Herbert Wegehaupt: 'Fishermen Landing Ashore'

• pastel;
  width: 62 cm

Wulff Sailer says at the opening of the exhibition "Otto Niemeyer-Holstein, Otto Manigk, Herbert Wegehaupt" in 1983 at Galerie Mitte in Berlin: "The factors that bonded these three artists were their lively ties with tradition, global culture, particularly French painting in the 19th and 20th centuries, and their admiration for this noble art, built as it is on crafts. Here stands a paragon of intensity, uprightness and modesty in one of the darkest chapters of our history! To survive the Third Reich, the years devoid of humanity, and not just physically, but also through painting: I doff my hat to this achievement. To sink into, to absorb with marvel the little that has remained. To internalize the mundane, to perceive with the power of modesty very nature through 'its own eyes', to observe the artistic and therein to see an intellectual and moral act void of ideological programme: it is in these things that I grasp the lessons that are to be learned from an exhibition such as this. What emerges is poetry, a particular intimacy, of which Paula Modersohn-Becker wrote: 'True intimacy is the soul of all art.'"