Fritz Tröger - Pierre Menard Gallery

elationship, a mutuality, an affection and, not least, a devotion. That people seem so little disturbed by his
presence has to do with their feeling that they aren’t just making a casual acquaintance. Of course they perceive
him as someone who doesn’t quite completely belong, but still as someone who also contends with the same
problems they do and who understands them fully. And not just the people speak to his particular sensibility,
but even the landscapes they have vacated of an evening and the trappings of the world of labor in which they
dwell – the coal conveyors, the cranes, earth-moving machines, electric towers, lonely rails, villages reticulated
with narrow paths and little houses ringed by fences in the snow.
And here it becomes quite clear that for Tröger the outside is more important than the inside. He longs for
the outer world because he is uneasy with the inner one, whether he is among men, near them, or far away from
everything and everyone. It’s not surprising that Tröger lived for many years in Lausitz, the land of coal-mines
and factories, and in rather Spartan circumstances. His studio in Oberlausitz was the just opposite of homey
and cozily furnished, nor did it encourage guests to linger. It was as if he made himself a home that was not
a home, which offered no comfort or repose, a home that forced him out of the city and into the countryside,
where, at last, he could breathe freely and live for himself. Even as a child he would escape to the garden as to
a remote horizon, a no-man’s land where he could simply observe and wait. Throughout his life he would travel
around Europe, longer or shorter excursions into his isolation, with the exception of the years of the Second
World War when this became impossible. As his wanderlust would again resolve into homesickness, he saw
the world of the Oberlausitz in northeastern Saxony with its familiar forests as something like a homeland.
Undoubtedly a sensitive child, an introvert for whom life was never easy, and definitely someone in whom the
desire to paint was so intense that he never considered whether he could make a living at it, but engaged the
practice out of simple necessity. During and after the First World War he studied art, first at the Dresdner
Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Fine and Applied Arts) and afterwards at the Kunstakademie (Academy of
Art). At the age of thirty, without a cent to his name, he went to Italy for the first time to draw, and upon his
return settled in Dresden to work as an artist.
If we try to identify Tröger’s style, his special status becomes apparent. He isn’t, ultimately, a modern, but
someone who simply insists on drawing and painting in the way he believes is appropriate to the phenomena
at hand. His straightforwardness is an analogue of his view of reality: he wants everything to make sense, and
nothing to remain unclear. Unlike his colleagues of the Dresdner Secession, with whom he occasionally exhibited,
he was no admirer of Cezanne. And he drew nothing from the lightness of the color-besotted Impressionists.
Nor was the Bridge (Brücke) aspect of his style at all that of a Ludwig Kirchner – in his case there is a
fundamental inclination toward gravity. He had no notion of creating a new style nor of renewing an old one.
His talent is not as a revolutionary of form or color. He is scarcely compelled by aesthetic innovation, but is
conventional by preference in a, by all means, positive sense – it is a kind of precision, a being true to the thing
itself that motivates him. Not a great master, therefore, but a lesser one, who teaches us a way of seeing.
Heinz-Norbert Jocks
Paris, June 2007
translated by Laura Hatry & John Wronoski