Al Bernstein

Al Bernstein's earliest works - from 1959 onwards - already show the first signs of an ambitious extension of creative techniques. The precocious young artist did his first ever oil painting 1959, at the age of ten: »LANDSCAPE WITH A FLOWERING TREE« (P 002/60), today in the private collection of Prof. Hildegard and Ferdinand Otto, cf. Catalogue Al Bernstein 1990.

Al Bernstein: »As a kid aged between eight and nine, at my grandparents' house where I used to spend my summer vacations, I found some brushes and painting equipment in the attic that had belonged to my late uncle, an artist, and I experimented with these treasures - mainly in secret. There were also wonderful old cameras, tripods made of wood and boxes full of large glass negatives with pictures of landscapes, groups of people, portraits, et cetera, all of them taken by my grandfather, who'd been a really keen photographer. With those wonderful French oil colors - in tubes - and brushes of all shapes and sizes, I just started oil painting as if by magic, and found it really easy and natural to do from the very start. I had a harder time with drawing; the effect of a brush full of color, reacting directly to my feelings, produced instant pictures when compared to a weak, thin, worried-looking pencil line. I loved painting on sections of wood, plywood, and pressboard, smooth or otherwise, wherever I could get hold of any, and liked painting those colorful landscapes I used to find in big art books.«

In the 90-minute video-film »AL BERNSTEIN 1990« (cf. Al Bernstein: »Codified Values«, 1996), Al Bernstein describes his first oil painting »LANDSCAPE WITH A FLOWERING TREE« in a monologue:

(…)
... »I taught myself the colors -
the electric blues, purple, the bloodred cinnabar,
deep alizarin crimson, yellow and green earths - ...

... (but now) from all sides distorted reflections of past and strange images starting from my memory -
... memory-ambered images...

The flower-laden tree!

The flower-laden tree I painted at the age of ten,
by force under a spell I have fallen under, ages ago -
a spell from a farther past where creativity revives -
I suppose... -
This flower-laden tree evokes me...«
(…)

Al Bernstein's early work was influenced by the French Impressionists. Up to 1974, alongside landscapes, architectural drawings and watercolours, he did several panel paintings using gold leaf - primarily on surrealist subjects, in accordance with the trend at art schools in the 1960s. Reliefs, drawings and illustrations for newspapers and book publishers as well as a number of watercolours and panel paintings have been lost without trace, and are not included in this catalogue of works.

As he grew older, however, the young and sensitive Al Bernstein began to feel constrained and, leaving his old world and old work behind him, he moved to the sunshine of Hollywood, Florida.

In the U.S.A. during the 1970s he began doing entertaining, encyclopaedic drawings of old American colonial landscapes in the style of the old European masters, and veered increasingly towards allegory. Al Bernstein's representational period - with the main works produced between 1972 and 1985 such as »SUPERFUERO UT ESSEM - OR I WILL HAVE HAD SURVIVED TO BE« (P 115/81, diptych), »ABADDON - ANGER OF GOD« (P 100/79), »LOVE« (P 104/80) and highly detailed miniatures as »THE KISS« (M 099/79) - is distinctive for his astonishingly skilful use of classic European artistic techniques. Bernstein's representational art seems to reach back to the traditions of the Renaissance and Baroque ages; he uses them as a means of communicating his pictorial message. The subjects he chooses, some of them biblical, are historically ambiguous: »ABADDON« (P 100/79) and »THE KISS« (M 099/79), both brilliant examples of the artist's craft, are angry satires on wellknown human shortcomings, with an additional touch of humorous self-parody. The consistency and clear identity of Al Bernstein's »classicism« place it far beyond the superficial displays of technique familiar from commercially-motivated representational art, and lend him the authenticity that has always been possessed by art that sets new standards, alongside a perennial relevance based on a free choice of perspective.

Al Bernstein's many and varied representational watercolours, sketches and drawings are a pleasure to behold. On the one hand the artist cheerfully illustrates European cultural history in works such as »CARLOS III, 1788-1988« (P 352/88), painted on the occasion of the bicentennial celebrations and portraying the Spanish king Carlos III smiling beneath a floating crown, while on the other he knows precisely how to lend uncanny authenticity to his North and South American street scenes, so reminiscent of detective stories, such as »GREAT SOUTHERN HOTEL« (D 146/84-1) or »LIMA, GARAGE SCENE« (D 267/86), without over-stylising them. The viewer is often given a sharper-than-photographic sense of these milieux, which have their literary parallels in the work of Raymond Chandler or Mario Vargas Llosa. Cf. Al Bernstein: »Codified Values«, 1996.

