The painter Alexander Dettmar came to Amsterdam because of Jacques Brel, the chanson singer. He wrote a song specifically for the Dutch port city in the 1960s. An ode to the workers and whores, the beer, the fries and the tears. Alexander Dettmar couldn’t get “Amsterdam” out of his head, so he went there himself in 1990. “To get the song out of my head.” When that was done, Amsterdam was over. Dettmar moved on. To Potsdam, for example.
Brel sings like Dettmar paints: in strong colors. The Amsterdam pictures, created in 1990, can now be seen in Potsdam’s Jan Bouman House in the Dutch Quarter. They look as timeless as Brel’s 1964 song sounds: with a nod to nostalgia. Dark, flat facades in red and brown tones, with a grey-white sky above. Strong areas of white give the images a clear structure. No cars, no people, not even bicycles can be seen. Pure architecture, carried by a strong rhythm through the strong colors. The Amsterdam that the painter showed in 1990 could also have been from 1890.
In the 1990s in Potsdam
The artists of classical modernism are Alexander Dettmar’s frame of reference, always have been and have remained to this day. No flaws, he finds himself. You can see where he ranks himself as an artist, he thinks. “What someone like Jackson Pollock did is already over today,” he says. He himself has also experimented with abstraction, but always found his way back to recognizable form. He shares a love of architecture with Lyonel Feininger, his great role model. Where Feininger’s famous Thuringian villages are flat and floating, almost dancing, Dettmar’s facades are more grounded. Like the churches in Cologne and his cycle on destroyed synagogues.
If Dettmar’s Amsterdam pictures can now be seen in the Dutch Quarter, it’s a double homecoming. On the one hand, from a purely architectural point of view, they are now “at home” again – in the historic brick building. The carpenter, shipbuilder and master carpenter Jan Bouman, who built the four squares in Potsdam between 1732 and 1742 on the instructions of Friedrich Wilhelm I, came from Amsterdam himself. And it is also a return for the painter Alexander Dettmar himself. He had already been to Potsdam in 1993. Painted the Alexandrowka Colony – and the Dutch Quarter. In 1997 he even exhibited his paintings in the Roman Baths in Sanssouci Park, “as the first living artist”.
model and replica
In the Jan Bouman House, the model and replica now hang opposite one another. Views of Potsdam from the early 1990s are on the rough plastered wall on the first floor – on the opposite side are the pictures from Amsterdam. What immediately catches the eye is what fascinated Dettmar here and there: the shades of the color red. Sometimes bordeaux, sometimes blood red, sometimes almost orange. In the color red, Dettmar likes what he likes in art in general: the power.
In Amsterdam, the application of paint is more cracked, the perspective more open. Squares are recognizable, the city seems to breathe more. The Dutch Quarter is colored in lighter shades of red, yet it appears more secluded. “I painted it the way I saw it at the time,” he says. What he saw: frontal view of glowing red facades with a white sky above. Dark window caves. 1993 was the year in which the cultural workers of the fabrik had to vacate their place on Gutenbergstraße. There is no trace of this at Dettmar. Instead, pure, timeless form.
To home page
