COLOUR • SPIRIT • SPIRIT OF THE TIMES?

Preface



In five decades of artistic work the painter Wilhelm Buschulte has, like many of his colleagues, created a most extensive opus characteristic of the second half of the 20th century. Apart from his numerous drawings and oil paintings, Buschulte produced designs of high quality for more than five hundred cycles of church windows, among them St. Gereon, St. Agnes and St. Ursula in Cologne, windows in Aachen Cathedral, and windows for buildings in Cairo, Beirut and Riyadh 1. In the course of reconstruction after World War II Buschulte designed, in collaboration with the architect Rudolf Schwarz, windows for St. Mary in Capitol and St. Vitalis in Cologne, as well as for the plenary hall of the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. Works came also into being for such churches as Holy Family in Oberhausen, Holy Cross in Soest, St. Mary Regina in Saarbrücken, all buildings by Rudolf Schwarz.

Yet Buschulte's opus remains unknown in public art history discourse – a fate he shares with his colleagues in stained glass painting. An incredible quantity of glass paintings in Germany's churches, though familiar to the church-goer and known to the research specialist, was not included in even such important survey exhibitions as the 1999 Berlin one, "A Century of Art in Germany": not one artist from this genre, not even Johan Thorn-Prikker.
This phenomenon in itself poses numerous questions when researching every single artist in glass painting. These questions will not be answered in this publication, still, here, and in other publications, they must be asked.
Like many of his colleagues, Buschulte, in order to preserve his artistic autonomy, lived through times of harmony as well as intense dispute with the institutionalised Church. In his early creative phase after World War II, a friend of Erich Heckel and Otto Dix, he is formed by Expressionism, bringing, in the following decades, radiant colour and a reduced clarity of line into the church interior like hardly anybody else. Petra Kemmler, in her master's thesis on Wilhelm Buschulte of 1996, dwells on "the outward directed intention of his inner struggle with the most varied themes.“2
Kemmler's M.A. thesis, which we also publish, among other materials, on a CD-ROM pertaining to this exhibition, formed the foundation for Annette Jansen-Winkelns 1999 publication, "Wilhelm Buschulte – Künstler zwischen den Zeiten“. Christine Haße, in co-operation with Wilhelm Buschulte, has documented the biography of the artist and the catalogue of exhibitions for our exhibition. Petra Kemmler's catalogue raisonné of graphic works and oil paintings, written in 1996/97, was equally revised for the CD-ROM. Christine Haße is owed thanks for compiling a catalogue of the stained glass paintings 3 which are published on this CD, and also for the bibliography which supplements, while based on, that of Petra Kemmler. I should like to thank collaborating art historians Sabine Hartmann, Christine Haße, Vera Henkelmann and Petra Kemmler for joint excursions to Buschulte's windows, the photographs, the extensive and fully detailed research for, and collaboration on, our CD-ROM, as well as for most thorough texts on the artist and his work. I thank Christine Haße and Stefan Johnen for an inventive concept and production of the CD-ROM. The link of content of Buschulte's works to the historical Bible text and their very free, most expressive and interpretative artistic transposition: these are graphically presented here. All in all, this publication documents the retrospective in honour of the artist's eightieth birthday, it is a scholarly undertaking which, however, does not claim completeness. Thanks are also owed to the Sparkasse Unna and the SIG Combibloc for financial support and to individuals and institutions giving works on loan to this exhibition: Studio Dr. Heinrich Oidtmann, Linnich, NRW-Stiftung, Studio Wilhelm Derix, Kaiserswerth, Studio Peters, Paderborn and Wilhelm Buschulte himself.
I should like to thank the colleagues at the Museum, Herbert Hamacher, Christine Haße, Edith Ludwig and Jürgen Vekens for their engaged co-operation in preparing this exhibition. The entire team offers grateful thanks to Wilhelm and Maria Buschulte for good and cordial co-operation and interesting and valuable talks in the artist's studio.
It is to our great joy that this exhibition will also be shown at the Diocesan Museum Paderborn from April to July, 2005.