Fritz Tröger - Pierre Menard Gallery

Although Fritz Tröger disavows style, suggesting he is pursuing something like the discoverable essence
of his subjects, or perhaps even more, what color and line themselves are striving for, or dreaming of, in the
manner of the self-conscious Zettel of Arno Schmidt’s great masterpiece: “I am not drawing what I see, I draw
what I feel when I see something. I’m not interested in a certain style which might attract attention through its
peculiarity, but in a basic formulation about regularity of line and color,” it is what must be termed his style that
is disconcerting about the work, and which imparts to it its preternatural calm, or perhaps rather its emptiness.
And it is this emptiness which makes the work disturbing and compelling.
These figures, who inadvertently depict the ravages of inter-bellum, war-time and post-war Germany, represent
the cannon-fodder, the scathed, the wounded, the shell-shocked, the marginal and the irrelevant left in
the wake of these various displacements. Their souls may not have been lost, but they have retreated to places
beyond hearing, beyond sharing their pain except in the simplest sense of keeping the company of other damaged
men and women. Even in work, there is no communication beyond the coordinated movement which the
task itself requires. If it is calm they exude, it is an ominous and inhuman calm; if it is defeat, it is the defeat of
the walking wounded, of mere survival in lieu of human aspiration.
Information about Tröger’s life and aesthetic is scant and not terribly reliable, to judge from the few
exhibition catalogues produced during his lifetime or the biographical data accessible in electronic sources.
One commentator suggested that the strange quite, the resistance to sound, even in the midst of what must
be a clangorous workplace, somehow derives from his deafness. And there is something impossible to ignore
about it once this notion has infiltrated one’s thinking about the work. His subjects invariably exude a sense
of self-containedness or fundamental solitariness, and perhaps even an inability to present themselves in any
other way. To explain this strange phenomenon, which one is anxious to interpret as a statement about, and a
brilliant evocation of, the essential loneliness of human-kind, as the result of the painter’s deafness, which at
worst, was a fleeting, and most likely forgotten, malaise, makes the sort of sense explanations of El Greco’s art
predicated upon his astigmatism do at first hearing: of course his world is different from that of others, and this
is the crux! Indeed, in his youth, Tröger did suffer a temporary deafness as the result of scarlet fever, but it is
only by analogy, or maybe by dint of his own intense focus on this perhaps defining experience that his work
has become steeped in silence: he was not, in fact, deaf. It would seem, however, that Tröger lived an essentially
solitary, self-contained, and even a sexless life. Is he projecting his own experience onto his subjects, though, or
is he, on account of his experience and sensibility, merely particularly well suited to depict their own essential
voicelessness? And is it that which he wants to equate with an absence of style?
Though they are not uniformly members of the working class, it is the world of the worker with which
Tröger’s sensibility resonates, and perhaps the lack of a voice among his subjects is as much a political and social
commentary as it is the result of the horrifying historical facts of their lives. Critics have identified Tröger
as a “socialist of the heart – for he was far too inert to act on his convictions.” His heroes were Vincent Van
Gogh and Käthe Kollwitz, though he had not the energy to be the former nor the passion to be the latter. He
nevertheless succeeded in portraying an aspect of the humble life which didn’t yet exist when Van Gogh and
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Fritz Tröger