By way of contrast, Bernstein's encyclopaedia-style watercolour studies of subtropical fauna and flora - such as »PINEAPPLE« (D 124/84), »ORCHIDS« (D 143/84) or »SUPERFUERO UT ESSEM«,» CRICKET« (M 114/81) - reveal an analytical, dissecting eye which knows how to meaningfully integrate the smallest of details into a picture, and to grab the viewer's attention with extreme plasticity of form. During the early 1980s these drawings formed the basis of a delightful intermediate period of works on representative themes, such as the large-format, mixed-media »SOME FLOWERS« (P 132/83), dedicated to Vincent van Gogh. One can clearly sense the way in which the colours radiate into one another in this strikingly successful expressionist rendition of sunflowers in umber, ochre and yellow tones influenced by azure. Energy exchanges like these are central to Bernstein's work, as is his concentration on colour: »Color in the way that it moves through the endless spaces right up to the apparent solution of the primeval metaphor, created by light.«

In their light-flooded spatial depth, Al Bernstein's abstractions are both grandiose and dramatic - a prime example being »RISE TO POWER« (P 572/90-1) More recent abstract works ( 1990- 1999) - primarily to be found in the U.S.A. and Spain - is »CLIMAX, A PIECE OF WORSHIP« (P819/99), »ETHIC I« (P 785/98), ETHIC WORK II « (P 786/98), SYSTEM OF ETHICS« (P 822/99)

These large-format works, often traversed by »thought traces«, are based on extensive preliminary studies, and their sheer subtlety is often only accessible on a second viewing. Al Bernstein's metaphorical portrayal of the close bonds between human consciousness and the supernatural places his art on a multidimensional level:
»Using color lavishly, seeing the new, feeling, assimilating, fleeing from the crippling constrictions of my youth. The experiences in Peru during the early 80s were decisive, the wide-open spaces and the stillness in the mountains, the legendary leopard men (who saw themselves as the connection between God and man), contact with the Indian culture, and fascination with the ancient Nasca lines...« - this was how Al Bernstein described his move towards abstraction at the time. On his various journeys around the globe, the artist made methodical sketches of the biological and astral-physical workings of plants and animals, and of human city-organisms; he examined ethnic perspectives (Peruvian burial rites; tour of the mile-long, ancient and mysterious Nasca lines with the explorer Maria Reiche); he extended traditional methods of spatial representation via conceptually innovative variations in both his drawing and paint-application techniques (e.g. dissolution studies of elements), and steadily developed his artistic receptivity as a result. He also came into contact with the avant-garde philosophies of the Pacific region, and their attempts to combine the Newtonian view of the world with a new, holistic, post-mechanical approach. Study sheets on these themes, and works such as the triptych »THE COLORFIELDS« (P 131/82-8) have mostly survived and afford us a unique insight into the artist Al Bernstein and the continuity of his work.
It was however Bernstein's analysis of universal systems - extending into the realms of the metaphysical - and his experimentation on their translation into visual terms, at such intercultural locations as New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Lima, Madrid and Munich as well as desert regions of New Mexico and Peru (remote even to their native populations) which firmly placed his work in select collections of modern art. The three panels of »MANTO« (triptych, P 459/88) constitute a fully abstracted reflection of the life of Peruvian Indians. »THE MARK« (P 469/88), with its innovative colour techniques and its three-dimen-sional, spatially layered perforation levels, is based on Bernstein's studies of floating phenomena in New York in the 1980s (they were also discussed there by Prof. J. Fitzgerald), carried out with the aim of abstracting a nocturnal, maritime cosmos of impressive depth, strongly influenced by archetypes and early line geometry.
»THE MYTHOLOGICAL CYCLE«. This cycle of works came into being on the Balearic Islands, in the »Casa de los Artistas« of the Fundacion Carlos Dudek: »HERACLES' TWELVE DUTIES« (D 425/88 to D 436/88) served as a basis for the short animated film »MORPHOSIS«. Bernstein sees his mythological cycle as resulting from his nature meditations, from his empathy with antiquity (»recalling ancient thoughts«), and from the heroic epics and legends of the Mediterranean region. He created several pigmentographs on these ancient themes (cf. commentary »Pigmentography«), and also translated them into nocturnal abstractions, such as the two diptyches »NYX THE NIGHT« (P 438/88) and »HYPNOS« (P 437/88).

ABSTRACT
WORKS
PIGMENTOGRAPHS
DRAWINGS