Franz Gertsch’s Selbstbildnis (Self-Portrait): ‘The eye taking a walk through the landscape of the face’

In the early 1960s, Franz Gertsch was in crisis. Figurative painting was dead, everyone knew that, and Abstract Expressionism was in the ascendency. For an aspiring artist keen to make his mark on this instinctive new world it would have to be one of daubs, zips and drips. This posed a problem for the young Swiss painter, who had emerged, at the age of 25, from a traditional realist schooling in Bern.

For a time, Gertsch found temporary accommodation with Pop art, a movement fascinated by the surface of things. It allowed the artist to display his formal graphic mastery in hard-edged, super-flat silhouettes painted in primary colours. Yet he feared the endeavour was leading him down a blind alley. ‘I couldn’t live out my painterly (realist) talent to the full,’ he told the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2017. He resolved to ‘give up or find a new way’.

The solution presented itself when he was on holiday in Ticino, Switzerland in 1969. Standing at the top of Monte Lema, looking down on the valley below, the artist observed that a camera’s lens subjects everyone and everything to the same rules. All he needed to do was to render reality as seen through the eye of a camera. It would be, he said, ‘as if I were coming down to Earth from Mars and, following a random choice, were able to paint anything in the world lying before me’.

Out went the bright silhouettes and the simple clear lines, and in came paintings so uncannily perfect that they looked like photographs, and so vast that they resembled billboards. ‘It is no longer about me, I am just the tool that paints these pictures,’ he said of the camera’s ability to wrench him out of subjective responsibility.

Gertsch’s first experiment, in 1969, was titled Huaa…! and depicted the actor David Hemmings in a scene from the film The Charge of the Light Brigade. The choice of subject was not random. Hemmings had played Thomas, a successful photographer, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, a cult 1966 film about truth, lies and the revelatory power of the photographic enlargement. Central to the movie is the question of the infallibility of the camera: can we really believe what it sees?

In answer, Gertsch directed his cool, analytical gaze on a clique of dandyish hipsters in the circle of the photogenic young artist Luciano Castelli in Lucerne. Between 1972 and 1977, he painted the seedy glamour of their hedonistic lifestyle with an unsparing accuracy. The results offered a tremendous amount of information. Gertsch paid as much attention to the dirty coffee cups and discarded cigarettes strewn around the group’s commune as he did to their unwashed hair, blue jeans and make-up.

For the viewer, the experience of looking at these monumental paintings was like being a latter-day Gulliver, set loose in the land of the giants and forced to confront, in magnificent detail, the physical realities of our existence. The drugs guru Timothy Leary described the paintings as ‘scary’, adding, ‘the pictures are alive! Gertsch is our new sorcerer’. The artist, he wrote, had created a new ‘time-space picture’.

For the next 40 years, Gertsch dedicated his career to the ‘blow-up’, making paintings of intense clarity from oversized photographic enlargements. Over time, the models changed. When Castelli and his retinue moved to Berlin in 1977, Gertsch looked around for a new ‘spirit of the age’ and found it in the rock star Patti Smith. The post-punk musician had come to worldwide fame with her album Horses in 1975. Gertsch saw her at a reading in Cologne, and the incessant click of his camera was so distracting that she lost her temper and threw a crumpled ball of paper at him. The action was caught in the 1978 work Patti Smith II, one of five paintings Gertsch made of her between 1977 and 1979.

These were to be the last of his paintings that focused on external events rather than the internal world. From 1980 until his transition to landscape woodcuts in the 1990s, he only painted head-and-shoulder portraits. On 9 October 2024, in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale, Christie’s is offering a rare self-portrait from 1980, which was credited by the artist as the moment he changed direction.

Gertsch is depicted against a neutral background, his gaze looking off into the distance. The artwork echoes the magical realism of Renaissance painters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Giovanni Bellini. The rich tones and the transition between light and shade create a sense of timelessness.

The artist was 50 years old when he made the painting, and he later recalled that it was ‘a tough piece of work’ confronting his ageing features. Every strand of hair and wrinkle is given the same attention. ‘The eye taking a walk through the landscape of the face’ is how Gertsch described it. ‘What interests me in painting is not the art but the life,’ he said, and he captures its transience with a poignant melancholy.

The 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale is on view at Christie’s in London, 3-9 October 2024. Explore Christie’s 20th/21st Century autumn sale season in London and Paris, 1-22 October

Franz Gertsch is at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, until 10 November 2024