“I intended to make visible the force of life, the intensity of crystals, the energy of fire. Always aware that we breathe in the immense space of the cosmos."
"For them, those who lack everything, those who are hungry, the Earth is not beautiful. Let’s do everything, do it with them, so the world becomes beautiful and life worth living.”
Ernst Saemisch was born in Central Germany - Moers - in 1902. He spent his childhood near Freiburg, in the village of Güntherstal, on the edge of the Black Forest. There, he initiates the close relationship with nature, that accompanied him throughout his life, nurturing his artistic work and his conceptions of art. His home also provides him with a natural anchorage in the European cultural tradition. His father, Moritz Saemisch, was Minister of Finance during the Weimar Republic. His mother initiated him in the passion for artistic creation. One day the family’s idyll collapses: World War I had broken out. His father takes him to deliver medicines in the improvised field hospitals. Ernst always thanked him for this early and cruel experience, with the conviction that the creative capacity must be tempered in the confrontation with reality. At Christmas 1917 his mother dies.
He joins the international school of Suoz in Switzerland. In that atmosphere of freedom and intellectual amplitude, the pain of orphanhood is mitigated by an encounter with Einstein, who invited him to a long ski ride; reviving the memory of the meetings with Haber, Nernst and Heisenberg in his father's home, which marked his creation and his thinking. A visit to a large exhibition of new French painting in Zurich has such a profound impact on him that he decides to take up painting as a way of life. The expressionist movement leaves a lifelong impression on his conception of art and his creation. Returning to Germany in 1919, he finds it marked by years of war and defeat. The economic crisis leads Saemisch to start writing, publishing articles and essays on culture and politics. He also paints and makes engravings.
Saemisch joins the Academy of Art in Kassel, from where he is expelled because of his harsh criticism of the prevailing academicism. At this school, however, an encounter with a Chinese painter had important consequences for his artistic work. Saemisch himself relates: "At his side I began to feel the totality on which the great Chinese culture is based; to know his art, especially the ink painting, so spiritual, sometimes of a delicate lyricism; I learned to distinguish the marvelous sensitivity of the line that submits to the force of emptiness". Since then, his oriental link is deepened, concretized in the preferential use of brush, ink and Japanese paper. The path that now opens up for him is towards the recently founded Bauhaus in Weimar. Here he finds the spiritual and human climate necessary to strengthen the search in which he was engaged, initiating the conquest of that wide space between figurative painting and abstract painting. Under the guidance of Klee, Feininger, Gropius, Itten and occasionally Kandinsky, protected by the communitarian medieval spirit of the Bauhaus, he deepened the inner freedom that led him to find his own style.
OOn a sudden visit to Hamburg, he is seduced by the vastness of the sea and embarks as a sailor on one of the last merchant sailings ships, from Scandinavia to South Africa. In the dining room on board his daily sketches circulate from hand to hand. In this community he finds a deepening of the spirit of solidarity that had supported him at the Bauhaus. "This was a wonderful and unique period, in the context of which I was formed as a painter". Back in Berlin, he begins to exhibit his work and immerses himself in the vibrant cultural life of the time, working as a journalist and traveling through Europe, the Soviet Union and North Africa.
Nothing could be more alien to his vision of the world than the irrationalism and nationalism of Nazism. Due to the economic crisis that made it difficult to expose and publish, he decides for a permanent job at the German news agency (Wolff Telegraphisches Büro, later Deutsche Presse Agentur), where he soon becomes director of the Foreign Section. He suffers by the deterioration of Germany's intellectual and artistic life. His environment becomes more and more constricted. Then his painting is threatened. Finally, his situation becomes untenable because of his close friendship with Jews. With the intervention of colleagues abroad, it is possible for him to be transfer to the war front in Finland, under the orders of Marshal Mannerheim. The year 1945 brings a turning point in his life, "this time a wonderful one towards freedom, in art and as a man", which softens the indelible imprint of the terrible years. The tremendous economic pressures, which leads him to grow tobacco in his father's house in Güntherstal to survive, do not prevent him from painting tirelessly, multiple variations on the same motif. His style gradually develops. He holds exhibitions in Freiburg and Zurich.
