Alsace, then a famous hospital for epileptics and syphilitics, for the gangrenous and for those suffer- ing from St. Anthony's Fire, Once admitted to the hospital the diseased were brought before the great altar erected in honour of St. Anthony, and # prayers were offered for a miraculous recovery. The altarpiece itself is a complex structure/ with movable panels designed for different co a' sions. On weekdays it was kept closed, and one would have been confronted with the celebrated Crucifixion. On Sundays the panels were opened to reveal the Resurrection, and scenes from the Virgin Mary's life—a message of hope to die suffering. And on Saints' Days the altarpiece opened up yet again to show the carved wooden figures of Saints Anthony, Augustine and Jerorne, and, on the wings, Anthony's meeting with Patil in the wilderness on one side and his temptation on the other. Grtinewald was a one-work artist. A number of paintings and a corpus of thirty or so drawings have been grouped around the Isenheim altar• piece; some, like the Lindenhardt altar, not very convincingly. None of them remotely rivals in power the Isenheim panels. The altarpiece is unique—German mysticism translated into.pairit' It could only have been produced in an age of violent social and religious upheaval by some' one burning himself out with creative passion. What little we know of Grtinewald himself would seem to confirm this. Sure evidence of 011r ignorance about his life lies in the fact that his name was not Grunewald at all. He was usuallY called Mathis the Painter and he died at Halle in August, 1528. At various times he was in the ser- vice of the Archbishops of Mainz, and it seems probable that he was dismissed for taking part in the Peasants' Revolt : he certainly had Lutheran pamphlets in his poSsession when he died.
Thames and Hudson's new book does every' thing a book can do to present this original and disturbing artist. The two short essays are first rate—Herr Meier's soberly factual, Dr. Pevsner designed to introduce this very Germanic painter to an English audience.
ALAN BOWNL
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