Fritz Tröger - Pierre Menard Gallery

In the Bunker of the Inner Life
In the face of the charged atmosphere of Fritz Tröger’s portraits – sometimes with sorrow, sometimes with
joy – one feels his profound sympathy with ordinary people, a deeply felt humanity. His figures, so tenderly
depicted, are never compelled to assert their identity, even the identity defined by what they might hope to
become. There is no notion of a sociological or a psychological portrait of his subjects, and certainly no adventitious
attempt to glorify or expose or unmask them. Instead he encounters these individuals and groups
unobtrusively and without prejudgment. In doing so, he quite casually manages to capture something of their
essences. Indeed, he depicts them so intimately, yet purely, that the viewer inevitably becomes curious as to
their identity and personal history. Who are they? How do they live? What sort of things are they engaged in?
What do they think about? Care about? What’s going on at this moment in which we find them before us?
What would they tell us if we could sit down at the table with them – about their work, their children or their
wives back at home?
The milieu from whence they come is instantly clear: their circumstances are humble. We see them in a bar,
sitting at a table; in a factory or at the wheel of a tractor. In the same scene in which peasants work with their
horses, workers are unloading trucks of coal and a pair of men converse in the seat of a wagon being drawn
through the landscape by horses. Coal-miners in hard-hats and naked torsos are depicted working, or relaxing
during a break. A mustached cabinet-maker in his apron is sawing wood. All equally compel Tröger’s brush.
When it is a group that he depicts, each individual seems more like a part of the whole than an isolated entity.
One thing becomes evident: the artist isn’t approaching these people as objects of study, whose secrets he wants
to reveal; he is, rather, trying to establish a human rapport with them, to achieve a kind of intimacy with them
through the act of drawing.
Outwardly, Tröger’s subjects seem quite self-contained, though still well-anchored in the world of others.
At the same time they give the impression that they have been captured, surprised, at a moment in their lives
in which their entire history is compressed; that from the vantage of this particular moment it is possible to
see the whole thing. The flow of time is stopped, and a strange silence has descended. Attuned to nuance, and
skilled at revealing it, the painter seems less interested in what may yet befall the being who confronts him than
in his solidarity with and security in his own present and the rich surplus of past which has eventuated in this
revelatory moment.
It is remarkable that though they sometimes provide only minimal cues to understanding, Tröger’s pictures
display a rich expressiveness. What do we experience in them? Let’s take an example: a man wearing glasses is
sitting on the edge of a bed. He is absorbed in a book; behind him is a closed wooden door. His right hand rests
on the mattress of the fastidiously made bed, the left on his thigh. The concentration of this reader reaches an
audible volume. Captured in his palpable intellectuality, it is as though the reader has retreated into his shell.
He is present in his absence, and the viewer wonders whether it is a permanent or only a temporary state. His
inner life, like all of Tröger’s subjects, remains a mystery.
7
A Consideration of the Work of Fritz Tröger
(Dresden 1894 - Dresden 1978)