In 1955 he moves to Sommerhausen in central Germany. In the shelter provided by its daily life, he achieves paintings of great beauty. There is serenity in both form and color: "I simply want to achieve greater transparency and reveal the harmony or antagonism of the forces of existence". Beyond figuration, he devotes himself to the search for the internal structure of the painting. In this process of "realization" he finds in Cezanne his most intimate companion "Faire la musique devant la nature", is the leitmotif that drives his inspiration, a leitmotif derived from Cezanne's motto "Faire l'ordre devant la nature". He frequently interrupts his stay here with forays into the severe rocky ridges of the Austrian Alps, making recreations of a fine abstraction: "I feel the drive to reach the inner order of things; an order former to all aesthetics; an order related to the genealogy of humankind.”
Attracted by the intense cultural life of Munich and the presence of important old Friends like the philosopher Fedor Stepun, he takes up residence in that city. He exhibits at Günter Francke's gallery; he maintains relations with the Society of Friends of Modern Art, directed by Franz Roh. After the resonance of Ernst's essay on the book The Mortality of the Muses, he receives many invitations to write for magazines and newspapers, and for the radio. At the same time, he takes over the management of the newly founded "Uraufführungsbühne" theater.
One of his visits to museums provides him with the experience that prepares a great turning point in his life: it is the exhibition in Munich of "Pre-Columbian Art", which "captivates me by the intense spirituality with which human existence is transfigured and placed in a cosmic connection".
He marries Mexican Gertrudis Zenzes, and in 1964 moves to the "poignant land" of Mexico. Here, "in the encounter with its mysteries", he leads a secluded existence, dedicated to painting and intellectual exploration. He lives in the old town of Valle de Bravo. His son Canek grew up there. For him, he would cherish a great love, a deep devotion and respect, and a desire not to interfere with his natural unfolding. In the name of his son, his roots in the world would come together: Germany and Mexico. In the solitudes of the Tierra Caliente, with his "fiery force subjected to forms", abandoned to the power of the sun, he faces the silence of the mountainous undulations only with his box of inks and watercolors. Often, a concise and dry noise brings him out of his self-absorption. He is no longer startled because it has become familiar to him: it is the snake that keeps moving. Since then -for years- the image of the upright snake haunts him. In multiple sketches he prefigures the series of paintings (pastels, charcoals, inks and oils of the years 66-70), making variations on the theme: "The man and the snake", where the man sleeps and the snake watches. These are paintings with deep metaphysical implications nourished by his devotion to the pre-Hispanic conception of the world.
He works tirelessly in Valle de Bravo or in Mexico City, in the hills of Contreras. Each finished work is preceded by hundreds of drawings with which he deepens his search for the essence. This does not distance him from his confrontation with political and social reality. Always following Klee's warning that a painter who does not read the newspaper every day should forget to be a painter, he follows, terrified, the dictatorial imposition in Latin America. In 1982, Ernst moves to Mexico City. He is very ill, but his spiritual intensity and joviality are not broken. At the invitation of the painter Alfredo León, Ernst takes charge of teaching a group of young painters from Tepito, a marginated neighborhood. With great affection, with true enthusiasm, he musters up the energy to travel week after week to Tepito: "Working as an old man among these young people is a great gift of life, for which I am very grateful...". He assumes as a fundamental task of his work to awaken confidence in the freedom to create. The group offers him a retrospective exhibition in the neighborhood. This exhibition means for him "to get out of the narrow elitist circle of art and perhaps - it is the beginning of spring - the beginning of another phase of my long life".
The disease is progressing. These are the last months of his life. Ernst works on his last paintings, searching for the path of the deepest freedom. His work is interrupted by a major health crisis that takes him to the hospital. On his return, he takes up the brush again. He begins the series "Cosmos" and achieves unfinished canvases of serene beauty that point to a harmony in which movement, paradoxically, ceases to be movement. At the beginning of this new cosmic journey, he is interrupted by death.
