Through all lust and darkness: On the death of Leipzig artist Frank Ruddigkeit
Frank Ruddigkeit, the draftsman, painter, sculptor, and university professor, was born in 1939 in what was then Grenzberg, East Prussia , and studied at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts from 1957 to 1962, before accepting an aspirant position at that institution from 1963 to 1966. Since 1974, however, he has taught for thirty years atBurg Giebichenstein in Halle.
All the more astonishing, then, is the exhilarating scope and thematic spectrum of the oeuvre created during these tense teaching periods by an incredibly versatile artist who took the work on a theater poster no less seriously than the illustrations for a bibliophile book edition. And who painted countless smaller panel paintings, portraits, and even playfully sparkling floral still lifes with equal passion, as well as his large-format murals addressing fundamental ideological questions.
His real domain, however, was drawing: stylistically confident, intense, sensual, so to speak the true way of life of this artist, who occasionally drew in such a fury that his hand continued to shade the large-format construction paper with charcoal, red chalk or chalk even when the sheet already seemed to be finished.
But he also applied himself to sculptural endeavors with great intensity. Admittedly, the most bombastic Leipzig sculpture of its time, the Karl Marx relief, which was banished to the university campus on Jahnallee in 2008 and which boasted a prominent position on the university's new building, and which (although realized collectively) was significantly influenced by rudeness in its design, is one of the reasons why the artist was virtually expelled from public consciousness. For it wasn't the Zeus-like thinker gazing from the background of the Bronze Mountains in itself (or was it?) that enraged the writer Erich Loest , who put forward various proposals for its eradication: The relief hung precisely on the spot where the almost eight-hundred-year-old, arbitrarily demolished university church had stood!
Thus, people in Leipzig seemed to have taken the short-sighted view that the artist had conspired with the cultural barbarian Walter Ulbricht. And since Ruddigkeit, one of the last important artists of the second generation of the Leipzig School, had not followed the local custom of remaining at the HGB as a teacher after completing his studies, his colleagues felt no need to support him.
One might write in an obituary: What remains is the work! – But where is the work if it is not publicly present? The precious, large diaries, in which the artist recorded his joys and fears in the most direct and wild ways, both graphically and in writing, have not yet been digitized; a mural in a Leipzig school and in the Gewandhaus are only partially accessible; and the relief frieze "Market Bustle" is barely discernible on the background wall of the entrance to the S-Bahn in the market square.
Now that Ruddigkeit has died after a very long illness that kept him confined to his apartment, may the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts retrieve his paintings from storage and assemble them, along with loans from private collections, into an exhibition so that younger audiences can also gain an insight into the unusually diverse, sensual, and equally impatient and thoughtful life and work of a man who could not console, but who encouraged. And last but not least: who dared to create beauty!
Our author Andreas Reimann is a poet living in Leipzig. He has a long friendship with Frank Ruddigkeit. The artist illustrated Andreas Reimann's first book ("Das Sonettarium" (The Sonettarium)) in 1989.
Berliner-zeitung
